The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner (review)

Abstract

This comparative study explores how selected Japanese architects and writers imagined, represented, or visualized the city. Describing in vivid detail their shared investments in what Gardner usefully terms the narrative “elements” of the city, this book offers a captivating mapping of two deeply entangled domains where Japan’s urban imaginaries took on new contours during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Deftly attending to the speculative dimensions of both literary and architectural discourses of the city, Gardner’s book opens new interdisciplinary entryways to Japan’s vocabularies of urban environments and planetary urbanization, analyzing the role of speculative futures therein. This volume complements a growing body of scholarship that explores the architectural and visual-cultural histories of the Japanese Metabolist movement, known for its visionary attention to urban design processes that proponents likened to organic processes. This scholarship examines the impact of the Metabolist movement on Japan’s architectural and design history.1 It also includes studies of individual Metabolist architects, such as Isozaki Arata 磯崎新 (b. 1931),