 Okay, welcome everybody to our first SOAS Japan Research Center seminar of 2021. I'm Helen McNaughton. I'm the chair of the Japan Research Center at SOAS. And I was going to say Happy New Year, but I instead am going to say Happy Inauguration Day to all our American colleagues and friends who are perhaps dialing in today, not least our guest speaker. It's a real pleasure to welcome Will Gardner to kick off our 2021 sessions for us. Will is dialing in from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. So he's not too far from the main events that are happening down the road today in Washington DC. He at Swarthmore, he teaches Japanese language, literature and film. And he has written and published numerous articles on Japanese modernism, science fiction, media and urban culture. And today he's going to be presenting highlights from his recent 2020 book, which has been published by the University of Minnesota Press. It's titled The Metabolist Imagination, visions of the city in post-war Japanese architecture and science fiction. So Will is going to speak for about 45, 50 minutes today. You will notice down the bottom of your screens that there is a cue, there are two buttons there, there's a chat button and a Q&A button. We are going to have a Q&A session at the end of Will's presentation for about half an hour. So if you have any questions, please put them into the Q&A button rather than the chat button. So please use the Q&A button at the end of the presentation and I will try and collect as many questions as possible for Will to answer. So I'm going to hand over to Will. He's going to upload his presentation. I'm going to turn my camera off so we can concentrate on his slides and I'll come back when he's finished his presentation. But welcome Will, it's a real pleasure to have you here joining us. Well thank you very much Helen and I appreciate the opportunity. So I'll go ahead and share my slides. You see that okay? That's great. So welcome everyone and I appreciate everyone who's joining us. I know that there are other things happening on TV today so I appreciate you choosing to join us for this talk and I will be talking, as Helen said, about my recent publication, which is called The Metabolist Imagination and these are the main themes that I'll be talking about today. First of all, this is a book that is interdisciplinary in the sense that it connects architecture and science fiction and my own background as a scholar is in literary studies. So I'm not an architectural historian and it's rather unusual to pair these two art forms, I think, in an academic book, but I was in prepping for this research project. I was really struck by some very strong commonalities in themes between science fiction in the post-war era, as well as architecture as I will discuss. So I will kind of discuss that connection a little bit more at the beginning of the talk. And the, I'm going to focus today, kind of some highlights really from the book. I'm talking about three themes that I believe kind of emerge in the writings and architectural plans of architects who are associated with a group called metabolism or the metabolist architects and I'll speak about them in a minute. The themes that I think are also kind of pertinent to Japanese science fiction are the themes of megastructures and the idea of expansion across Tokyo Bay. And finally the idea of a capsule as an architectural form and the idea of cyborgs and cyborg architecture and C would be on the theme of apocalypse and the theme of ruins as architect, as architecture. And finally, in the third section of the talk, I'm going to connect these themes with some relatively well-known works of anime by Otomo Katsuhiro, the famous sort of cyberpunk animation Akira from 1988. And Oshi Mamoru, who is a director probably best known for Ghost in the Shell, but I'm going to be discussing two movies that are connected with a franchise that he worked on called Pat Labor. So I'll be talking about some of those same themes that you see in section two as they apply to these works. So first of all, about this connection between architecture and science fiction. So, in this work I look at architecture and science fiction as two forms of artistic simulation. So I argue that the architect imagines an intervention in the human and natural environment. That is the architectural plan will propose a change in the existing natural or constructed environments and the lives of its imagined inhabitants. Similarly, fiction and especially science fiction or speculative fiction SF, as it's also known, is a form of imaginative simulation, positing a change or novelty in the natural built or social environment and tracing its narrative consequences. So, in a sense, I'm looking at these two art forms there as two forms of simulation in terms of what the architect and what the writer or filmmaker do. Okay. And in particular, the architectural group that I focus on in the study, the metabolists, I think their work in particular points to a narrative dimension. And so I argue that the metabolists were interested in the processes of growth, change, and decay, and they imagined architecture as a means of understanding and designing such dynamic processes. Thus, architecture could be approached as a temporal form, responding in part to that new diachronic possibilities of computer simulation, which was just kind of emerging on the conceptual horizon at the time that this group debuted. But it also linked to the temporality and tropes of narratives. And I don't, I'm not going to talk about it too much today, but a number of the figures architects and architecture critics associated with metabolists actually employed the fiction, you know, prose fiction genre or sort of hybrid fiction slash essay architectural essay form to kind of express their ideas. So, so there are we can find actually sort of literal narratives in the written work of architects and architecture critics that are affiliated with this metabolist group. And so, so that is more or less the conceptual connection between architecture and science fiction that I explore in the book, but I also explore some of the sort of human interconnections between architects and writers in the post war era. And in particular, one event that I focus on, that's not going to be the focus of my talk today but is the focus of a chapter in the book is the 1970 Osaka Expo. And this Osaka Expo was really the site of a very interesting collaboration between figures from a number of different fields, including architecture, of course, art, but also science fiction. And in particular the author Komatsu Sakyo was very active in the planning and even staging and even in a sense architectural design of one portion of the theme zone, being responsible for the underground exhibit in the theme zone area. So, so he collaborated, as you can see this photograph taken in 1969 with Komatsu on the left and the architect Kurokawa Kisho on the right. So, so, you know, one other thing that I think fascinates me about this era is the actual interconnections, interpersonal connections between some of these figures and and Komatsu wasn't the only person affiliated with science fiction in some way who worked on this Osaka Expo in fact there were a lot of other science fiction writers and mangaka etc, who participated, but but he's certainly the most prominent and one that I focus on the most in the book. So, just to give you an idea, this is a photograph of the site of the 1970 Osaka Expo. And you can see here the very colorful and unusually shaped pavilions kind of spread across the site. And you see the very prominence of sort of infrastructure in sense of there was a sort of monorail that connected this site to the city of Osaka. There was a also a rail that that went around the outside in the perimeter and there were these sort of moving sidewalks, which connected various pavilions. So there it was a site of a kind of futuristic infrastructure. And it was built in the press and by some of the folks who were conceptualizing the event as a kind of simulation of a city of the future. So this term meet I to see or city of the future was was one that is associated with this particular Expo. And probably the most famous landmark in the in the Osaka Expo was this tower kind of sculpture designed by famous artist Okamoto Taro. And in the original Expo, this tower actually sort of inter, sort of penetrated through the roof of the so called Festival Plaza, which was designed by Tangei Kenzo, who was probably the most famous architect of the 20th century in Japan, an important associated with many kind of state projects in Japan, and who was the sort of mentor, one of the key mentors of the architects of the metabolism group. So that Festival Plaza, the building no longer stands but but if you go to Osaka today, you can still see Okamoto Taro's Tower of the Sun and it's become a kind of beloved landmark in sort of suburban Osaka. And so yes, so to return just briefly for those of you who are not familiar with Komatsu Sakyo, the writer, he is in addition to being associated with the Osaka Expo, actually known for sort of apocalyptic science fiction and sort of disaster narratives in science fiction. And two of his most famous works just to mention, one of them is called Katsunohi or the Day of Resurrection, which is also known as virus, the Day of Resurrection or just a virus. And it's one of the earliest science fiction narratives of a kind of killer virus, a virus that's actually been manipulated by human beings, which escapes and, and wipes out civilization