A fantastic article from the last time this topic came up: https://failedarchitecture.com/2014/06/a-year-in-the-metabol... It goes over the history of the tower, the experience of the author living there, and has better shots of the interiors featuring a variety of tenants.
Travelling to the 70s must feel like going to the future: these futuristic capsule buildings existed, supersonic air travel was commonplace, and there were humans travelling to the moon. The epitome of modernity these days is how fast your car videos can load.
I can put on a lightweight headset and hang out to shoot pool with a group of strangers from around the world in virtual reality. In my lifetime countries, including political enemies, worked together to build a space station that has been continually occupied by humans, each usually staying long term, since it became habitable. I watched the F-35 hover over the water and shoot out of sight instantly at Fleet Week, and I can wirelessly throw an essentially unlimited supply of media from throughout history onto a TV I can’t perceive the pixels on. I can fly across california for $100 round trip and instead of owning a car I can rent an electric one with an app on my phone.
The air isn’t polluted by leaded gasoline. The equal employment act and title ix didn’t pass until 1972, America is a more balanced and equitable society today than it was in 1970.
All that to say I find this take is needlessly pessimistic from multiple angles, and I disagree.
Hm. In 1969, you could watch a Harrier jet hover the water and shoot out of sight and several emancipatory legislations were a direct result of these era. (In fact, you could watch Apollo 16 going to the moon and celebrate the equal employment act passed just the previous month.) And it's also the 1970s, when awareness rose for environmental issues (like leaded gasoline and many more).
Regarding pixels, well, there were still some high-res vector displays left (otherwise, there weren't any compression artefacts, at least). ;-)
The view OP presents is a bit grim though. Most of the real "modernity" of the '70s was not something regular people would enjoy. Going to the Moon, or the Concorde were no different from today's fusion experiments, including the fact that they were based heavily on "earlier work".
Perhaps society decided to turn that progress into something a regular person could benefit from. Think EVs, or a network of internet satellites, work from home (and everything supporting that), getting all your shopping delivered at home, all the virtual "networks" (I don't mean FB here, any networking possibility) you can imagine, and all the knowledge now available from the comfort of your own personal pocket device. There are also plenty of social movements and evolution, think on the line of equal rights, that may have been rooted in the '70s but were completely in the realm of the implausible until the last 2 decades.
Of course people no longer see that as evolution and modernity because so many were born into them already. They look like normality.
And even the "modernity" that was available to normal people in their daily lives was mostly for the sake of the looks. I lived in some modern buildings of the '70s (not unlike the one presented in the article) and that wasn't modernity, it was creativity and embellishment mixed with a lot of impracticality. They were more art than practical creation. The result of the same current that gave birth to The Jetsons a decade earlier, just put in tangible reality in the '70s.
The observations on modernity are important. In a sense, future — as in this optimistic, curious interest and anticipation — is a thing of the past. We have replaced art by engineering (for the most part with a rather short term perspective) and lost emotions on the way. I think, this is one of the reasons for the retro trend we've seen in the last decade. – I also think, the 1970s were actually already a bit late to this, as they were also the decade of a generation on wait, rather apt to indulge in personal matters. (Are the 2020s the 1970s of the post-futuristic age?)
Regarding the the article, metabolism occupies a special spot: it's futuristic, full of anticipation, both theoretical and practically minded, and vitally combines elements from both art and engineering approaches.
Edit/PS, regarding art vs engineering: And in the arts engineering is called curating… ;-)
Perhaps the idea is that today generally speaking there's a clearer separation between art and engineering. We tend to have functional things, or ones focused on impressive visuals at the expense of the functionality.
Comparatively very few things want to be both. The car wanted to be both engineering and "art" in the 50s-60s, in the 70s buildings had their turn with all kinds of experimental architecture. In the 80s clothing and fashion became art with outrageous and flashy colors and designs.
These days we have a clearer line between art and engineering. Then again my opinion may just be a product of being surrounded by "present day life", creating some bias. Or maybe electronics are today's form over function.
Not that I was around for it then, but the sense I get about things that are trying to be both Art and Engineering is that they fail to be spectacular in either category.
Today's super/hyper-cars definitely try to be beautiful and stand out visually but they're as much function as they can be. The form just follows the function. Every line prioritizes aerodynamics, every component is about weight saving and performance, every embellishment is about ventilation or downforce. The visual uniqueness is working around the function, not the other way around.
