Prefabrication experiments - 500 - An Ongoing Tale of Two Fields: The Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972-2022)

For this significant milestone - blog post 500 - we close a series on how events, exhibits, publications, and comparisons to other industries have inspired, disseminated knowledge and demonstrated the benefits manufacturing-based methodologies in building production. Exhibits on industrialized construction have also often depicted a romanticized view of two conflicting value sets: design versus production. At the crux of prefab's quandary has been this deep-rooted tension between manufacturers' posture on mass-production as applied to architecture and architects' opposition toward what they perceive as the creation of a standardized built form. 

 

These two fields (architecture and industry) have occasionally converged in fertile experiments aimed at exploring innovative prototypes. The Metabolist era in Japan was shaped by vast post-war investments in production methods and spawned architectural visions of a future city based on an industrialized plug-in mobility: the cellular organization of inhabitable modules connected to service cores; individual dwelling pods or capsules would be mass-produced, delivered, simply connected to a support structure and potentially disconnected from the cores to be repaired or set into another system.

 

An icon of this mutable building approach designed by Kisho Kurokawa and built in Tokyo in 1972, was dismantled in 2022, putting to rest the utopian vision of the mobile capsule-based city. The Nakagin Capsule Tower's modules, intact for 50 years, were not used in subsequent projects, they were neither returned to their factory for repair nor their replacement. The building that represented mobility was revered by some (mainly architects) and regarded by others as a relic of postwar technological optimism never achieving its touted possibilities.

 

Today, the experiment is the object of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (July 10, 2025 to July 12, 2026); the retrospective entitled The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower includes a restored unit. Using this icon as an art piece presents the failed experiment as the focal point of architectural/artistic innovation. While the exhibit addresses how cities change over time and evolve, the Capsule tower represents another spectacular attempt that ultimately failed to unite the fields of architecture and production. 

A photo from the exhibit website: see - https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5830