across the planet, except for a small group of a sort of international group of researchers who are on Antarctica and the environment of Antarctica is too cold for the virus to to replicate. So, so that they are the only human being spared. And, and so this is a very, so this is one of Komatsu's earliest works, and one which certainly is is a sort of somewhat kind of disturbing from the, from the perspective of course today of what is happening with the global pandemic today, but work that I think will probably continue to get attention in the coming years. So for Komatsu's most famous work is probably Japan Sinks, which is a novel from 1972, right after that therefore right after his period of collaboration for the Osaka Expo. And this is a work where the title kind of says it all. The idea behind the work is that the whole archipelago of Japan sinks underneath the Pacific Ocean in a giant sort of seismic cataclysm. And, and this is a very interesting work that I also discuss in the book. And it's also a turned, you know, been a very popular work in the sense of a work that has become a kind of cultural touchstone in Japan. You hear this phrase and he home team Botsu from time to time, when various bad events happen in Japan. And, and most recently there's been a new anime on Netflix, that is sort of loosely based on this story so it's a story that has definitely had legs in in Japanese culture. So let's go back to metabolism. And I just wanted to say a little bit about the metabolism movement for folks who may not be too familiar with this particular episode of architectural history. This movement was born in the year 1960, and it is a kind of outgrowth of the world design conference which was held in 1960, and a group of architects. Some of whom had been sort of mentored as I mentioned by tongue Kenzo. But they. Tang it this time was actually at MIT so another sort of mentor figure assata Takashi, sort of convened a group of young architects around the idea of sort of proposing something bold, sort of highlighting the most sort of bold and innovative ideas among young architects. And, and they put together this kind of book, which is sort of like a manifesto called metabolism, the proposals for new urbanism, and they sort of distributed it at this conference. So as I mentioned before, the idea of metabolism is to conceive and design buildings, and other urban forms not in terms of built completed or even potentially completed plans or structures, but rather as entities capable of ongoing processes of metamorphosis, just as the material of a living organism undergoes a constant process of birth growth decay and replenishment. So, obviously metabolism is kind of organic metaphor that refers to this type of potential for growth and sort of thinking texture therefore as a kind of process rather than an end point. And this type of organic metaphor was really highlighted in the book design of this book. The designer I was Kyoshi was the book designer, and you see, you see, you know, a nebula for example, being featured, or a galaxy, and you see architectural forms that resemble cells of the human body or natural cells of the organism. And then you see some of these bold architectural designs. And just to return to the Osaka Expo for a moment, Kurokawa Kisho, so the Osaka Expo really became a kind of bookend for the metabolism movement in a sense that this movement was most active in the years in 1960 through 1970. And the 1970 Expo became a real kind of showcase for metabolism and metabolism architectures, architecture and ideas. And so we see, for example, Kurokawa Kisho's Toshiba IHI pavilion, which has these sort of external structures that are sort of supporting the building from the outside. But you see this kind of replicable shape here where you have the sense of kind of almost organically this structural element could replicate itself and sort of grow almost virally from this point and sort of spread out into the environment. And this was kind of one of the ideas I think that this building really kind of shows that sort of organism and dynamism potentiality in a kind of pedagogical way, you know, as a form of architectural exposition. So today, the three themes that I'd like to talk about from the book are the idea of megastructure and also the idea of megastructures and developments over Tokyo Bay as a kind of imaginative territory. And excuse me. So yes, so this is the first of the three themes that I'll discuss. So, so a megastructure obviously kind of, you know, that the name implies just a very large building. And one of the things that I sort of highlight in the book is that this sort of imagination of large, you know, I think is, is a sort of key sort of science fiction imagination of what the city will look like in the future right that it's going to get big and and this idea of sort of giant buildings as as something of the future but but a megastructure in the sense this word actually in in some cases has been attributed to an architect Maki from Mexico who is also participated in the metabolism manifesto, although he was somewhat in a group a small group subgroup that was distinguished itself a little bit, distance itself a little bit from the main, the main group of architects, such as Kurokawa that I mentioned before. But in any case, he, he also he wrote about megastructures and his definition was a large frame in which the functions of a city or part of a city are housed. And so, so this idea of a frame, which then is distinguished between a discrete, rapidly changeable functional units, which fit within the larger framework. So this idea of changeability of units sort of within a framework is is one of the key ideas actually of metabolism as we'll see in a moment. But, but I think that this idea of also a building which is also a city, which, which contains within it the functions of a city is also sort of a key concept. And we can think, you know, in the works of science fiction outside of Japan, you know, we can, we can point to megastructures that I think fit Maki's definitions in some ways, such as Fritz Lang's new, the new tower of Babel from Fritz Lang's and Metropolis classic science fiction film, or, for example, the Tyrell Corporation headquarters from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Or, and I would say these are kind of dystopian megastructures in a lot of ways. But, but we also have actually within Japanese science fiction. The idea of a megastructure being explored in Komatsu Sakyo's novel city in the air 008, which was actually he was writing just at the point he was collaborating with the metabolists. And he basically explicitly incorporates kind of metabolist ideas and metabolists sort of megastructures within the narrative of this work. So, so here is a design, actually, the design itself precedes the metabolist manifesto but it was featured in the metabolist manifesto, and this is by the architect Kikutake Kiyonori. And here so we see a tile tower shaped community so the building itself is is is envision, you know, kind of explicitly as a self contained community that almost as if the building itself were a city. And, and this, like a number of metabolists idea sort of designs addresses some of the concerns around the environmental crisis in Japan. Around the year. So this is 1950s 1960s, but already sort of pollution and congestion in post war Japan which was rapidly urbanizing rapidly industrializing this is the high growth period in Japanese history. So, so we have these many issues of urban sprawl of of traffic of the loss of the natural environment. And, and this design was was in it was an attempt to address some of those issues, and in effect sort of gathering the inhabitants of this sprawling sort of Megapolis of Tokyo, and, and sort of consolidating them in these these giant tower communities, which would then be surrounded by open countryside and green. So it was conceived of as a way to introduce green and and to the city and, and this actually connects with Komatsu's sort of utopian work of juvenile science fiction city in the air 008, which also kind of features the name of the sort of city in this work is called out of the blue sky. And, and it features the sort of imagination of a world of the future without pollution. And, and another sort of interesting feature of this tower state community is that the living unit, you see the sort of bubbles on the surface of this tower, and those are actual units, which can be, which can be replaced after the sort of life cycle of say one generation of inhabitants, when the sort of unit wears out is actually can be retrieved into the core of this building. Well there's a kind of giant furnace, and the sort of metal metal unit is melted down and sort of recycled and then returned to the tower. So the towers kind of constantly replenishing itself, like a natural organism. And Kikutake around the same time also. So, I'm sorry, this is just a slide, I'm showing this notion of sort of interchangeability or sort of removability move ability of these living units. And, and so, and Kikutake also at the same time was working on sort of designs of future cities and that actually floated over the water. And this was another of the themes that was quite prominent in his work. And so talking about sort of cities over the water. This is another sort of area of imagination of the metabolism architects, and, and probably the most one of the signature works. And speaking of metabolism, loosely to connect its mentor, Tongue Kenzo is the model of sort of that that Tongue proposed for the