Project Japan

Project Japan - Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist

Architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist assembled the history of Metabolism: the first non-Western avant-garde architecture, which emerged in postwar Tokyo. Extensive interviews and rare photographs present this movement and illuminate the group's futuristic vision for the future; a dream of cities that could grow, reproduce, and transform in response to their environment. From 2005 to 2011, Koolhaas and Obrist conducted interviews with the surviving members of Metabolism. Project Japan features hundreds of previously unpublished images: master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate shots of metabolists at work and play, architectural models, excerpts from magazines and amazing sci-fi visions of cities, and tells the history of Japan in the 20th century through its architecture. From colonized Manchuria in the 1930s, through devastated post-war Japan and the founding of the Metabolism movement at the World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960, to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first famous architect, the apotheosis of the Metabolism movement at Expo '70 in Osaka and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s: The result is a vivid document of the last moment when architecture was more a public than a private matter.