The legacy of the iconic Nakagin capsule tower

https://www.designboom.com/architecture/moma-nakagin-capsule-tower-exhibition-many-lives-museum-modern-art-new-york-05-23-2025/

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

93 27 1 year ago

designboom.com

pvg• 1 year ago

Related thread in 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27299363

a1o• 1 year ago

Oh, I have seen these photos before but without context. Does anyone knows if there is any architectural photography book just about it? I would love to have it!

pixelcort• 1 year ago

Yes there is a nice coffee table book that I keep in my living room!

中銀カプセルスタイル: 20人の物語で見る誰も知らないカプセルタワー(Nakagin Capsule Style)

‎December 23, 2020

ISBN: ‎978-4794224880

Luc• 1 year ago

More interior photos: https://www.designboom.com/architecture/noritaka-minami-1972...

Macha• 1 year ago

A YouTube video which includes some internal footage:

https://youtu.be/6SwvtBxxp2w

ginko• 1 year ago

I guess early 70s might be pushing it but I'm having a hard time imagining that you could tear down a building like this in a European city without city conservationists getting officially involved.

drivingmenuts• 1 year ago

I think the Japanese don't get quite as invested in buildings of the past. They don't preserve and/or re-use buildings like we do in the US. Great for advancing architecture and design - not so great if you want to preserve history for some reason.

jasonjayr• 1 year ago

IMHO, being an island on the Pacific rim, I think Japan has had centuries of "Well, that structure was lost to [insert natural disaster here], guess we'll have to rebuild". Whereas, Europe has "Its amazing that this structure has lasted through [insert any number of man made disasters, wars or disputes], we should see how much longer it can survive"

tecleandor2• 1 year ago

Yep. Regular apartment or business buildings are teared down and rebuilt regularly, every 25 or 30 years, for compliance with new earthquake regulations. [0] Also, the 80's economic bubble long term effects are still showing: a lot was built with low quality materials, land lots were super expensive and there was less money for high quality building...

Also, land and building ownership is separated on Japan, so depending on how you got your home, you could own an apartment or single family home, but still be paying rental for the land that it uses.[1]

Edit: Also, from the West we aren't familiar with how often do they rebuild stuff like, for example, the temples. We arrive to a, let's say, 300 years old temple, and we're imagining it being 300 years old. Of course, being mostly wood, they're like huge Theseus temples that, during the years, they're fixed and repaired and pieces substituted and probably right now the oldest wood piece is 'only' a 150 years old. Others were burnt down due to accidents or war. And not only that, some others are regularly rebuilt as a tradition or ceremony. Like the one in Ise (Mie) that has been rebuilt every 20 years since the 690 [2]

  0: https://www.archdaily.com/980830/built-to-not-last-the-japanese-trend-of-replacing-homes-every-30-years
  1: https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/07/11/freehold-vs-leasehold-land-ownership-available-foreign-residents-japan
  2: https://www.archdaily.com/1002972/the-eternal-ephemeral-architecture-of-shikinen-sengu-the-japanese-temple-rebuilt-every-20-years

UI_at_80x24• 1 year ago

This matches the (albeit goth {dark|dirty}/industrial) aesthetic of William Gibson Necromancer (and others), and Blade Runner.

Given these all happened around the a similar period I'm not surprised. It's cool to see the things that provided inspiration to others.

morkalork• 1 year ago

Dragon Ball must have been referencing this right? Not just the clean retro-futuristic style but the name capsule corp. too

pimlottc• 1 year ago

I don't know that show but capsule hotels [0] are also a big thing in Japan, more widespread and probably more well-known than the capsule tower

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel

gyomu• 1 year ago

The word "capsule" (カプセル, kapuseru) is pretty established in Japan. There are capsule toy machines (also often called "gashapon" or "gacha" but those are respectively Bandai/Tomy trademarks). As another commenter pointed out there are capsule hotels; the working name for Pokémon was originally "Capsule Monsters".

os2warpman• 1 year ago

Nakagin is lauded by artists and designers but fell into disrepair due to low occupancy rates.

Apparently a sufficient number of people don't want to live in microscopic hamster cages, no matter how cool they look, not even as pied-à-terres.

keiferski• 1 year ago

Japanese culture has different ideas than the West when it comes to preservation vs. rebuilding structures, which is ultimately rooted in the fact that it’s an island with typhoons and earthquakes, and thus architecture tended not to last long, historically at least.

This is also why you see so many articles online about buying cheap houses in rural Japan: because typically new owners will demolish old buildings like this rather than refurbish them in the way a building is in Paris or London.

My guess is that the Nagakin became a little too retro and run down, and the lack of this preservation culture meant that no one really wanted to live there. It would probably still exist and be in good condition had it been built in say, London - like The Barbican, for example.

An interesting article on the ephemeral idea: https://www.archdaily.com/1002972/the-eternal-ephemeral-arch...

user_78322• 1 year ago

I think it's less of the size, and more of other things like amenities, and imo, those tiny windows.

