Digesting Metabolism Artificial Land In Japan 1954 2202

Description

Modernism's not dead! How modernist ideals for housing were reinvented by the Japanese avant-garde architectural movement known as Metabolism This impressive illustrated volume is the first to focus on the Metabolists' built designs for housing, which they regarded as living organisms and not static monuments. Their housing encouraged individual and collective forces to collaborate in the creation of the living environment. The Metabolists produced buildings made of modular, flexible and dynamic units that could be randomly expanded, redesigned and adjusted to meet every expectation, inspired by Le Corbusier's idea of "artificial land" an attempt to reconcile country and city, envisioning dense urban housing as stacked platforms of airy plots for building freestanding homes of all variety. Digesting Metabolism investigates 11 Japanese projects that translate this dream of flexible housing into built reality, from Le Corbusier protégé Takamasa Yosizaka's Yosizaka House to the zany and inspiring Sawada Mansion of 1973 and into the future of new building materials and concepts such as "concrete timber." Essays place the Metabolists' work in the context of postwar recovery in Japan.