Look at a '50s car and you'll see all kinds of functionally useless fins and embellishments all around, all meant to make the car look more futuristic and "airplane like", simulating airplane's wings and engines [0].
It was actually meant in the sense of the paradigm art versus engineering. E.g., in software, the pendulum is at about the most extreme it ever was. As for art as in fine arts, well, the definition changed. (Art theory was rather different in the sixties and seventies, as was the general modus operandi.)
>America is a more balanced and equitable society today than it was in 1970.
The inflation adjusted minimum wage peaked in 1968. An American worker in 1970 could graduate high school and get a job that would allow them to support a family of four, buy a home, and take the occasional vacation. To say that we've progressed in terms of equitability since then is a cruel joke. The area under the curve of material wealth may be greater, but we've become a winner-take-all society.
I think you are right that we have not unilaterally progressed in terms of equitability since 1970, but by my understanding of history the upward mobility you describe would be much more accessible to a woman or non-white person in America today than in 1970. "An" American worker, sure. Someone in the right demographic. But not every American, not by a long shot (not to say that today everyone has equal opportunities across gender and racial demographics, but we've improved).
They just had very low jitter networks. Displays in that age didn't even have enough space to buffer a single frame. The ads loaded no faster than real-time.
Having a total of 20 supersonic airlines wasn't exactly common place.
And spending 1.5% of your GDP to send like ten people to the moon probably isn't that great an achievement from a cost benefit analysis (I know there will be fierce disagreement).
Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazing.
That these planes were operated only by BA and Air France (and a similar plane to some extent by Aeroflot) was merely an accident. Concorde was developed as a mass transport and there was broad interest. Then the US ban and the oil crisis happened.
Yes but this is my point is there are great reasons why concorde failed but equally it's technology was not enough of progress to overcome the fact that 747s could do things at much greater scale and more economically.
The reach of aeroplane travel is far more impressive now than flying under a 100 people at supersonic speeds.
I also dispute that there was mass transport plans - the total passenger load was tiny.
Not to take away that the plane itself is an amazing piece of technology.
Concorde failed because of politics, not technology. The US wanted to make way for its own SST project so it limited Concorde's access to the US market.
A Concorde B variant with an even longer range and quieter engines was already being developed, and airlines were very interested in it. if the US market had been more open it's likely other markets would have followed suit.
Once it was stabilised in the market other improvements would have followed. Concorde was always a first class for the first class market, not an air bus. But if supersonic travel had become established there would have been market pressure to commoditise it, and we might have seen a continuing supersonic long haul market working in parallel with the smaller more local subsonic services we have now.
Concorde failed because of the technology. It was hugely expensive and consumed mass amounts of fuel (13x the fuel per passenger of a 747-200). It used 2 tons of fuel just to taxi to the runway for takeoff!
I dispute that airlines were actually interested in a Concorde B. The economic problems of supersonic flight would have remained.
There's a reason Boeing abandoned any pretense of interest in SST after Congress declined to fund it.
I'd like the option of supersonic travel for transoceanic voyages. I'm looking at plane tickets back to the East Coast from Japan.... Tokyo to Dallas alone is ~12hrs, total travel time ~24hrs across 3 flights. Flying to the other side of the planet faster would be far more valuable to me than even browsing HN while airborne (I tend to sleep through my flights, no matter how long, anyway).
Given that Concorde's maximum range is less than the distance from Tokyo to Dallas, I suspect you'd end up saving little time on that leg with it, as you'd add an extra stop. The rest of your trip sounds like mostly waiting in airports. How does an SST help with that? If anything, the lower traffic on expensive SST flights would tend to make the flights less frequent, increasing those waits. It might end up taking longer.
Doubling the price of the peasant seats would be roughly equivalent to the price of business class. If that cut my total travel time in half...yeah, I think I would fork over the money for that.
All the resources that went into the moonlanding could have gone into something else. Eg could have stayed in private hands.
For a different example:
Yes, in the real world WW2 sort-of gave us computers. But IBM (and similar companies) would have invented electronic general purpose computers anyway, and probably sooner, if there hadn't been a war going on.
Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazing.
The 70s looks at your example of progress, thinks of it as a big ARPANET and is not impressed.
We have wristwatch and pocket supercomputers with access to a global network.
