Nakagin Capsule Tower, July 1, 2009
Preface
In the wake of its imminent demolition, I wanted to see one of my favorite polemic buildings – formative in our own theory of Tokyoism – one last time: Nakagin Capsule Tower, designed by Kisho Kurokawa. With COVID-19 preventing any near-future/last minute trips, the best I can do will be through revisiting this essay I wrote way-back in 2010 (originally published on the open blog of Le Journal Spéciale’ Z, Journal of the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris). With retrospective edits and added commentary, this will serve as my final pilgrimage to this present-day tower of a future past.
Nakagin Capsule Tower: One-Room Mansions in Tokyo
In the age of the liberalized individual, living environments become an intrinsic part of the construction of identity. In “Cell Block, Egospheres, Self-Containers”, Peter Sloterdijk proposes that the contemporary subject inhabits a condition of “connected isolations”, where the notion of a “public” is no longer a given. Increased privatization, coupled with the personal accumulation of expendable capital, creates a scenario where the individual can cater to his or her every desire in an exclusive, inoculated space – the one-room apartment or ‘egosphere’.1 The basic one-cell unit becomes the irreducible atom of the larger modular that constructing contemporary built-society. It fosters all the life-needs of an individual; an occupant can fall under the illusion of self-sustainability, only until reminders of collective “connected isolation” are recalled through noise, both audio and visual, or failures in the life-support system that breaks the illusion that one is immunized from all outside problems, influences, and agencies.2
Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower epitomized the emerging precedent of the one-cell unit, a prototype of a new way of living in Japan, an alternate future not quite chosen but yet still alive.3 The 1960’s post-war economic boom transformed the concept and spatialization of the typical Japanese family: the role of the cha-no-ma, or living room, as the space where the family gathered around the kotatsu, or low heated-table, was transformed so that the new warm glow of the television was the center of a rapt attention dissuaded family conversation.4 The 1970s produced a new set of ideas on urban living from the Japanese avant-garde movement of the Metabolists: post-war, pre-Bubble visionaries that actualized the drawn and discussed “theoretical musings of science fiction” of their British-counterparts, Archigram.5 The Metabolists’ city was a living, evolving organism – an advanced technological infrastructure to plug into, such as with the Nakagin Capsule Tower. The urban nomad, the new homo movens, could break from traditional family values and the spatial ideas that accompanied them. Instead the nomad could connect, or as with the Nakagin apartment units, literally plug-in to a whole new system of actions and engagements that made the traditional concept of family or local community outmoded, if not obsolete.6 As a virtual-physical, programmatically hybrid space, it was the simultaneous symptom and solution to the increasing trend of the Japanese single-male egosphere: one-room mansions supplemented with conbini, neighborhood convenience stores for all one’s living-needs; and the development of capsule hotels, love hotels, manga kissa, and karaoke parlors.7
These programmatic hybrids could have been lazily concluded as spatial symptoms or stereotypical harbingers of social phenomena to come in the 21st Century: falling rates of marriage and birth; rising numbers of elderly; increased suicide rates. The white-collar single-male salary man outnumbering the family man father, who now spends long hours at the office, his patriarchal influence supplanted by the television and the computer. The dutiful housewife replaced by the single-female ‘parasite single’, living an unattached life of capricious consumerism and comfort out of the comfort of her parent’s home.8 Children immersed in the virtual worlds of video games, skipping their after-school entry exam cram classes and preemptively rejecting the way of life accepted by their parents’ generation.9 In these scenarios, the egosphere is not an innocuous neutral container, but neither is it a cause for remonstration: in all cases, it is “a matter of anchoring a prudent individual in a world milieu that has been made radically explicit”.10
One cannot also underplay the role of technology in all of this. Prescient in Nakagin’s rooms are its various gizmos and gadgets – a built-in television, a rotary phone, a new-fangled stereo radio for extra cost – foretelling of a high-tech boom integrated into the domestic future. Technology within mediates the outside in the capsule or any single-apartment derivation, creating a situation where in ontic space, one can be shut-in alone, but virtually be a social butterfly. “(Media) ensures that the cell, dependably fulfilling its defensive functions as an insulator, an immune system, a dispenser of comfort, and a source of distance, remains a worldly space.”11 Fast-forward to now, the space occupied in-between reality and online, became the extended egosphere. It no longer matters whether you are in Shimbashi or Chicago. The Nakagin Capsule almost foretold the allure of the contemporary manga kissa – that regardless of your physical space, cyberspace can become a liminal space of technology and egos, merging the electronic and the biological with other machines and beings, creating a network of virtual communities of individuals.