development of Tokyo, which actually in his writing about this work really incorporated a lot of the sort of organic metaphors that I think was used by his younger peers in the metabolism movement. And, and this was an idea of a kind of mega structure, which would be placed over Tokyo Bay as a way for the city to expand again sort of dealing with this kind of population pressure that was threatening the way of life of Tokyo at this time. So so Tongue proposed moving over the bay, but not through traditional sort of infill development but actually by building this kind of mega structure, which would be the sort of lattice work of roads, and then tent like structures, which were themselves sort of artificial ground in which individual homes could be built inside of these kind of giant tents. I say tent just because the building looks like a tent by these sort of giant structures. And, and so this was a proposal that was actually presented in a great deal of detail it was presented. I believe the year 1960 on the New Year show on NHK. So it was presented to the Japanese public with a lot of fanfare. And it was a plan with a lot of, as I say a lot of detail that that attracted a lot of attention worldwide from other architects. And, and was quite controversial of course it was, it was never implemented, but, but I argue in the book that that Tokyo Bay itself. In many both the sort of architectural works and science fiction works becomes the sort of locus of a, of a sort of imaginative territory of expansion, in a sense, analogous to the way in which in American science fiction outer space becomes a kind of imaginative canvas for you know ideas and criticisms about American expansionism and American sort of manifest destiny. So, so, so I think this is very interesting and I don't have necessarily a ready made answer for for why Tokyo Bay has become such an imaginative fixation. I do have a few, a few hypotheses that I presented in the book. So, the second thing that I wanted to highlight is the theme of a capsules and the idea of cyborg architecture. So, among the works that are associated with metabolism that actually got built. And actually, at least for now still survive on the most famous of these is the work called Nakagin capsule building, which is in Tokyo. And, and still exists today but this was a building that was built. It was sort of rapidly constructed from these prefabricated units, which had actually been fabricated in a facility designed to make shipping containers. And these units were then sort of plugged into in a sense this framework. So this idea sort of framework, and, and sort of removable addable units. So the idea, even though, in fact, the building was not terribly modified or did not really grow or shrink over the years. The reason behind the building was that it was sort of infinitely permeable in this infinitely permutations of the building could be imagined. So these units could be linked up to to make a larger housing suite, or, you know, more units could be added on or units could be removed and replaced when they got old. So so this was a sort of showcase of this idea. And Kurokawa in particular promoted this idea of the capsule as an architectural form. And when we look at the Osaka Expo, we see capsules all over the place really very much featured, for example, in the roof of the theme zone, or in Kikutakes Expo Tower, these kind of polyhedron location units which are connected to a central tower, or a Kurokawa's own work, Takara Butylian, which I think is one of the most elegant of these structures on the sort of lattice work, which you can see has a potential for kind of expansion, and then these capsules which fit into the lattice work. And the whole notion of capsules was really highlighted in the Osaka Expo. So, for example, you see here next to the Takara Butylian, a kind of architectural extension of this space where these sort of towers which look very much like to my eye, like astronaut suits. So the idea sort of connecting the capsule with the sort of capsule of a space of a rocket, for example, of course this is the era of the space race and the Apollo missions. Or the idea of a space suit itself being a kind of wrapping, you know, around the human being, which is almost like a kind of architecture, a kind of capsule. And we also have, you know, within the sort of display space of the Expo, things which are sort of drawing the connection between the kind of capsule form and the human womb and embryo as, again, the sort of organic metaphor of a capsule. So, sort of looking at various kind of definitions among folks affiliated with the, with the Metabolus movement of this idea of capsules, you know, some things that really stand out to me are this idea of kind of enclosure, and this idea that the human being needs to be kind of protected in a sense that this enclosure is something which maintains a kind of homostasis that is a sort of equilibrium within which is sort of interacting with the environment, but at the same time protecting the inhabitant from the environment. And this is a sort of concept from cybernetics, which, and we see that sort of cybernetic vocabulary very much influencing this conception of capsule as it was introduced at the Osaka World's Fair, for example. So we see, and Kurokawa himself called the capsule cyborg architecture. And he talks about the capsule as a node in an information network, a point from which to filter information from outside, and even sort of barter what he called creative information from the inhabitant. So this is a kind of point in a network, right? And another interesting thing about the conception of capsules at the time is the emphasis on mobility. The idea that, you know, as we said in the Nakagin capsule tower, the capsule could be removed, or, you know, that the frame itself could change shape. And so this is a sort of metaphor for an architecture which is sort of transforming and in a sense a mobile, but there was an imagination that the capsule could become even more mobile. And then perhaps it could free itself from that frame. And then Kurokawa imagined the sort of docking, what he calls a docking of multiple capsules and kind of flexible social aggregations as a kind of new conception of architecture for the future. And Kurokawa also emphasized sort of customization that these capsules could be mass produced, but in a sense they could be sort of customized by their inhabitants. And one thing that I, again, this is my own sort of interpretation that I think is in a sense sort of a speculative that is not within sort of mainstream literature of capsules, but personally sort of looking at science fiction and capsule design from this time. I'm really intrigued by this relationship between the fact that the Nakagin capsule tower was created in 1972 and this is the same year as the first piloted robot series Manzinger Zed from 1972. And those of you who are familiar with Japanese popular culture and science fiction know that this sort of piloted robot has become a very sort of signature element of many anime and Japanese science fiction. And in fact, a kind of predecessor from this existed at the 1970 Osaka Expo, designed by Tangei's former students, Isozaki Arata, as a kind of piloted performance assistant in the festival plaza. But in any case, I think that this idea of a cyborg and the capsule as a sort of cyborg architecture is a sort of interesting connection with this and this sort of emphasis of mobility and architecture. Interesting connection to the emergence of the sort of mecca or the piloted robot form. Okay. And the last of these themes that I wanted to mention is the idea of apocalypse. And, and I mentioned before Komatsu Sakyo's two big narratives virus and Japan sinks as beings, you know, large scale sort of apocalyptic narratives. And what we also see within the, the, the, the metabolism architects and their writings, and, and folks who are sort of connected loosely with metabolism such as Isozaki Arata, who was an architect, a disciple of Tangei, did not participate in the 1960 Metabolist Manifesto and maintained some kind of critical distance from the group, but nevertheless was an important kind of interlocutor of the group. And, and he in particular focused on this sort of idea of ruins and ruins not only as, as a sort of memory in a sense a cultural memory of Japanese cities that had only 15 years earlier been destroyed, you know, in many cases level to the ground like fire bombs, or in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs, but also sort of ruins as a kind of future potential for the Japanese city, as part of a kind of cyclical apocalyptic imagination. So, going back to the Metabolist Manifesto, we have Kawazoe, Zoe writing. We hope to create something which even in destruction will cause a subsequent new creation. And then we have Isozaki, as I mentioned, returning to this idea of the ruin. This is an early example where he actually combines his own sort of utopian mega structure design of a city in the air Shinjuku with these forms of kind of classical ruins in his kind of imaginative work. And another sort of somewhat later a version of this is a photo montage that he exhibited in Milan. That show that was entitled Hiroshima ruined again in the future and we see these kind of mega structures on the horizon that are like ruins of mega structures. And Isozaki writes incubated cities are designed to self destruct ruins are the style of our future cities future cities are themselves ruins for our contemporary cities for this reason. We are destined to live