But many people also live in a far more precarious economy, the global network is far too much a source of poor-quality or tainted information and toxic social experiences, monitoring and manipulation of all kinds are pervasive, and a compulsory personal ethic of branding, consumption, and selling is far more prevalent than anything more adventurous or creative.
To be pedantic, a reduction in poverty is not the same as a reduction in inequality. Your example of India and China seems to be pointing to the former.
I'm not sure what the parent commenter meant, but when I think "precarious economy", I'm thinking about things like wage stagnation and rising costs of healthcare, housing, and debt, rather than the fact that people now have iPhones (which for many are only affordable if paid for in monthly installments over years).
> To be pedantic, a reduction in poverty is not the same as a reduction in inequality. Your example of India and China seems to be pointing to the former.
No, I meant that not only has absolute poverty declined, global (!) inequality has also declined.
There is now more inequality inside of China then there was when everyone was really poor in Mao's time. Yes. Hence the emphasis on global: the vast mass of Chinese people are closer to eg American standards of living than ever in the past.
(American) wage stagnation is a myth mostly produced by being sloppy with inflation adjustment.
> No, I meant that not only has absolute poverty declined, global (!) inequality has also declined.
Sure, that's true. The pedanticism was pointing out that your second sentence was a non-sequitur. Starving and smartphones are about poverty, not necessarily inequality.
> (American) wage stagnation is a myth mostly produced by being sloppy with inflation adjustment.
Obviously it's more nuanced and complicated than this, but even if I grant you that wage stagnation is a myth, what about the other (majority) parts of what I said and cited? Would you argue that economic inequality has decreased in US over the past few decades?
> The pedanticism was pointing out that your second sentence was a non-sequitur. Starving and smartphones are about poverty, not necessarily inequality.
I don't know how inequality came into the discussion?
The original point I commented didn't mention anything about equality, did it? "But many people also live in a far more precarious economy [...]" sounds like a complaint about poverty, not at all about inequality?
> Would you argue that economic inequality has decreased in US over the past few decades?
I don't live in the US, and don't care too much about that country. Even its poorest inhabitants are already rich and well off by global standards and are offered opportunities many can only dream off.
From what I absorbed over the Internet, it seems the answer to the US specific question depends a lot on exactly how you operationalize it:
I (and many economists) prefer measures of consumption (in)equality, because people don't eat money. Presumably income is only a means to the the end of consumption.
Though to be honest, I suggest we should care much more about the absolute welfare of poor people than about whether rich people have slightly more than they did yesterday (ie inequality).
Sadly true, at least in some dimensions. Though as I sit here in my bedroom staring into a massive multipanel array of sharp pixels, attached to a global fiberoptic firehose of information... it feels like a different sort of imagined future came true, though maybe not the best one. All it's missing is VR goggles (never been that interested personally) and hackable wetware.
In the 1970s we lived under the shadow of The Bomb. We assumed our future was as glowing cinders under literally leaden skies.
Now, the future in the 1960s was wonderful. Spaceships! Atomic-powered flying cars! Jet travel to anywhere in the world! Air raid drills with duck and cover! That past had a future!
Deregulation made air travel cheap, commonplace and miserable. I took Greyhound across the country several times in t70s. The quality of travel in airplanes is essentially at that level - but much faster of course. The 1950-70s were an era of regulated private monopolies. Those regulation stood in the way of all sorts of progress but also gave a substantial portion of the working class a middle class income.
I'm not going to argue whether one was better than the other because the change was inevitable, we'll never change back, just "change forward" to some further situation.
I've gotten into camping and climbing recently and every time I walk into an REI I'm pretty amazed at how different the gear is from when I was younger. Might not be as flashy but there certainly has been a great deal of improvement in pretty much every consumer good there is.
Yes, though this and electric cars both required a single man with combination of wealth, charisma and ability to think beyond their own wallet - which is a very rare set of characteristics to coincide in a single person - who then could drag the market kicking and screaming into accepting EVs and reusable rockets. Unfortunately, depending on such happenstance doesn't scale, so it's not a reliable way of creating a better future.
> Yes, though this and electric cars both required a single man with combination of wealth, charisma and ability to think beyond their own wallet [...]
Elon Musk became the richest African-American in the process. I don't think he needed to think beyond his own wallet? (He might have or not. I don't know what he's thinking.)
Both SpaceX and Tesla came close to bankruptcy, and he started the former and took over the latter with enough PayPal money to spend the rest of his life in extreme comfort.
