Kisho Kurokawa: Nakagin Capsule Tower
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Location: Tokyo, Japan
Project Year: 1972
isho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower is architecture as a living organism. Not a building, but a manifesto: modular, replaceable, unfinished by design.
Each capsule is a cell, a plug-in unit for modern life, floating between utopia and obsolescence. Concrete cores act like spines, while the capsules attach like futuristic parasites, suggesting a city that can grow, shed, and regenerate.
It was pure Metabolism: a belief that architecture should evolve like nature. Today it feels both radically futuristic and painfully fragile — a monument to an optimistic future that never fully arrived.
Project Year: 1972
isho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower is architecture as a living organism. Not a building, but a manifesto: modular, replaceable, unfinished by design.
Each capsule is a cell, a plug-in unit for modern life, floating between utopia and obsolescence. Concrete cores act like spines, while the capsules attach like futuristic parasites, suggesting a city that can grow, shed, and regenerate.
It was pure Metabolism: a belief that architecture should evolve like nature. Today it feels both radically futuristic and painfully fragile — a monument to an optimistic future that never fully arrived.
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