The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2021-01-27

The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction was recorded on 20th January 2021 with speaker Will Gardner (Swarthmore). Find out more at: https://www.soas.ac.uk/jrc/events/seminar-and-events/20jan2021-the-metabolist-imagination-visions-of-the-city-in-postwar-japanese-architecture-and-scienc.html​

In this talk, I will present highlights from my recent book The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). This book explores how, in the wake of the destruction of Japanese cities in the Second World War, both architects and science fiction authors imagined alternatively utopian and apocalyptic futures for reemerging postwar cities. In particular, the book examines writings and architectural projects by figures associated with Metabolism, an avant-garde architecture movement formed in 1960, together with works by their contemporary SF authors, including prose writers Komatsu Sakyô and anime filmmakers Ôtomo Katsuhiro and Oshii Mamoru. In this talk, I will discuss how architects, authors, and filmmakers elaborated shared themes such as futurity, ruins, and apocalypse, as well as architectural and urban forms including megastructures, capsules, and cybercities.