Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan

Seven young Japanese architects and designers, pursuing a new approach to urbanism, founded an avant-garde group in 1960 and published its radical manifesto called Metabolism: The Proposals for New Urbanism. Numerous futuristic urban visions, along with experimental architectural practices, meant that the Metabolists became emblems of Japan's postwar cultural resurgence. At the root of the Metabolist urban utopias was a particular notion of the city as an organic process. It stood in opposition to the Modernist paradigm of urbanism and led to such ambitious design concepts as artificial land, marine civilization, metabolic cycle, megastructure, and group from, which embodied the Metabolists' ideals of social change.