I have lived in (modern) rooms not much bigger. For someone living by themselves, it's not bad at all. And lots of people do live in such sized spaces - eg hotels, or cities like NYC.

I have no idea how expensive the rent there was, but if it was low enough, in a large city with enough people on a tight budget, lots would be interested. Heck, with the current housing shortage in many places (like NL) where even getting a place to stay is a challenge, there would definitely be takers for such a place.

user_78322• 1 year ago

I really wish people explored such concepts more. There's gotta be a balance between "every unit/thing/room is a modular entity" and "the building is static, take it or leave it". If I had to guess, there seems to be significant inertia and friction in the whole process. You can't build something unless you have some money, and if it involves buying and/or demolishing existing structures, you need even deeper pockets, making it "sticky" (as it's a discontinuous function).

The economist in me in partially hopeful that there is a way to address such an inefficiency.

zemvpferreira• 1 year ago

Of course there is! Vernacular architecture has been doing this for millenia, all the way to caves.

Take a plain partition wall. If you build it architecturally, it’ll be optimized. Likely out of metal/timber and sheetrock, or bricks. It mainly is what it is and needs full replacement by craftspeople for modifications.

Now take the same wall made vernacularly. Possibly made out of clay and straw, or stones, or timber. Might be two feet wide in certain places. It can be carved, reused, expanded by the user at will.

Efficiency and robustness are a necessary tradeoff. If you live in a cave you can carve out new rooms given a spoon and free time. But most of us would prefer the comforts of modern buildings.

StopDisinfo910• 1 year ago

The French Ministry of the Economy and Finance building, which was built in the 80s, is very interesting in this regard in a way which is not to dissimilar to the modularity of office buildings pre-open plan. [0]

I had the chance of joining a tour there years ago. Everything is build on a grid of 90cm cube modules and most rooms are bounded by movable panels - some plain other made of glass - which can be moved to reconfigure the space. That’s supposed to offer some flexibility as to how the building works.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_the_Economy_and_...

gsf_emergency• 1 year ago

German pavilion at EXPO 2025 seems vaguely Metabolist, tho all they mention is

Circular economy

https://www.expo2025.or.jp/en/official-participant/germany/

Incipient• 1 year ago

One issue with a tower like this definitely feels like it would be maintenance. The highly complex geometry involved, along with the number of external seals required, in an area that gets humid...keeping on top of it feels like it could have degraded too much to be worth repairing?

masklinn2• 1 year ago

The tower was ultimately demolished in 2022, though the capsules were removed first and two dozen are preserved.

FWIW even ignoring the issue with maintenance of the commons, the capsules were originally designed with a 25 years lifespan, but neither refurbishement nor replacement was done during the tower's life.

At opening each capsule cost $110k (in 2024 dollars), during the update proposal 20 years ago renovation costs were estimated at $50k (in 2024 dollars), per capsule.

The highly complex geometry involved

In my understanding the superstructural geometry was relatively simple, it's a pretty standard core with a lift and a stairwell around it.

The apparent external complexity is because capsules can be attached both longitudinally and transversally, and each "floor" is composed of a large landing for the lift stop and two smaller ones (aka there are three small flights of stairs per floor), and the capsules are attached to each landing, which creates a staggered appearance.

IIRC the tower also had a massive design flaw for mass market: access to the top of a capsule was necessary to remove it, so the capsules were not easily swappable for refurbishment or replacement, or just to move to a different tower with your capsule, something you'd imagine would be an advantage of the design.

dexwiz• 1 year ago

Capsule design in general was a popular idea, but swapping isn't feasible compared to moving. You would still want to remove most items from a capsule when being lifted by crane.

The one place you do see capsule architecture is cruise ships. The rooms are built elsewhere and then slotted into the ship en masse. But in this case, ships are moved to a shipyard to be serviced. In the tower model, the maintenance machines have to come to the tower, which is much harder to make economically viable for single replacements.

tecleandor2• 1 year ago

Yep, what I felt from the last articles I read in the 3 or 4 years before dismantling them, is the problem wasn't that the building had an expensive maintenance per se, but maintenance being delayed for years and years.

They didn't even have hot water for years. That, plus the low occupancy, so the repairs are split between less people. Plus the land ownership, that maybe it was split from the apartment ownership and you'd need to pay additional fees. And I didn't know (or remember) what you commented about the inability to remove pods that had another pods over them, that's a maintenance bummer.

It's like a car (or your teeth), when you begin to delay maintenance. It's not only the cost of the summed delayed maintenance, but the additional surprises that could appear because the unmaintained property degrades faster.

aabhay• 1 year ago

For any interested, the best book I found on this topic is Project Japan (https://a.co/d/fcrNp6p). It dives into the history of the whole Metabolism movement (in my opinion, an effort to create more modular and dynamic architecture and entire city plans that could be deployed, migrated, and repurposed effectively).

Members of this movement created everything from Tokyo’s iconic phone booth, to the ubiquitous soy sauce container, to ski cabins and a plan to dredge the whole tokyo bay to construct a completely designed cityscape, with some truly wild proposals.

The legacy of the iconic Nakagin capsule tower

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