As fantasized in the capsule-lifestyle of the immersive egosphere, media privatizes space: cell phones or portable music players can create a homogenized void of ubiquitous, public, one-sided monologues, where once conversation was directed to other people who were physically present. Public zones can become privatized into the individualized – catering to what the user wants to hear and say, without having to deal or acknowledge the spatial, atmospheric, and temporal qualities of the surroundings.12 A “private” media (single-player video game, iPod, etc.) enjoyed alone in the realm of the single-apartment, family room, or subway car does not have to negotiate with others, in comparison to the “communal” nature of television, where an entire family sat together around the set in a shared room to watch a program.
What architects are facing, in Japan or otherwise, is a growing competition to define and design “contemporary urbanity”, claimed more and more by the advent of instant virtual communication in an increasingly shrinking atomized spatial physicality. The Metabolist understanding of the city serves as a reminder that the city is an ever-changing organism, and that architecture is part of an infrastructure that must adapt to dynamic needs of its occupants. The Nakagin Capsule Tower shows of how identity and lifestyle causally shift with changing economics and technology, ultimately collapsing into “commercialized choice” while leaving the spatial attributes as always something yet-to-be-desired amidst the realm of infinite/future plug-&-play possibilities.13 What the egosphere explicates is the role of architecture today, fraught between being material evidence of lifestyles that are not yet synonymous with manufactured desires, and attempting to reconcile the various conditions of living in a reflexive modernity, with individuals and households in search of themselves in a politics of identity. Itself a time capsule of this vision of urban life, the Nakagin Capsule Tower encapsulated this struggle – albeit briefly, but brilliantly.
Guest Contributor: Gregory Serweta, AIA, NCARB
He is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, a registered architect leading a multidisciplinary practice based in Buffalo and New York City called sp architecture, and a global external collaborator with Bureau 0–1. Previously he has worked in practice on design and master planning projects in the United States, Japan, and China, at firms including OMA New York and Sou Fujimoto Architects.
Gregory wrote his master’s thesis at Cornell University titled Homo Luden Ludens: New Babylon Reloaded, Media Immersion Pods in Tokyo, Japan on manga kissa.
Author: Gregory Serweta
Peer Reader: Kaz Yoneda
Editor: Hinako Izuhara
Associate: Tomoka Kurosawa
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Thank you for your time and kind attention.
Until next time!
References
[1] Peter Sloterdijk, “Cell Block, Egospheres, Self-Containers.” Trans. D. Fabricius from Sphären III: Schäume (Spheres III: Foams), Log 10 (Summer/Fall 2007): 89.
[2] Ibid., 92.
[3] Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Future Vision Banished to the Past”, New York Times, July 6, 2009.
[4] Akira Suzuki, Do Android Crows Fly Over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo?: The Interactive Urban Landscape of Japan (London: AA Publications, 2004), 19.
[5] David Stewart, The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987), 177.
[6] Suzuki, 19.
[7] Jorge Almazán and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, “Tokyo Public Space Networks at the Intersection of the Commercial and the Domestic Realms Study on Dividual Space,” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering (November 2006, Issue 308): 301.
[8] Masaru Tamamoto, “Japan’s Crisis of the Mind”. New York Times. March 1, 2009.
[9] Suzuki, 26.
[10] Sloterdijk, 91.
[11] Ibid., 102.
[12] Ibid., 103.
[13] As it stands, the decidedly confining and outdated capsule tower is slated for demolition to make way for newer residential apartments, though delayed on account of Japan’s prolonged financial stagnation. Ironically, its ‘scrap and build’ planned destruction puts into action the ideas of Metabolic change, though not as Kurokawa intended.