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Japan Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
The many lives of Nakagin Capsule Tower on display at New York's MoMA
Despite a yearslong battle for its preservation, the Nakagin Capsule Tower designed by Kisho Kurokawa was dismantled in 2022. However, in a poetic exemplification of the tenets of the metabolism movement that it once represented, the beloved building continues its existence, albeit broken down in parts, akin energy from food metabolized in a body. The Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project saved 23 of Nakagin's capsules and has been restoring a number of them under the supervision of Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associates. The refurbished capsules started resurfacing in public as early as 2023, with a unit turned into a van by the Yodogawa Steel Works company. More units were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art Saitama, the Museum of Modern Art in Wakayama, M+ in Hong Kong, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. From July 10, 2025, through July 12, 2026, MoMA is displaying the A1305 capsule in its street-level galleries in Manhattan as part of a larger exhibition titled 'The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower,' showcasing the 50-year history of the building through nearly 45 pieces of contextual material. 'These materials include the project's only surviving model from 1970–72; original drawings, photographs and promotional ephemera; an archival film and audio recordings; interviews with former tenants; and an interactive virtual tour of the entire building,' states MoMA's press release. MoMA members have the opportunity to enter the Nakagin capsule during a number of special activation events during the exhibition. | Jonathan Dorado "The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower" is on view in the street-facing galleries of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from July 10, 2025, through July 12, 2026. | Jonathan Dorado Evangelos Kotsioris, who led the exhibition's curatorial team, told The Yomiuri Shimbun in writing that the museum housed the capsule because the tower is 'one of the most important buildings of the 20th century.' The 'many lives' in the exhibition's title allude not only to the refurbished capsules but to the people who once made their homes in the 140 single-room apartments of the retro-futuristic building in Tokyo's Ginza. Photos and videos show a range of interiors, from a simple minimalist bedroom to a tea ceremony room and a DJ booth. 'Each capsule — that is to say, each unit — is an expression of the idiosyncrasies of each individual,' wrote Kurokawa in 'Oh! The Code of the Cyborg.' The architect had always imagined that his poster-child of metabolist architecture would transform and change. While Kurosawa once drew up plans for a twin building to Nakagin Capsule Tower that was never realized, the latest exhibition is an invitation to imagine both the structure's past lives and its future potential we have yet to experience. 'The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower' in New York's Museum of Modern Art runs through July 12, 2026. For more information, visit
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘As thrilling as driving a sports car': the Tokyo capsule tower that gave pod-living penthouse chic
Looking like a teetering stack of washing machines perched on the edge of an elevated highway, the Nakagin Capsule Tower was an astonishing arrival on the Tokyo skyline in 1972. It was the heady vision of Kisho Kurokawa, a radical Japanese architect who imagined a high-rise world of compact capsules, where people could cocoon themselves away from the information overload of the modern age. These tiny pods would be 'a place of rest to recover', he wrote, as well as 'an information base to develop ideas, and a home for urban dwellers'. Residents could peer out at the city from their cosy built-in beds through a single porthole window, or shut it all out by unfurling an elegant circular fan-like blind, all while remaining connected with the latest technology at all times. Launched to critical acclaim, the Nakagin tower's 140 capsules quickly sold out, and became highly sought after by well-heeled salarymen looking for a place to crash when they missed the last train home. Never intended to be full-time housing, the pods came stuffed with mod cons: en suite bathroom, foldout desk, telephone and Sony colour TV. But, 50 years on, after a prolonged lack of maintenance and repairs, and disagreements among owners about its future, the asbestos-riddled building was finally disassembled in 2022. The creaking steel capsules of Kurokawa's space-age fantasy were unbolted and removed from the lift and stair towers, pod by pod. Now, three years on, a little piece of his dream is back. After a meticulous process of conservation, people will soon be able to get a glimpse of life in one of these sci-fi capsules, thanks to a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA acquired a unit in 2023, one of 14 capsules that were carefully restored to their original condition, with oversight from Kurokawa's office, after the tower was disassembled. 