only a fleeting moment. Without their energy and return to inert material, all of our proposals and efforts will be buried. And once again, the incubation mechanism is reconstituted. That will be the future. The future city as ruined and the ruin as the destiny of the future city but itself then becoming an incubation bed. I think a really interesting idea, and one that is very resonant I think in in an interesting to think about in terms of both architecture and fiction. So, Isozaki and sort of pointing out his sort of distance from the metabolists says, I was in agreement with the most of what they said but I could not see I on one cardinal point, drawing a direct analogy between organic metabolism and architectural transition for rather than being systemic changes dramatic and destructive lying outside the bounds of human control. It is the result of complicated accumulations of overlapping unforeseeable coincidences. In the second chapter of my book I discussed this concept of ruins and particularly the resonances that this work has with the kind of apocalyptic science fiction and writing of Komatsu sake, who I mentioned before the author of virus, the author of Japan sinks and the another work called the Japan Apache tribe, which even more sort of thematizes ruins and sort of constructive but sort of crazy apocalyptic constructive energy of ruins. And Komatsu also kind of wrote about extensively about the importance of sort of witnessing eye witnessing sort of Japanese cities, ruined and flattened and society in a sense brought to a zero point after, you know, at the end of World War two, as a kind of formative experience. And this is something that kind of connects Komatsu and Isozaki. And so I don't have time to talk in detail about that but but this is one of the ideas that I explore. So I'm going to skip a little bit about Komatsu and and just at the end here and just talk a little bit about how some of these themes. I also see sort of echoing. So Komatsu's work that I've described. A lot of it really comes from the same period of the metabolist movements and Komatsu himself, as we saw was a collaborator with the commitments of the metabolist architects. But I see other science fiction creators, particularly the the filmmakers, the anime artists, Otomo Katsuhiro, famous for the work Akira, and Osi Mamoru famous for Ghost in the Shell but also for pet labor. So I see these as artists of a slightly later generation but who still sort of reflect in some cases criticize some of the themes of metabolism. So with regard to Akira, those of you who are familiar with the anime, it's hard to forget the opening scene. We see a sort of bird's eye view of Tokyo. We see the actual year of the release of the film sort of being given as the date of this of the of the scene starting and then we see on the horizon, this giant fireball sort of engulfing the city of Tokyo and this has become sort of in a sense, a supernova that unleash the sort of energy of anime onto the world. And this has become such an iconic scene in animation history. But I'm sort of interested in this sort of a narrative logically as as the fact that this is the beginning. It's not the end of Akira, but this is the beginning. And the rest of the film sort of describes the sort of life on the sort of the ruins of the old Tokyo, as well as the Tokyo that has been rebuilt. And the series actually takes place in the film version, it takes place in 2019. And Tokyo, as you may recall, has been rebuilt as Neo Tokyo. And again, the sort of imagination of Tokyo, future of Tokyo being Tokyo Bay. So we see here Neo Tokyo is really built across Tokyo Bay as a new city. And then we see sort of the ruins of the older city also playing a role in the film and in the manga, which was a work that sort of comic strip that was also sort of drew sort of at the same time or slightly before but also while he was making the film, anime film Akira. So this is one thing I think very interesting. And not only do we see the sort of ruins come into play but the potential that this apocalypse itself can reoccur at any moment. In the manga version, it reoccurs, there's a second apocalypse that occurs sort of midway through the narrative. So this idea that apocalypse is it's itself kind of a cycle. And one of the things that intrigues me about Akira, both the film and the manga is that it is, to my, in my opinion, it's, it sort of conceptualizes Japanese history as a kind of cycle. Right. And kind of apocalyptic cycle. But we also see sort of many sort of historical elements. So we see, you know, in addition to this kind of echo that we have of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that fireball that we see it in the opening scene. We also see echoes of student protests from the 1960s millennial movements from the end of the 19th century. Revolutionary movements from the 1930s of the 1960s. There's an effectual civil civilian government and an activist military that is resilient of the militarist period leading into World War Two. And also the today of the 1980s of Japan, you know, in the form of this sort of delinquent youth biker culture. So, so all these kind of historical elements are kind of mixed together. Sam, for example, the film scholar Isolde Standish has have referred to this as a kind of postmodernist view of history, in which history is a kind of flattening out all these historical things are kind of jumbled up together in a pastiche. And, and this is a kind of postmodern flattening of history. But I would like to argue that this is actually a kind of cyclical view of history in which we are sort of destined to kind of repeat the same history in this kind of secular fashion. Making nowhere more so does it is this evident in the fact the film's kind of invocation of the Tokyo Olympics and the idea of a kind of Olympic time as secular time. And, and you may recall that this film from 1988, kind of weirdly sort of predicted the scheduling of the next Tokyo Olympics for 2020. And at the same time all of these apocalyptic events are happening around the Olympics. So it's unclear whether the Olympics are actually going to be able to be held because we have the sort of warfare between sort of telekinetic children who are with their sort of mental powers, capable perhaps of destroying the entire city of Tokyo again so it might not be such a great time for an Olympics. And we see in the film, something which had became the sort of viral last year as as Tokyo was wavering over whether to host the Olympics last summer in the midst of the coronavirus. And, and this sort of one frame of Akira from from Akira showed the fictional like 2020 Olympics and the graffiti on the on the bottom right there says to see that to see, or just cancel it. And this became a kind of rallying cry among some on the internet like just cancel it so. So we'll see what happens with the now postponed Olympics. But, but we see the sort of certainly a kind of weird prophetic power of this particular work. The other series that I would like to mention just as we're coming to the conclusion here is is the pad labor series by OSHI. And here again we see the imagination of a sort of expansion over Tokyo Bay, the theme one of the main themes of the series is the so called project Babylon, in which the entire sort of Bay of Tokyo is going to be sort of overwhelmed and controlled by a series of sluices, and, and the the sort of water level will be decreased, and Tokyo Bay will be capable of this giant expansion, doubling of the of the of the square mileage of the city and and you know, you know, older buildings we see throughout this work are being torn down, and they're torn down by this, these piloted robots, which in this series are called labors. So we see this sort of imagination of the future and which is going to new form of combination of human and machine is in itself a sort of element, sort of architectural protagonist right, a sort of creator of and destroyer of and, and the, the title, however, the pat labor derives from another type of labor, so called labor piloted robots, which are patrol labors there there there are police labors, because many of these labors are sort of prone to glitches and hijacking and and, and other sort of cyber attacks and so so there's a police force of pat labors which also tries to keep these rogue elements in in rain. And, and nevertheless we see in the film the sort of discourse of the sort of new Tokyo that's being constructed versus the sort of ruins of an of an older Tokyo the rubble that's sort of left in its wake. And, and I would argue that this film actually represents a departure from the sort of generative sort of almost positive apocalyptic but yet energetic potential of ruins that we saw. I think both in Akira and also in the works of such as the Japan Apache tribe by Komatsu Sakyo. And, and so I see in an OSHI we see a kind of requiem in a sense for the older neighbors of Tokyo, which are going to be destroyed by the pat labors, and by this giant project Babylon, and I see this as a kind of critique in a sense of the sort of sometimes referred to as the construction state on this idea that you know these large scale state projects, as well, which are sort of transforming Japan throughout post war history, but also a critique of sort of architectural practices, known as scrap and old, in which, you know, older buildings are sort of heartlessly, you know, obviously that's a editorialization but are sort of ripped down to to create new buildings and, and we can see other critics from around the same time or other