Nakagin Capsule Tower to be dismantled for rental accommodation and exhibitions

Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, architect Kisho Kurokawa ‘s 20th-century metabolist landmark, will be dismantled and donated to museums or converted into rental units. Located in the Ginza neighborhood and built over the course of just 30 days in 1972, the housing block is considered a rare example of Japanese metabolism.

Much of the concrete and steel tower has fallen into disrepair and has been under threat of demolition since 2007. Now, the owners and residents of the Nakagin Capsule Tower have decided to sell their homes after attempts to find a buyer prepared to sell failed. finance the restoration.

One of the modules is already on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama, Japan , and the Center Pompidou in Paris is reportedly interested in acquiring one for its collection. The owners are now crowdfunding to renovate the remaining 139 capsules so that they can be donated to institutions, or relocated to another location in Tokyo and rented out to people who want to experience staying in one of these.

Kisho Kurokawa , who died in 2007, originally designed the modular housing block to appeal to single businessmen, the archetypal Japanese salaryman, looking for a compact and conveniently located apartment.

Made up of two interconnected concrete towers, the Nakagin Capsule Tower was built with 140 prefabricated steel modules bolted to the main axes. Each module measures 2.5 meters by 4 meters and has a distinctive round window at one end.

Each of the small houses or modules was equipped with built-ins including a bed under the porthole-style window, cabinets, a kitchen stove and refrigerator, a telephone, and a Sony reel-to-deck tape recorder. A small bathroom even contains a small bathtub. A very Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey style house!

Kurokawa ‘s vision was that each pod could be rotated and replaced every 25 years , to keep the building cool, but problems with ownership and funding meant this never happened. Instead, many of the capsules fell into disrepair.

The distinctive tower was built as part of Japan’s Metabolist architectural movement, which was pioneered by Kurokawa along with Kiyonori Kikutake and Fumihiko Maki. As students in the 1960s, architects were influenced by Marxism, megastructures, and social growth. Metabolism got its name from the constant biological process that keeps the body alive.

Nakagin Capsule Tower embodies the ideals of metabolism in the way the cantilevered modules were designed to swap in and out, like the cells of an organism constantly renewing itself. But this vision was never achieved and several of the pods were abandoned or converted to storage units.

In 2007, the owners’ collective announced that they would be selling it to a developer who planned to demolish the building and build a new apartment block in its place. However, the developer went bankrupt in the 2008 recession, leaving the future of the tower uncertain.

In 2018, the owners began renting out the pods on a monthly basis to architecture enthusiasts as they continued to search for a buyer, until the coronavirus pandemic shut down negotiations. Before the demolition of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, the residents’ association plans to conduct a survey of the building to be published in a book to record the architecture.

Did you know this iconic building? You have visited? Tell us in the comments!