'The Nakagin Capsule Tower is one of the world's most written about works of modern architecture,' says MoMA curator Evangelos Kotsioris. 'But the many lives of the building, and its residents, have rarely been told.' He and co-curator Paula Vilaplana de Miguel have pieced together an immersive display that tells the full story of the project in all its facets, from conception to marketing to unexpected afterlife. There will be a wealth of ephemera, from the building's only surviving sales brochure, to the original promotional film for the tower, alongside video interviews with former residents, and an explorable digital model of the entire building. And of course, there's the capsule itself, visible in all its freshly white-painted glory through the window of MoMA's street-level gallery. The museum's retractable glass facade was opened up for the first time to get it in. Peek through the pod's porthole window and you will find a streamlined white world that could have been lifted from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A reel-to-reel tape recorder shines out from an angled wall panel, next to a sleek radio receiver and built-in rotary phone, beneath a Sony Trinitron TV. A bright red Olivetti typewriter perches on a fold-down desk, alongside a Sharp electronic calculator – one of the cutting-edge features included in the 'super-deluxe' capsule model. 'Just as there is a full range of automobiles, from sedans to coupes to sports cars,' Kurokawa explained in the sales brochure, 'a capsule house can serve numerous purposes – mini-office, studio, hotel, home, conference room, or urban villa – based on the equipment selected.' Kurokawa was the youngest founding member of the Metabolist movement, a group of Japanese architects formed in 1960 that fused ideas about megastructures with those of organic biological growth. They imagined a networked world of interconnecting modular structures that could multiply and spread across the planet like a great branching fungus. But, unlike many of his contemporaries who struggled to communicate effectively with clients and the public through the usual clouds of architectural jargon, Kurokawa was a media-savvy salesman. He produced a sizzling manifesto, The Capsule Declaration, illustrated with Airstream trailers and Nasa space capsules, amniotic sacs and coffins, arguing that 'the capsule transcends human and device'. He imagined a seductive plug-and-play future, where capsules could be adapted, expanded and replaced as societal needs changed, presenting a new kind of architecture capable of growth and transformation through 'metabolic cycles'. In 1970, he published a punchy magazine-like book, which came with a striking fold-out orange and pink poster and a 7-inch vinyl recording of his computerised voice reading out his manifesto. On seeing this, as well as Kurokawa's capsule installation at the Osaka Expo the same year, the Nakagin development company was sold. Their sales pitch for the 'capsule manshon' – a term for high-end apartment buildings – was expounded in a glossy brochure designed like a car catalogue. It included dashing cutaway illustrations of the 10 square metre capsules, drawn by a car magazine illustrator, suggesting that life in one of these pods would be just as thrilling as driving a sports car. The construction company, Taisei, made a 25-minute film, with actors performing a glamorous day in the life of the tower, while buyers were even gifted a lamp in the shape of a building. The marketing worked. Despite their small size, the capsules sold for around 50% more per square metre than the average apartment. The only surviving wooden model of the project will be on show in the exhibition, and attentive visitors will notice that it includes a second capsule tower. Such was the initial sales success, Nakagin started planning a twin complex across the road, to be connected to the first by a raised plinth, as well as towers for several other sites across the city. But their timing couldn't have been worse. The 1973 international oil crisis saw construction costs soar – and Kurokawa's capsule dreams evaporate. Still, the first tower remained a success for the next 15 years. Its neighbourhood, Ginza, boomed into a bustling business district, while the capsule prices were ever-inflated by the 1980s bubble economy. Kurokawa, meanwhile, would continue pursuing his penchant for pods elsewhere, building the world's first capsule hotel in Osaka in 1979, which spawned a wave of similar micro-hotels across Japan. But the Nakagin tower wouldn't be repeated. Like a giant pixelated bar chart, it reflected the country's fortunes: when the bubble burst in the early 1990s, so the capsules started to crumble. Residents moved out, maintenance funds dwindled, and rainwater pooling on the capsules' flat roofs caused extensive corrosion. Kurokawa had always intended that the pods would be replaced after 25 years, to respond to changing needs. But a crucial design flaw made it impossible to remove them individually without first removing every capsule above. Besides, any attempt to refurbish would have required the prohibitively expensive removal of the asbestos insulation. Lured by the value of the site for redevelopment, the individual pod owners voted by majority to sell the building for demolition in 2007, just a few months before Kurokawa died. 