artists, so articulating similar kind of critiques of what was happening to the Japanese city in the 1980s in terms of, in a sense, the metabolism of the city sort of revving up again, and the changing in this of the city was growing and in scale so so another artist, a photographer, Miyamoto Ryuji, who who wrote about ruins and took photograph of ruins at this time, writes, this kind of change occurred at the time of the Tokyo Olympics, 1964 but it would seem that the process was accelerated in the 1980s. The harbor was completely occupied, the highways ran above ground, the newly developed city center bristled with skyscrapers. At the same time, old buildings with extensions and many different facades, a large number of brick buildings down town, erected at the beginning of the Shoah period, and the sheet copper-sided homes and apartment buildings were all torn up by their roots. Everywhere the streets were different, made new, everything was subordinated to efficiency and perverted into a colorless space. Inconvenient old buildings were replaced with astounding speed. There was no time for them even to fall into decay. Ruins were not left around for very long. So I think we see, you know, in Miyamoto's work and Oshi's work in works also by Fuji Mori Teru Nobu and Akase Gawa Genpei, who are affiliated with a group called the Street Observation Studies Group, a kind of discourse, a kind of discursive network of ruins, an elegiac discourse of ruins, which I think is in contrast to the earlier generative view of ruins that we saw kind of proposed by the the metabolist movement. And here we even see what looks like, in a sense, a quote, those of you who are familiar with Akase Gawa, Genpei's work, in particular, his photographs, which he called Thomason's, of sort of vestiges, strange vestiges of old buildings left in the kind of ruins of transforming Tokyo. We see a kind of echo of that even in Oshi's work, Pat Labor. So, let's see, we're definitely running short on time here. The other thing which I guess I could address more in the question and answers is, it's interesting in Pat Labor too. We have a focus on actually on the cyborg side of things and we see a focus on the Pat Labor, these sort of mobile police or piloted robots as a kind of nodes in an information network, which is kind of constructing a hyper reality in which you can't tell the difference between news and not news or war and simulated warfare. And so we see a kind of media critique of a kind of hyper reality in the second film in the Pat Labor series, which I think addresses some of the issues, you know, which were proposed in a more utopian fashion by Kuro Kawa and his capsule declaration. I think we see, again, a more kind of critical view of these, in a sense, in Oshi's work. So I think that I'm going to stop there because I want to leave some time for questions and answers. And there's much more I could have said but hopefully we can get to a few things in the discussion. So I'm going to stop my slides and hopefully Helen can come back up. Yeah. Thanks Will. Thanks. That was great. That was a really fantastic visual start to our 2021 year and I was someone who's lived in Osaka twice and thinks of Osaka as her Japanese hometown and has walked past that 1970 Expo tower a lot. It was really lovely to see it particularly as we can't all travel to Japan at the moment. It's also somewhat disturbing to see the mention of the virus movie and and the mention or the prediction of Tokyo 2020 being canceled and and sort of feel sitting here in 2021 that we might be descending into some kind of science fiction world. Anyway, hopefully we'll come out the other side, but I just personally wanted to ask one question before I start to look at the chat and just to remind it everybody can you put. Can you please type all your questions into the Q&A function which is at the bottom of your screens I can see some questions are coming in now so I'll get to those in a minute. I looked at the Tokyo 1964 Olympics myself from the perspective of sports history and social history but not from perspective of architecture but I do know that Tunga designed the Yoyogi National Gymnasium for the Olympics and so he did talk about the Olympics a little bit at the end but can you talk us through whether there was any interaction and influence between the fact that you know there was a lot of investment in architecture for the staging of the Olympics. And I think that the metabolism movement you're talking about had any influence on that architecture or not. Sure, yeah. That's a great question and I think definitely there are all sorts of historical connections here, a Tonga himself being being one of them. But I think, you know, again, I had to sort of cut a lot of corners in the talk but one of the things that sort of key background information is the sense that Tokyo was a city and the Japanese archipelago as a whole were being rapidly transformed during this period. So this is a period of sort of great infrastructure projects, highways being built, you know, mountains being moved, rivers being downed. But also, you know, the construction of the Shinkansen, you know, which opened as you know, you know, in tandem with the Tokyo Olympics, the construction of the Haneda Airports and the Monorail for that. And also the construction of the sort of highway elevated highway system which really, which really for better and for worse transformed the city of Tokyo greatly. So this, it was an, I think it was a moment, you know, and of course Tonga and designing the Yoyogi Stadium participated in this in a very prominent way. And it was a reclamation of the city also the Yoyogi National Stadium was built on the site of one of the housing facilities for the Allied occupation and and and sort of an American village that was kind of torn down, you know, in time for the Olympics it was a kind of handover moment in a sense. But also a sense in which, you know, that there was a potential to kind of reimagine and recreate Japanese cities which had emerged sort of in the early post-war era just kind of pell-mell, you know, from the ruins of the firebombs. And with with not a whole lot of sort of centralized planning. So, so the metabolism, I think, emerged at a time when there was, when there was a call for sort of greater thought about the planning process. In a sense the protagonists sort of propose themselves as participants in this sort of let's go back to square one and kind of reimagine how we think about change and growth in cities and what are the potentials of our city. And so they propose themselves to sort of take place part in that sort of recreation of Japan to sort of make success of course like Tange being such a prominent architect was involved, you know, quite extensively in various projects. And so Tange became involved in a number of think tanks that had sort of semi-government, you know, connections, but their big sort of utopian designs were never really realized. And instead we have the sort of, you know, in a sense the construction state, you know, continuing to work and continuing to involve sort of more, you know, street level sort of contractors, you know, in a very sort of, you know, kind of straightforward sort of developmental economics and a system. And so, so that that's the sort of, you know, kind of construction state system that I think oh she is criticizing the metabolism a sense offered an alternative alternative version of that, you know, one which was still very large scale, and still to a large degree top even though they imagined the potential for sort of change and adaptation within it rather than saying everything has to be designed by by a single sort of master planner. Right. So, yeah, and then of course the 1970 Osaka expose a sort of bookend for the Olympics. And this idea that that we will bring the same sort of state redevelopment dollars, you know, to the Osaka region, create new infrastructure, clean up things. It's and promote Osaka in the same way that Tokyo was promoted in the Olympics, and we have obviously the echo of that in the fact that there is an Osaka new Osaka Expo being planned to to sort of follow the the supposed Tokyo Olympics that are happening have been rescheduled for the summer. Yeah. Great. Well, we'll have to see how that all pans out. I mean, right, I'm going to go into the Q&A function so we have a question here from Raymond Sweetman of UCL. Yes, or he asked was any consideration given to the detritus of these visions, so building rubble, etc. sewage waste disposal, and in terms of regeneration where they envisaged as infinite or finite models of architecture. Well, I think certainly sort of conceptually sort of detritus, you know, certainly in the works of Isozaki this idea of ruins, as being you know the city will sort of inevitably produce its own ruins and its own detritus as part of his conception. And I think that implicitly the sort of organic metaphor of metabolism sort of invokes this idea of cells that are both sort of in taking new material and expelling sort of waste as part of their cycle of growth and generation and and living. In terms of the actual planning of the cities and the buildings that were proposed. I don't think I don't see a lot of emphasis on this question of rather than I could say that that's Kikutake's conception that I showed of the tower shaped community in a sense sort of was trying to deal with the fact that well the living units in an apartment building you know will will eventually decay. And so trying to build in that cycle of actually melting those down and replenishing them as a kind of form of recycling, trying to build that into the building design. But I think on a sort of street level version of like questions of sort of waste and pollution. Certainly one of the criticisms was that was leveled against metabolism was that even though it had this sort of idealistic vision of itself as in a sense responding to an environmental crisis. And in fact, it was just a kind of version of scrap and build this idea that that's, you know, that's imagining architecture as something which will be kind of thrown away and redone, and which will generate waste, and be a waste tool in the sense in the sense that that we might, you know, criticize. So I think that that that that was a charge against the sort of metabolism conception that even though it had a kind of idealistic environmental list side to it. In a sense it was complicit with this kind of construction state, and this kind of scrap and build mentality. Okay, great. Well, we have a couple of questions here which probably can be linked together one from Patrick who asks what other architectural movements were occurring alongside the metabolists. What ways did they, you know, contrast with them and one from Nikolai I think, which could go along with that. What contemporary developments can be traced back to those metabolist ideas or projects, you know, did it inspire other movements in Japan or outside Japan. