"Once there was a nation that went to war, but after they conquered
a continent their own country was destroyed by atom bombs... then
the victors imposed democracy on the vanquished. For a group of
apprentice architects, artists, and designers, led by a visionary,
the dire situation of their country was not an obstacle but an
inspiration to plan and think... although they were very different
characters, the architects worked closely together to realize their
dreams, staunchly supported by a super-creative bureaucracy and an
activist state... after 15 years of incubation, they surprised the
world with a new architecture-Metabolism-that proposed a radical
makeover of the entire land... Then newspapers, magazines, and TV
turned the architects into heroes: thinkers and doers, thoroughly
modern men... Through sheer hard work, discipline, and the
integration of all forms of creativity, their country, Japan,
became a shining example... when the oil crisis initiated the end
of the West, the architects of Japan spread out over the world to
define the contours of a post-Western aesthetic...." -Rem Koolhaas
/ Hans Ulrich Obrist Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas
and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of
Metabolism-the first non-Western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in
1960, in the midst of Japan's postwar miracle. Project Japan
features 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-telling the 20th-century history of Japan
through its architecture. From the tabula rasa of a colonized
Manchuria in the 1930s, a devastated Japan after the war, and the
establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in
Tokyo to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity
architect, the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo '70 in Osaka, and
its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s: The
result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture
was a public rather than a private affair. Oral history by Rem
Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist Extensive interviews with Arata
Isozaki, Toshiko Kato, Kiyonori Kikutake, Noboru Kawazoe, Fumihiko
Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kenji Ekuan, Atsushi Shimokobe, and Takako
and Noritaka Tange Hundreds of never-before-seen images,
architectural models, and magazine excerpts Layout by award-winning
Dutch designer Irma Boom Further reading
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