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Metabolism.

Japanese architectural movement active from 1960 to the early 1970s. It was launched at the World Design Conference in Tokyo (1960), and its initial members were the architects Takashi Asada, KIYONORI KIKUTAKE and KISHO KUROKAWA, journalist and critic Noboru Kawazoe, industrial designer Kenji Ekuan and graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu; they were soon joined by the architects Fumihiko Maki and Masato Otaka. Metabolism was critical of orthodox Modernism as represented by CIAM, advocating instead a more dynamic approach to the problems of architectural design and urban planning (see JAPAN, §III, 5). Its manifesto Metabolism 1960: Proposals for a New Urbanism was published after the conference. In rejecting CIAM’s static and ultimately classical conception of the city, Metabolism sought rather to emphasize that the city constantly undergoes change like an organism, hence the biological term borrowed for its name. The aim was to give order to such transformations by allowing for the different cycles of growth and decay of urban elements. Elements with longer lifespans were to form an infrastructure to which short-term elements were to be attached in a manner that expedited the latter’s periodic replacement, an idea that had been explored earlier by the Groupe d’Etude d’Architecture Mobile of YONA FRIEDMAN.

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  Reproduced by kind permission of Macmillan Publishers Limited, publishers of The Grove Dictionary of Art.
  © Copyright 2000 Macmillan Publishers Limited.
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