Dwelling mobility and interoperability were the basis of utopian postwar architectural projects for rebuilding Japan by young architects who in their way were the protagonists of a high modernist architectural regime articulated to technology. A Pritzker Architecture Prize winner in 2019, Arata Isozaki was an emblematic proponent of the Japanese metabolist movement, which perceived and designed the city as an organic organism. Expanding and contracting as needed, urbanity was organized around megastructures that provided the community infrastructure and services for modular clustered dwellings. The city would evolve according to a predetermined cellular structure. Dwellings were imagined as moveable commodities within the overall framework, inserted or replaced as needed. The entire city would be a type of scalable entity established from modular components. Even though Isozaki is known for much more than these ideas, The City in the Air project he designed outlined the basic elements of the metabolist architectural solution.
In Isozaki's vision, horizontal circulation would branch out from vertical cores generating areas for horizontal dwelling distribution akin to linear viewing portals radiating from the central trunks. Further, building this new city infrastructure over the existing one would act as a type of pressure valve allowing the city to scale up or down as required. Metabolist speculative visions inspired architects and academia and repurposed the component based construction systems that were becoming familiar in Eastern European collective housing blocks to apply them to city making. Many megastructures were elaborated around a basic concept; a vertical circulation element anchored to place onto which modular units were attached leaving the ground plane free for urban networks. Perhaps inspired by LeCorbusier's Cité Radieuse, densely packed vertical dwellings would liberate the ground plane and elevate dwellings bringing them closer to light and separate them from perceived unsanitary living conditions closer to the streets. This vision was applied in both an inverted pyramid towering proposal and an inhabitable bridge truss proposal.
More streamlined versions were explored in many experiments and portrayed most ambitiously by Habitat 67 in Montréal by Moshe Safdie; individualized units had their own personal and private access and further the checkerboard type disposition allowed for each unit to be a singular recognizable element in the overall composition.
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| City in the Air model |
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