The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner Franz Prichard The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Pp. viii + 223. $108.00 cloth, $27.00 paper. This comparative study explores how selected Japanese architects and writers imagined, represented, or visualized the city. Describing in vivid detail their shared investments in what Gardner usefully terms the narrative "elements" of the city, this book offers a captivating mapping of two deeply entangled domains where Japan's urban imaginaries took on new contours during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Deftly attending to the speculative dimensions of both literary and architectural discourses of the city, Gardner's book opens new interdisciplinary entryways to Japan's vocabularies of urban environments and planetary urbanization, analyzing the role of speculative futures therein. This volume complements a growing body of scholarship that explores the architectural and visual-cultural histories of the Japanese Metabolist movement, known for its visionary attention to urban design processes that proponents likened to organic processes. This scholarship examines the impact of the Metabolist movement on Japan's architectural and design history.1 It also includes studies of individual Metabolist architects, such as Isozaki Arata 磯崎新 (b. 1931), [End Page 165] Tange Kenzō 丹下健三 (1913–2005), Kikutake Kiyonori 菊竹清訓 (1928–2011), and Kurokawa Kishō 黒川紀章 (1934–2007), as well as studies of the Metabolist movement's central role in the 1970 Osaka World's Fair, Expo '70.2 Moreover, the book makes a significant contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on the history and contemporary afterlives of the urban transformations of Japan's discursive and built environments more broadly during the 1960s and 1970s.3 Gardner's primary focus is not the Metabolists' iconic architectural designs and large-scale regional redevelopment plans. (The book does include a number of well-chosen color illustrations and photographs of Metabolist works, for which the press should be applauded.) Rather, he focuses on an evocative survey of central Metabolist keywords, such as "process," "megastructure," "capsule," and "ruins." Gardner's aim is not merely an intellectual history of Metabolist thought. The book dynamically sifts through Metabolist vocabularies to explore the intersecting narrative dimensions of what Gardner calls "imaginative simulation" (p. 1) undertaken by both architects and science-fiction writers to reimagine Japan's built environments and social conditions. The representative central figures of this study are architect Isozaki Arata (whose early writings bleed into speculative fiction territory) and celebrated science-fiction author Komatsu Sakyō 小松左京 (1931–2011) (who participated directly in the planning of Expo '70). Bringing such figures into critical dialogue, the book traces the direct and indirect exchanges among their narrative imaginaries of the city, as well as the formative role these exchanges played in developing the discourses of information society, cybernetics, systems theory, futurology, and planetary catastrophe in Japan. Gardner's lucid inventory of the complex entanglements during this pivotal historical period thus makes significant contributions to an interdisciplinary understanding of Japanese architectural and literary visions of the future city (mirai toshi 未来都市). While the chapters proceed in a linear fashion temporally from the [End Page 166] early 1960s to roughly the early 2000s, the resultant survey of narrative and imaginative figurations of the city is decidedly nonlinear. Capturing the connective threads of discursive exchanges among discontinuous media and moments, Gardner's meticulous focus on the narrative effects and changing imaginaries of the future city weaves together a nuanced collection of recurrent motifs and circular eddies across the chapters of the book. Chapter 1 situates the emergence of Metabolist architects' diverse process-oriented visions within a shared interest in the city's continuous metamorphosis, likened to the metabolic processes of living organisms. Gardner contends that "by stressing the processes of becoming, transforming, and even disintegrating, the Metabolists introduced a narrative element into their architectural theory" (p. 43). He offers a highly compelling reading of the literary forms that Metabolist thinkers Kawazoe Noboru and Isozaki Arata, as well as non-Metabolist Itō Toyō 伊東豊雄 (b. 1941), deployed to articulate their speculative architectural visions. Chapter 2 deepens this understanding of the role of narrative form through the...