1972 – Nakagin Capsule Tower

Completed in the year 1972, Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower is one of the few visionary proposals realized by an avant-garde architectural movement called Metabolism. An experimental apartment complex designed with 140 removable capsules, this building in Tokyo embodies the future of urban living as envisioned by Kurokawa at that moment in postwar Japan. In recent years, the building has faced the threat of demolition to make way for a more conventional structure.\n\nIn this first monograph about the building, Noritaka Minami uses photography to document the current state of individual capsules as a response to their potential disappearance.