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's important not to just see Japan in a bubble right and particularly architecture is a very international field and all of these architects were very much in constant communication with their peers in other countries, and we see sort of similar movements in other countries and similar kind of utopian move, you know, moment around 1960 where on the one hand, sort of centralized central planning is being criticized in a number of quarters. So the idea of sort of international sort of Congress of architecture, you know, sort of these great sort of city planners and sort of imagining sort of cities as a sort of perfect checkerboards and this sort of idea of of city planning as a kind of rational thing where you will distribute, you know, various features of a city and various neighborhoods, functions of a city, sort of this kind of functionalism. And, and that is, that is something that was happy so that kind of criticism of that that type of centralized planning was happening and so architects were beginning to sort of imagine similar versions of just building a framework and allowing, you know, allowing things to happen more spontaneously around it. So in the United Kingdom, Archigram was a group of architects, you know, who were exploring some of these ideas. You know, Friedman in France, there were many architects sort of around the world who were kind of exploring similar ideas. And at the same time, also, another aspect of this which I didn't talk so much today about in my talk today was this idea of imagining architecture also as being a kind of simulation and kind of open to that architecture, through information technology was becoming more flexible. You know, so thinking of organic growth as something that's that that is not only sort of within building materials but also the sort of organ, organicism of information technology as information has been something fluid. Right. And so the information technology transforming the city into something which is liquid and fluid and sort of this imagination of the sort of the city of the future as being one transformed by by information technology. So that is something that I think, you know, that is something he wrote about quite a bit in very interesting ways. And, and I have a chapter where I talk about sort of connections between science fiction and and architecture in terms of their imagination of this sort of site cybernetic cities or sort of liquid cities. And, and that is something I think you know in terms of the policy of metabolism, right. So the idea of this sort of like frames and capsules has not really taken off. Globally, I think we can say, as an architectural idiom, but, but the idea of sort of imagining cities in flux and planning for cities in flux kind of through simulation and through information technology and the ideas of in fact making cities more organic, more flexible, and even incorporating organic material into building material for example, these are ideas that which are still very being explored by architects today. And so I think that there is is still a dialogue that's going on with metabolism with respect to organism and information technology, even if, even if in some ways that the things like the McGee and capsule tower are seen, you know, as kind of historical curiosity, but, but not necessarily something which led to a new way of building on a large scale. Thanks, I think you've sort of started to answer quite, we've got quite a few questions coming in asking about this legacy of metabolism, and you know how it can be reinterpreted today and in particular, one question. So quite a few questions along those lines. And one question from Stefan here who has read your article narratives of collapse in generation. He says you're quite critical of the techno utopian depiction of the ideas of the metabolists in that but at the same time, you know, you're capturing that in your book. So, he's saying in the same way that all science fiction is not only to stop it but sometimes offers a glimmer of hope. So where do you what what ideas of the metabolism movement do you think are worth holding on to after 60 years. So again that sort of hinting at the legacy or I don't know if you want to say more about that kind of legacy or right I mean I think you know I guess I tried to explore in the book I mean I do think that's another another aspect that I discuss. Again I didn't have time so much today but within those apocalyptic narratives, we see some of the first sort of globally some of the first sort of narratives that are addressing climate change. So I believe from even 1962 there was a one of the metabolist critics Kawazoe wrote about wrote a sort of narrative of sort of architectural future where he imagined Tokyo eventually being subsumed by the Pacific Ocean due to climate change and anthropogenic climate change so so and and that was anthropogenic climate change was another big theme of Komatsu Sakyo, although it's sort of buried in his fictional works. But, but I do think that that's so sort of attention, you know, sort of whole way of thinking about architecture and cities as a narrative process where we can think about our sort of feedback loops in a sense with the natural world and the potential for disasters and the way in which we may be able to rebound from disasters. So I do see, you know, on the one hand, there's a lot to be worried about in terms of the future, which which these works point out but I do see, you know, in that very sort of engagement with the imagination of the future and sort of, you know, addressing some of these serious questions. I do see a positive potential and you know both the architecture and science fiction works. A question here from Jakob asking, would you like to give us a hypothesis regarding the prominence of Tokyo Bay in imagining the future. I mean, again, the Olympics 2020 plays into this perhaps that. Right, yes. Yeah, Olympics 2020 or definitely Tokyo Bay is very much featured. Tokyo Bay has always been sort of the site of the future in some way right and if we think of Odaiba, those of you who are familiar with Tokyo that Odaiba has this kind of futuristic quality to to the sort of self presentation of the city. And it's the the home of the some museum of future technology. It's the Fuji television headquarters designed by Tonga kind of echo a kind of metabolism and megastructure building. So we see, we see the Tokyo Bay as a kind of stage for the future. One, one hypothesis that I do develop, you know, do discuss in the in the book is, is the idea that we can see. If we look at science fiction in Japan, the sort of pre war years a kind of proto science fiction we see the Pacific as a sort of expansion, like the Pacific as the sort of arena of Japanese imperial expansion. Right, so this is the era of imperialism and the idea and and sort of promotion of Japanese sort of technological spirit across the Pacific. So, in the form, you know, of, of, of, you know, Japanese warships, you know, on the one hand but but you know we can, we can see that the, the, that the sort of expansion over the ocean as being a sort of an imaginative territory of Japanese imperialism, which sort of cuts shorts or, you know, has to be reimagined in the post war era in which Japan has lost its empire and has has renounced militarism. It's still, and so I see, in a sense, Tokyo Bay as a kind of replacement for this kind of trans specific imaginary sort of imperialist vision of expansion. And perhaps that is that is one hypothesis that you could, you could explore. But, but if, if folks who are participating in this have other ideas, I would certainly love to hear them. I have a question here about whether you could comment a bit more about how the architects and the authors that you mentioned envisage the reciprocal relationship between the inhabitants of the city and their designs whether real or fictional. And I asked was asking a question which might tie into that about the buildings that you mentioned that are still around today, what are they used for and are they, are they, is that sort of what they were designed or envisaged for