Synopses & Reviews
By Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist
Having wandered the ruins of Hiroshima, Tokyo and other Japanese cities after WW II, The Metabolists – four architects, a critic, an industrial designer and a graphic designer – showed with the launch of their manifesto Metabolism 1960 how they would employ biological systems (aided by Japan's massive advances in technology) as inspiration for buildings and cities that could change and adapt to the vicissitudes of modern life. Units could be added or removed from buildings like Kisho Kurokawa’s Capsule Tower in Tokyo as required; buildings themselves could be added or removed from cities at will in the cell-like master-plans of Fumihiko Maki.
Project Japan features a series of vivid, empathetic conversations, replete with surprising connections and occasional clashes between Koolhaas and Obrist and their subjects. The story that unfolds is illuminated, contradicted and validated by commentaries from a broad range their forebearers, associates, critics, and progeny, including Toyo Ito and Charles Jencks.
Interspersed with the interviews and commentary are hundreds of never-before-seen images: master-plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts and astonishing sci-fi urban visions. Presented in a clear chronology from the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s; a devastated Japan after the war; to the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference; to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect; to the apotheosis of the movement at Expo '70 in Osaka.
Koolhaas and Obrist unearth a history that casts new light on the key issues that both enervate and motivate architecture today: celebrity and seriousness, sustainability and monumentality, globalization, government participation (and abdication), and the necessity for architecture to reach beyond its traditional boundaries in order to embrace the future.
Synopsis
In 1996-97, Harvard's graduate students studied China's Pearl River Delta (PRD), a cluster of five cities with a population of twelve million that will probably reach thirty-six million by the year 2020. The establishment in the PRD of Special Economic Zones - "laboratories for the contained unleashing of capitalism" - has hastened an unprecedented experiment in urbanization on an astonishingly large scale. Great Leap Forward contains essays that explore, in a theoretical and statistical context, the results of this rapid modernization, which has produced an entirely new urban substance.
About the Author
The editors:
Chuihua Judy Chung is principal of CODA Group (Content Design Architecture) in New York, whose projects encompass editorial and publication work, and graphic and architectural design. She is editing the forthcoming Owning a House in the City, a study on low-income housing in the US.
Jeffrey Inaba, a partner of AMO (Architecture Media Organization) is writing a book on the work of Gordon Bunshaft and Kevin Roche.
Rem Koolhaas is principal of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, and the author of Delirious New York and S,M,L,XL. He is the recipient of the 2000 Pritzker Prize.
Sze Tsung Leong is principal of CODA Group (Content Design Architecture) in New York. With Chung, he has designed and edited The Charged Void: Architecture, the complete works of Alison and Peter Smithson. Leong is the co-editor and designer of Slow Space (Monacelli, 1998).
The authors:
Bernard Chang, Mihai Craciun, Rem Koolhaas, Nancy Lin, Yuyang Liu, Katherine Orff, Stephanie Smith