It's always possible. There may even be a strong base rate for this assumption, given what just about every other company does. But on the other hand, he is still consistently chasing the goals he outlined over a decade ago - the object-level, world improvement, not money-making goals.
Take a look at SpaceX. It has achieved success, it could double down on its existing work and earn great profits for many years to come. But instead, it's still pushing for Mars, following Elon's original plan. Never deviating, never compromising. Only slipping schedules and changing execution details[0]. They don't have to. He doesn't have to care either, he's already famous and filthy rich. And yet they keep pushing for Mars. So either Elon is that good of a conman, capable of maintaining this charade for so long, or... maybe he's just being honest.
--
[0] - Which is normal for every company, and arguably every white-collar worker. For some reason, Musk gets badmouthed by plenty of software devs here over slipping a deadline on unprecedented feats of engineering - same developers who don't think twice about all the promises they break at their own workplace.
I had the pleasure of flying the Concorde, almost by accident, in the 90s. Yes, I was flying on business, but for some reason I couldn't get a flight on KLM to the Netherlands at all that week and my creative travel agent mused "Hey, do you want to take the Concorde?"
The cost was $3500, which at the time was within a couple of hundred dollars compared to a business-class seat on KLM. Yes, that ticket price wasn't something I'd contemplate for personal travel, and it was a bit discounted at that; but for business travel it certainly wasn't exorbitant.
Heh, thanks for correcting the typo, that saved my Friday afternoon :)
I had not heard car videos are so popular nowadays that their download speed can be used as a measure of modernity. But actually, that did not surprise me any more, more like the opposite. I feel that the older I get (I was born in 76), the more I see and hear things related to computers, music, media that apparently are very popular now I have never heard of. Sometimes it feels like I'm forever stuck in the 90's in a way. I mean, music was best in 90s-early 2000s, All you bases belonged to us as far as the best memes go and so on. But then again, with the technology in my hands today, I wouldn't change it to 90's junk in a million years.
> The economical miracle can be divided into four stages: the recovery (1946–1954), the high increase (1955–1972), the steady increase (1972–1992), and the low increase (1992–2017).
The period of highest growth ended in the 70s, which ended some of the optimism of that period.
70's and 80's were peak of humans I believe. It will be hard to undo all the crap we've built including the internet which I have mixed feelings about.
> It's a big mystery for me how the things went down since seventies.
There is a insightful (if a bit messy, and occasionally wrong) book that purports to answer that question:
Where is my flying car?: A memoir of future past, by J. Storrs Hall. [1]
In that author's view, it boils down to
* a levelling off of energy consumption per capita, that previously had doubled every 10 years. (In particular, the author laments the dearth of advanced nuclear power, which would be good for the economy and the climate.)
* increasing regulation and risk aversion.
* as well as “centralized funding streams”, “bureaucratic inertia,” “cultural malaise and indifference”.
I published a photobook 'Danchi Dreams' in 2018 that captured the massive Japanese apartment blocks from the same era as Nakagin. The apartment buildings, known as 'danchi', were constructed from the 1960s - 1980s to replace burnt-out cities and house a booming population. Though they might not be quite as spectacular as what the Metabolists dreamed up I think they shared a forward-looking vision for what the modern world could be. http://danchi-dreams.com/
It reminds me of Canada's Habitat 67, which is also made up of prefabricated concrete rooms and sealed bathroom units. Designed as cheap housing for the future, it is now luxery housing but residents have to put up with similar problems such as a pipe burst in one apartment causes major problems.
I always really loved how Habitat 67 looked, whatever practicality issues aside hah.
I also really love The Interlace in Singapore, but I have no idea how you could be expected to navigate it if you are unfamiliar. I wonder how it is for service providers etc to find units. The layout when you see it from above makes more sense, but only slightly.
In the Netherlands they use converted shipping containers as student housing. Also stacked fairly randomly and in different colours. Looked really cool.
There was one such complex nearby where I lived. But it didn't turn out well, because of the cheap and fairly indestructible accomodations, the rental agencies filled these up with 'problematic' tenants rather than students and it turned into a slum pretty quickly. The best place in town to get drugs or get stabbed. Eventually it was dismantled obviously. It was a good idea, but stupid management.
I used to live in something similar to a converted container [1], but designed as housing (also in the Netherlands), we didn’t have any such problems, and the containers were still going strong when they were removed to make space for new developments.