or not. I think that's a really interesting question, you know, and one thing that I see a little bit in, you know, it's in a lot of the writings of architects, there's not a whole lot of space given for sort of imagining the individual and the individual's life so much as sort of we talk about sort of future kind of conditions of the individual and subjectivity of the individual but sort of imagining what actual life in such a building, you know, would be like, and what, you know, what happens when like actual individual life is messy right and and people's interactions with buildings and cities are not necessarily so utopian right when we get to the level of sort of nitty gritty everyday life. And, and I do feel like there is a little bit of a lacuna, you know, in a sense of a lot of these works don't sort of imagine that a granular level of interaction until really, I think, again, we can look at a work like oh she's Pat labor, you know, and, and a sense at least of, of, you know, in the first Pat labor film, you know, the antagonist of the film is someone who is who has moved, you know, from from place to place in these old city build older city buildings that are being torn down by by this giant construction project. And, and he becomes sort of embittered towards the project battle Babylon and tries to sabotage it. And the so called heroes of this of this work are the police me sort of manning these past futuristic pat labors, who have to sort of tame this threats but there's a great deal of sort of sympathy being you know expressed in the film to the sort of subjectivity of this person who is being sort of this constantly displaced by this process of architectural transformation. And I think that's that's that's one place we can see the more sort of individual level on a kind of critical level being addressed in the works. And there was a second part to your question which I think I've, I've, I just, it was just to do with the buildings that are still that were built and still. It's quite interesting. So, so the knock again tower for example is quite interesting case and in the sense that it has, it has largely deteriorated, and it has not been particularly kept kept with care over the years. And it's, it's a space in which artists and young people have sort of inhabited and transformed. And so you can find there are books and documentaries out there that sort of explore the insides, you know, of the tower and how people have turned those spaces into their own, and how, and we see, you know, both of the sort of deterioration of that architectural space but the way in which it's been kind of appropriated by its users. Again, and, and so that's something I think very interesting to to observe and, and there are sort of books out there, where you can, you can explore that. At the same time, there's been quite a bit of controversy over whether this building will be saved will it be somehow restored. Will it be torn down. So, so the fate of that, that particular building has been much discussed in the last 10 years or so. Well, that kind of leads nicely into the next themes that are emerging so there's a few questions here talking about the fact that destruction and rebirth seems to be quite a prevalent theme and linking it to religion and natural disasters so Liam for example asks for example at a religious level that he says shrine is rebuilt every to 20 years sorry. But it'd be possible to say that the concept of inevitable architectural ruin and then rebirth is something organic is rooted in Japanese history religion and perhaps the constant reality of natural disaster as well. Yes, excuse me, yes. Absolutely. I mean, I appreciate that question I think that the question itself makes a couple of points which I think are very necessary and pertinent in that I think that certainly the conceptual background of metabolism. And the architects were very aware of the precedent, for example, of the essay shrine, even though they may not have wanted to highlight that for sort of questions because of the controversy of, of, of essay shrine and other buildings as representatives of a problematic sort of historic and cultural tradition and sort of nationalist ideas and architecture. So, I think that that the metabolists were very much aware of the sort of precedent and for example Kiku take one of the architects that I mentioned in my talk. He himself was was trained in a more traditional Japanese architecture, you know, in which structural components are sort of standardized, such as tatami mats, or shoji doors, and can't and have a kind of replacement cycle, right so that that that a Japanese a traditional building has a kind of framework in terms of the frame of the building, and the components which, which have a replacement cycle, which is not the same as the building so, in a sense they are metabolists right they, they are sort of, you know, before the fact metabolism and, and so metabolism in a sense I think was trying to move movement was trying to connect to the Japanese architectural tradition and also to the conditions of Japan as being a country struck by natural disasters frequently, frequently destroyed and rebuilt. So it's sort of, I think, addressing that historical condition and that's historical that the tradition of Japanese architecture, but trying to imagine reimagine it on a conceptual level rather than quoting, you know, architectural, you know, rather than using architecture history by quotation, in terms of the style of the buildings, sort of using that sort of conceptual elements of Japanese architectural practice as as an inspiration for their architecture. And then you can also get to Kurokawa, for example, writes about metabolism as a kind of Buddhist practice, right, so this idea of impermanence, right, so he explicitly and in some of his writings, you know, does sort of connected with that religious and aesthetic tradition of Buddhism of impermanence of a cyclical conception of time. So, so certainly the the metabolism cells were aware of those connections with the cultural past, but at the same time, they sort of I think they tried to highlight their, their kind of future futurism, right, not not present themselves as traditionalists, but but sort of inspired on the conceptual level by by some of those practices. And Joanna wants to know if you've seen the book anime architecture. Yeah, I will certainly check that out. Thank you. And there's a question here about from James I think about transportation so architecture has to cope with forms of transport future transport. So are these futuristic projects adapted well to, you know, you know, in terms of what are the links and images of transportation. Yeah, that's an interesting question. And certainly, I think, in terms of the metabolism architect, or actually metabolism was a group which incorporated, you know, both architects and designers. So, I, if you look at the 1970 Osaka Expo certainly sort of the transportation infrastructure was very much part of the conception of that space, right, and, and it was a kind of of tongue, for example, imagined the, the sort of movement of people, you know, around the, the site of the Osaka Expo was anticipated and in fact did have a record number of visitors. And, and so the ability to sort of move people around that site was something that had to be incorporated both on the level of of the transportation infrastructure, which was designed to do in terms of its stylistic components by another metabolism echo on Kenji a designer. But, but sort of conceptually, this, and again this is this is starting to talk about the the conception of the future city as a cybernetic city. Right, so the ability to sort of take in information about the number of visitors and where they needed to go. And to plan the sort of information infrastructure and the transportation infrastructure together, right, and to make this a city which would be adaptive to crowds and the movement of crowds and flexible to that. This is part of the conception of the 1970 Expo. So I think you know if we talk and, and certainly things like the 1960 plan for Tokyo proposed by tanga Kenzo, you saw the picture of him standing in front of that, that big map of Tokyo. That is, it is another example where this sort of transportation infrastructure is really part of the architectural conception. And so, again, we have a connection here between transportation and information, and, and sort of the ability to change and adopt in kind of feedback loops which is, which is is informing the the conceptions of both the Tokyo Bay proposal and and especially the Osaka Expo. Yes, we have an interesting question here from Hester. He says the high rises of science fiction classics like metropolis are often interpreted as critiques of class division. Did the metabolists imagine their architecture spaces to create a more equal society, for example, or was this not part of the Japanese discussions asking about class. Yeah, that's really interesting. Today we see that's absolutely that that that class critique in metropolis and other other science fiction works. I would say one interesting place to look for this is Kurokawa's writing about the capsule form Kurokawa himself had a sort of again, almost utopian conception of architecture and sort of society transforming in tandem. And he talked about the capsule form as a kind of liberation in the sense of the individual. So he saw that the individual would inhabit a capsule, and, and then would have would have the prerogative to sort of dock with other individuals to create families