Kisho Kurokawa: Nakagin Capsule Tower traces the full arc of one of postwar architecture's most radical experiments — from its Metabolist origins in Tokyo to its contested demolition in 2022, with the intimacy of the MoMA One on One format.
About This Book
Completed between 1970 and 1972, the Nakagin Capsule Tower was Kisho Kurokawa's most audacious realisation of Metabolist thinking: 140 prefabricated capsules clipped to twin concrete cores, each self-contained unit fitted with a porthole window, reel-to-reel tape player, Sony colour television, and fold-out desk. It was architecture conceived as biology — replaceable, renewable, alive. In this MoMA One on One volume, curator Evangelos Kotsioris examines the building's design logic, its construction, its slow deterioration, and the circumstances that led to its demolition in 2022. Published to accompany MoMA's display of an original capsule — the first shown publicly in the United States — this is a precise, focused study of Japanese Metabolism at its most material and most mortal.
Key Features
- 48 pages examining the design, construction, evolution, and demolition of the Nakagin Capsule Tower
- Text by curator Evangelos Kotsioris
- Published by The Museum of Modern Art, 2022
What You'll Discover
- How Kurokawa's Metabolist vision translated into the specific material and spatial conditions of each 140-capsule unit — from porthole windows to integrated Sony televisions
- The structural logic of prefabricated capsules attached to steel and concrete cores, and what that meant for the building's intended lifespan and replaceability
- The forces — preservation debates, deterioration, ownership complexity — that shaped the tower's fate and ultimate demolition in 2022
- The significance of one original capsule entering MoMA's collection, and what its preservation as an object signals about how institutions now reckon with lost architecture
About the Author
Evangelos Kotsioris is a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where his work engages architecture and its material histories. His text on the Nakagin Capsule Tower was produced in conjunction with MoMA's acquisition and public exhibition of one of the tower's original capsules.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 48
- Dimensions: 186 x 227 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781633451735
- Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
- Publication Date: 2022
Perfect For: Architects and historians with an interest in Japanese Metabolism, postwar prefabrication, or the ethics of demolition and preservation; students of twentieth-century architectural theory; anyone following MoMA's collection of built fragments.