![]() ![]() In the Nagakin’s nearly abandoned state, the front desk was manned by men in uniforms who resembled security guards more than concierges. ![]() The deteriorating state of the building amplified my anxiety as night fell. During my one-night stay, I encountered no women and only a few men in the lobby and hallways. The capsules had no kitchens instead, like a well-appointed hotel, the building featured a restaurant on the ground floor and offered housekeeping and secretarial services. Kurokawa designed the capsules as temporary residences and offices in central Tokyo for elite businessmen. I was intrigued by the disparity between the building’s futuristic aspirations and the nostalgia that surrounded the movement for its preservation. I had been following the debate over its fate, and I was keen to experience capsule living firsthand. I was born in Tokyo in the early 1970s and had come to associate the building with the Japan of my childhood. In July 2014, I rented a unit in Tower B on Airbnb. Fifty years after completion, the tower has become a symbol of obsolescent masculinity. Its designer, Kisho Kurokawa, was the youngest founding member of the Metabolists, a group of avant-garde architects (all men) who reimagined how Japanese people would live, work, and play. The Nakagin Capsule Tower encapsulates the futuristic macho dreams of the 1970s. It follows contributions from Ken Tadashi Oshima, Noritaka Minami, and Filipe Magalhães and Ana Luisa Soares. Below is the fourth entry in our five-part series on the Nakagin Capsule Tower, an essay by Aki Ishida. To mark this moment, AN gathered remembrances in text and image from those whose trajectories brought them in close contact with the building. While we shouldn’t repeat the tower’s mistakes, its optimism about alternative futures is a legacy worth noting. Kurokawa showed us a version of a possible pod world that proved to be immensely influential, for better and worse. That it survived half a century is a feat in and of itself. The tower’s demolition is no surprise, as its problems were well known from the start. The slow deconstruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo began on April 12 and will continue through the end of the year.
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