Tokyo, spring 1972. Fourteen stories of prefabricated capsules rose over Shimbashi — bolted to twin concrete shafts, each unit a complete living pod with fold-down bed, integrated desk, and built-in reel-to-reel tape deck. Every capsule was engineered for one purpose: to be unbolted and replaced on a twenty-five-year cycle. Not a single unit was ever swapped.
The Metabolic Principle
When the Metabolists published their proposals at the 1960 World Design Conference, they advanced a radical premise: cities should function like biological organisms, with permanent infrastructure acting as skeletal trunks supporting temporary, renewable cells. Kikutake's Marine City floated on the Pacific. Tange's plan for Tokyo Bay stretched a three-hundred-meter megastructure across the water. Every scheme treated impermanence not as failure but as the fundamental condition of urban life.