or not. And so he explicitly in some of his writing, sort of offers this as an alternative to the kind of patriarchal construction of Japanese society. And so I do, I do think that that there is a sort of social utopian elements to to Kurokawa's writing. At the same time, I think that there is often a neglect of class issues and neglect of gender issues that we see in metabolism writing and in a lot of science fiction writing from that same time period. So I think that there are a lot of blind spots in in the work as well. But, and I think, you know, for example, in the work of Komatsusaku, these sort of disaster narratives often often kind of rely in a sense for their ray of hope in the kind of resilience of very kind of patriarchal structures of sort of heroic scientists and and wise leaders who can somehow who were almost always male who who can somehow lead the the community or the nation through the the trials of whatever disaster is being featured. And so I think that kind of links to a question from Fabio my so as colleague who says that he thoughts about the capsule as architectural reform, sorry form, reminded him that Walter Benjamin described the 19th century material as being like a velvet lined box in which the bourgeois owner rested a compass or another valuable instrument. So, can we take that idea, the metabolism imagination of the capsule a bit further as, and is it an extension of the body your clothing that cannot become a protective shell he's asking I guess it kind of is different to the class. Right. Yes, absolutely. I think that this, and perhaps I wasn't able to convey this as well as I might have in the talk but I think one of the one of the most interesting features of the capsule form is this idea of it as a kind of wrapping or clothing or protection. That's, you know that that sort of then begs the question what what what you know a house is also kind of a shelter right. So why do we need a capsule, like why do we need that harder exterior in a sense which, which has a cybernetic link to the outside world but but is in a sense a more kind of protective shell. And I think that again that sort of connects with this sort of anxieties of this time period with the Cold War with with the increasing sort of attention to pollution and noise pollution in urban experience. And so, so the need to to not only have a sort of velvet lined box, which I love that that quote but but something which is a little bit more solid in a sense to to protect the individual. And then we see later sort of versions of the Metabolus capsule that I also discuss in the book, which, for example, the works of a kind of second generation architect Ito Toyo, who was trained with Kiku Takei, I believe. And so he was very well versed in metabolism, metabolism architecture, but he tried to imagine architecture with kind of softer edges, and he talks about architecture as a kind of clothing. So, and architecture as a membrane, which is also a membrane, an informational membrane and a membrane connecting us to this sort of information of the outside informational sort of environment of the outside world. So we have the kind of continuation of that sort of cybernetic conception, but with more sort of an imagination of more sort of soft edges in, in Ito Toyo's work who is a kind of second generation architect sort of influenced by metabolism. I'm conscious of the time so I'm just going to choose a couple more questions. There's a question have a comment here from Gala, who says the 1960s were the years when more skyscrapers began to be built because the, the, the legislate or the rules on height were lifted. So to what extent do you think that the fascination with height influence these imaginative reconstructions of the city. Absolutely. I mean, it's just the idea of building up into the sky, you know, was, was newly sort of possible in a sense by the, by the changes in the building regulations, as well as a number of other factors. But what I think what's, what's interesting about metabolism is in a sense addresses sort of be even beyond that this, if you read the works of architects of that era. There's a lot of kind of complaining in a sense about how sort of Byzantine, the property ownership rules are for example in Tokyo, and, and how sort of difficult building kind of large scale structures is. And so, so I think that, for example, he says a key a rata came up with this conception of, of Shinjuku city in the air, being where you would build just these sort of large columns. And then he imagined building in a whole nother layer sort of connecting these columns on top of the existing city. So sort of getting around all this question of like property rights and, and sort of needing to destroy the old city to build a new city, actually mentioned like going above that, that ceiling, right that old ceiling in which, you know, buildings were not built above a certain height. He built that sort of second city on top of that. And imaginatively in his proposal from around the year 1960 he built this imagine the sort of second layer, which would be kind of put on these, sort of concrete pillars as it were, that would, would host a whole nother city on top of the existing city so so that that is definitely I think a reaction to sort of the possibilities opened up by the changing regulations around building height in Japan, in Tokyo. And finally, I mean we have talked a little bit about legacy but a more specific question here from colleague Donna Teller. So, what is the looking back on the metabolism movement and thinking about contemporary Japanese architects and architecture today what is the sort of major influence. And then perhaps link to that just a sort of general question from a couple of people is the future of Japanese architecture and these kinds of visions and positive positive or negative as one of the questions. I mean that's really difficult for me to say, you know, beyond what, you know, I'm not neither an architect nor an architectural historian so I can't, I can't, you know, I can't predict. I think a lot of architecture of recent years has focused to to a large degree on sort of smaller scale, you know that I think there is a generation of architects who have, in a sense, reacted to metabolism by thinking small, you know by thinking like let's let's think about how we can really create very sort of human scaled architecture in the small spaces that truly exist in Japanese city. So, and, and also thinking about architecture which is more has perhaps like a lighter footprint on the environment than than previous imaginations of building practices so I think that there there is a generation which in a sense reacts to metabolism which which is trying to be trying to sort of remove that large scale vision and think of it and think of architecture in a different way. You know, so I, I don't know I think that architecture that it seems as if the metabolism architects are that there is a, and hopefully this book in some ways will be a part of it, there is a sort of impetus right now to take a second look at them, and to, to draw what inspiration or what, what lessons we can from their work in both a positive sense. As I mentioned, I think that the two sort of most pertinent legacies, you know one would be a kind of the metaphor of organism as it as it regards the sort of interactions with the natural world and interactions with the world that is already in feedback loops with human beings you know through climate change. So, so thinking about those kind of feedback loops and how architecture fits into that I think that's one. And of course the, the sort of cybernetic the sort of the way in which the realm of information technology is is transforming our lives by the moments and more so, you know, under, under the pandemic and, and the sort of ways in which our lives have been restructured by zoom for example. And we're all sort of inhabiting imaginary spaces in a new way, you know, in the last couple of years right so so I think this idea kind of virtual space simulation, you know through information technology this idea of is is architecture something which is only a physical thing or is it something which could be more ethereal in a sense. I think that those, those issues which were explored in the in the early days by the tablets and other architects at the same time around the world, I think still have a lot of, a lot of legs to them. Great, thank you. Well, and speaking of visual space I have to say that despite the fact that we were competing with the inauguration and, and Lady Gaga's dress. You broke the rate you have broken the record for our virtual JRC seminars we had 250 people attending today which is a record for us so I think that really speaks to your, your topic and it was really fascinating and thank you for that. Yeah, we're not here every Wednesday but we are here met very many Wednesday so if you enjoyed today please tune into the more of our seminars, but just to say thank you so much will for joining us. And everybody stay safe, stay healthy and well, and we'll see hopefully we'll see you again but thank you will. Thank you so much Ellen it was it was a pleasure. And I'm sorry if I didn't get some of your questions but as I said there was a lot of people. Sure and I think you'll be sharing those questions and comments with me so I do thank everyone who who who contributed to the questions and I'll certainly take a look at all of your comments after the session. That's fantastic. Thanks everybody thanks for joining us and have enjoyed the rest of your evening. Thank you.