I’m still nostalgic for that space. It was my first experience living alone, and a great one at that.
Metabolism (the architectural movement that underpinned the Capsule Tower) fascinates me because of its grand scope, one that sought to build an entire society that would suit the needs of the modern person. A building like the Capsule Tower was only a small part of a totalising vision which included ideas for reimagining the Tokyo Bay with vast arcologies.
For those interested in Metabolism a fascinating book on the subject is Rem Koolhaas’ “Project Japan - Metabolism Talks” from Taschen. I’ve only just begun to read it and the level of detail is illuminating.
I always wanted to stay in the airbnb from that building to actually feel what it would be like to live there.
What stopped me though is the fact that there's asbestos and that the conditions of the capsule were bad enough that I could end up inhaling some asbestos. How much of a concern is that really? You hear such horror stories about Asbestos but given how widely used it was and how little care was taken to demolish certain buildings in countries like China, I would expect a lot more people affect with Mesothelioma if all it took were a few fibers finding their way into people's lungs?
So for anyone with the medical knowledge, was that a valid concern of mine or just a paranoia that prevented me from experiencing a building I've always been fascinated with before its disappearance?
Asbestos is a game of chance. While of course there’s plenty of chance nothing will happen there’s also a small chance one fiber gets loose and ends up in a bad place and causes you to die a pretty miserable death.
True, you can also get struck by lightening on your way to the room, the asbestos may also save your life from a fire.
Everything is a game of chance. You can quantify your chances of dying with micromorts, it is a good way to put things into perspective.
Dying of cancer because you spend a night in a capsule containing asbestos is, I believe, so ridiculously low that you might as well worry about being killed by a dog swimming with a gun in his mouth when you go to the beach. I mean, unless you are doing things like taking an angle grinder to the capsule, something the owner might object to.
Really, asbestos is mostly an occupational hazard. Once it is in place, the risks are low.
This is like saying that puddles are a game of chance because you could spontaneously faint when standing close to them and drown. It is theoretically not impossible, but it is also not a risk that you should be worrying about in your daily life.
Asbestos is an extremely stable compound, which is the entire reason it was being used as fire resistant material.
I think that "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the metabolists failed because the buildings they produced weren’t metabolic enough to cope with the ever-changing needs of the city’s inhabitants. Surely, preservation of their work as some kind of cultural relic would be the last thing that the young radicals of the late ’60s and early ’70s would have wanted." is the key quote. I'm sad to see an interesting building go, but it seems like a failed experiment, rather than a monument that should be preserved.
From the article, it seem like the main failure was in execution. The pods were designed to be replaceable, swapped out regularly as needs changed. In practice, swapping out a single pod was impossible, due to the construction.
For some reason, I'm really sad to see this go. I remember it being all over the UK media when I was a kid.
was the key design mistake, because it glosses over the fact that people get attached to things for sentimental reasons. Even if it were easier to swap out pods, I bet that some people would stubbornly remain in their older pods "because it is the pod I grew up in" for example.
Designers in all sorts of fields (even software) often fall for this fallacy, because it would just be so much more elegant if humans conformed to your vision for the world instead of the other way around.
This reminds me of Jacques Tati's wonderful film, Mon Oncle (1958). There's a residential house with many similarities to the Nakagin Capsule Tower, and it has so much personality that it's almost a character in itself. Tati gets as much comedy out of its silly, "forward-looking" design as he can, and he contrasts it excellently with an equally ridiculous old house in the centre of the village.
Why “bizzare”? And what is “Logan’s Run”? That building is absolutely breathtaking! It’s maybe my favorite structure on the planet. And it would be so cool if it got rebuilt (without the asbestos)!
Would be very interesting to learn why this was downvoted. I am somewhat loosing faith in humanity recently. If people express their negative feelings towards someone who thanks another person and is politely trying to clarify his previous message, I am not sure what future do we all have.
What a coincidence. Just read yesterday about it in the Monocle book of Japan and that it will be either teared down or preserved depending on the votes among the owners.
When you design for architectural and humanist ideals only, but don't design for maintenance or renovation, then any claims of renovation, renewal, or timelessness are moot, wishful,
unattained aspirations.
Practicality first, then form, because a building in a high-value area has to be fundamentally useful or it becomes a spectacle, art, and/or blight.
