Nakagin on the Move

FINALIST of Re-Draw.05: Nakagin Capsule Tower

+ FINALIST

Re-Draw.05: Nakagin Capsule Tower

Nakagin on the Move

Team

Name: Lidia Anabel del Rey Simón

Nationality: Spanish

Institution / Company:) Technical School of Architecture of Madrid (ETSAM)

Name: Alfredo Silles González

Nationality: Spanish/British

Institution / Company:) Technical School of Architecture of Madrid (ETSAM)

Metabolism derives from the theories of modern architecture, Archigram, Bauhaus, and Soviet avant-garde, together with Japanese context and culture. Kurokawa was shocked to see the destruction caused by World War II in Japan. This gives rise to his thought that architecture should be ephemeral modular structures that can be enlarged, reduced, or removed and that respond to certain needs of specific periods of time. That is why it’s called “Metabolism”, because it is not maintained, it mutates, it changes, it transforms…

In this context of Metabolism, together with very urgent housing needs due to the great economic and demographic expansion that Tokyo was undergoing, this tower was built, with prefabricated housing capsules as individual units, connected to the tower core as if it were a machine, thus achieving cheap and quick housing.

We now have this need for affordable, quick-to-build, adaptable, and modular housing in most cities around the world, which are suffering from a major housing crisis. Therefore, our proposal is based on this need and exports Kurokawa’s model to the near future and to an undefined location anywhere on the planet, even in Tokyo itself, creating a habitable architectural organism of totally free independent capsules and people, that can be attached to or detached (in various ways) from these vertical hives that are the cores of this new system of Nakagin towers. A kind of living entity, anarchic and at the same time, organized.