'Many people see the Nakagin tower as a failed utopian project,' says Kotsioris, but it actually stood for a relatively long time, in terms of Japan's throwaway building culture. 'When buildings in Tokyo had an average lifespan of 15 to 20 years, the fact that it stood for 50 years makes it a resounding success.' As it turned out, the building's final years were some of its most vibrant. It won a 15-year reprieve when, after the 2007 financial crisis, the developer that had agreed to acquire the site unexpectedly filed for bankruptcy. Takayuki Sekine, a retired chamber of commerce manager, and his wife, Yumiko, bought a capsule when demolition was already on the cards, and spent every weekend in it. 'After I started my blogposts, my articles attracted many readers here,' Takayuki recalls in a video interview. 'Some enthusiasts started living here, with many more people joining in. And we had so much fun, with drinking parties at night.' In another video, a DJ called Koe-chan explains how she spotted the tower from the highway. 'It stuck with me like a traumatic memory,' she recalls, and she was compelled to acquire a capsule for live-streaming her DJ sets. Others used their pods as offices or libraries, each customised to their new purpose, while the collective efforts to repair and maintain the leaky hulk brought the tower a real sense of community for the first time. 'Ironically, the capsules were originally designed as protective wombs for isolation from the city,' says Kotsioris. 'But in the end, they turned out to form a really sociable, neighbourly community.' As for Kurokawa, he would no doubt be amused that some of his capsules have found new homes, scattered around cultural institutions and collections worldwideAfter all, he imagined a future where you might undock your capsule and take it with you across the ocean to pastures new. The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower is at MoMA, New York, from Thursday until 12 July 2026
Yomiuri Shimbun
04-07-2025
- General
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule Tower Unit to be Shown at MoMA in New York
Part of an iconic residential capsule building in Tokyo's Ginza district that was demolished in 2022 will be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from July 10. Designed by the late architect Kisho Kurokawa (1934-2007), the Nakagin Capsule Tower building was completed in 1972 as a housing complex comprising a total of 140 single-room housing capsules. One of the capsules, now housed in the renowned institution for modern and contemporary art, will be shown at the exhibition 'The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower,' focusing on the building's 50-year history, until July 12, 2026. Thanks to the design using detachable and replaceable capsules, which each had about 10 square meters of space inside, the building was famous as a structure that represented Japan's Metabolism architectural movement. It is also one of the representative works of Kurokawa, who designed the National Art Center, Tokyo, and the Toshiba IHI Pavilion for the 1970 Osaka Expo. The capsules were never replaced, and the building was dismantled due to aging in 2022. The Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project, a citizen group formed by former unit owners and others to preserve the building, obtained and restored 23 capsules. The preservation group has been searching for recipients for them. To date, capsules taken from the building have been added to the collections of several prominent overseas museums, including M+, one of Asia's largest contemporary art museums in Hong Kong, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Evangelos Kotsioris, assistant curator at MoMA, told The Yomiuri Shimbun in writing that the museum housed the capsule because the tower is 'one of the most important buildings of the 20th century at large.' 'The Nakagin Capsule Tower anticipated contemporary conversations about circularity in architecture, in other words, the idea that designers should not only think about the design and construction of buildings, but also their life cycles, and ultimate disassembly and repurposing of the materials that made them up,' Kotsioris wrote, adding that the museum concluded that the capsule deserves a place in MoMA's collection. '[The capsule] is a cozy space that has inspired generations of architects, and captivated the imaginations of both residents and people around the world,' Kotsioris wrote. In addition to the capsule with its interior fully restored to the state it was in when the building was completed, about 45 related materials that include photographs, films and the project's original models and drawings will be on display during the upcoming exhibition.
