By JESKO FEZER

As Mr. Kikutake woke up it was already past noon. He would have slept even longer if he hadn’t been disturbed by the sound of breaking glass. From his first floor office he could see the policemen with their black helmets. The helmets floating up and down like ping-pong balls in seas of light and continuously regrouping in ever changing formations. It was as if they were attracting each other and at the same time pushing themselves off once reaching a certain distance. Flooding the streets, they encircled single students and beat them to the ground with their batons. This was all about the Japan-U.S. Security Pact again. For months the police had been beating it into the heads of the students. Last November 80,000 workers and students made their way into the courtyard of the parliament and overpowered the police. Only hours later, military units managed to stop them brutally. The mass announcements continued all through winter and spring. In January another violent clash occurred between the police and the students who wanted to prevent minister Kishi’s departure to the U.S., for the renewal of this contract. On May 29, the House of Commons voted for the pact. Today, on the June 16, 1960, three days before the foreseeable ratification by the Upper House, the Zengakuren (league of student unions) wanted to demonstrate their militancy in front of the parliament.

Kikutake’s clock radio had been ringing for several hours. He turned it down a bit and started cleaning up the broken glass. He wouldn’t even try reporting the damage to his insurance company because he thought that their coming up for anything would be totally out of the question. In his provisional bathroom, he splashed some water in his face, tucked his wrinkled shirt back in his pants and while looking for a toothbrush, he noticed the tear gas. He knew this certain stinging smell very well. It was all about to start. No need to close a broken window. Kikutake heard it on the radio that over 100.000 people were participating in the demonstration.

The small room was soon fogged up. The clouds were rising in the staircase as well. He wouldn’t go out on the street though. It seamed too dangerous. So he pressed a dampened towel to his face and kneeled down on the floor.

The radio announcer described how a female student got seriously injured in a clash with the police. In the turmoil she had been hit by a bus and had been pulled along for several meters. Then she simply lay there. At the time it was still unclear how her condition was and if she would survive the incident. Doctors explained that the situation was serious and her condition unstable. She would probably be paralyzed for the rest of her life. Demonstrators declared through their microphones that their fellow student had been chased and literally executed. The situation was out of control. Single groups attacked police units in side streets and built up barricades. A police spokesman explained that he regretted the tragic accident. But this was attributable to the violent behavior of the demonstrators. He appealed to the citizens not to let the situation escalate and threatened to take action against potential offenders with the full force of the law.

A part of the demonstration, which officially had already been broken up, was now taking place in front of Mr. Kikutake’s office. The female student died some hours later. Her internal bleeding could not be stopped.

Kikutake still felt sleepy as he sat down at his drawing boards with a cup of coffee and some aspirin. He was waiting for his few employees, Tokyo University architecture students. As soon as the general strike ended, the suburban trains would be running again.

He was happy that Kurokawa called, because he knew that otherwise he could have waited for ever for them to come. To start working by himself seemed rather a depressing idea to him. Kisho Kurokawa was only 26 years old and the shooting star of Tokyo’s architecture scene. He worked in the office of professor Kenzo Tange, who promoted him wherever he could. Two years ago, it was also Tange who had sent him to Noboru Kawazoe, the publisher of the outstanding Tokyo architecture magazine “Shinkenchiku,” who had then been assigned with the task of assembling a committee of a younger generation for the “World Design Conference” 1960. It was meant to be some sort of grassroots movement for the superstructure of this event. Only later as the association of the Japanese industrial designers got off the preparation for the conference, were they asked to form a group to work on the conference’s content. Kawazoe, the industrial-designer Kenji Ekuan, the graphic-designer Kiyoshi Awazu and Kisho Kurokawa, then invited Mr. Kikutake to take part in a newly founded movement. At that time it seemed strange to Mr. Kikutake. Apart from a certain youthfulness, he saw no similarities between the five of them and he missed a joint project. But since they had approached him explicitly because of this years’ publishing of his projects “Tower-Shaped-Community” and “Ocean City” in “Kokusai Kenchiku” magazine, he saw a possibility to share his concerns with a group of people and maybe even to make himself heard. The cooperation between industrial-designers, theorists and a graphic-designer interested him.

He knew how ambitious Kawazoe could be, and he thought Kikutake was quite brutal when it came to pushing his interests. It could be an advantage to work with this type of highly motivated people. And he was very well aware that they needed him too. He was the only one of this young group that had a certain international status. He had already introduced plans for future cities and they were well known in the appropriate circles around Team 10 and Yona Friedman. For his project “Tower-Shaped-Community” he had developed housing towers with a capacity of about 1,250 people as a form of external growth and internal regeneration. He planned the construction of these towers as a sort of self-production. Like a silkworm, a fabrication-center should create the inner core. Then after finishing the core of the tower it should start producing exchangeable living-units. Finishing this phase, the factory would turn into a laboratory for new and better units. Like the changing of leaves during a calendar year, the living-units could also change from generation to generation.

His concept of change and the related nature analogies were visible anyway but in order to manifest this as a principle, the group thought it needed a universal concept and a method. One, that was thoroughly Japanese and at the same time internationally practicable. They needed a name for their group that made a statement. They wanted a name that included “change” against the eternal and absolute of the western society; also something including biological means like “growth,” “flow” and “nature,” as well as overall principals of life such as “renewal” and “exchange.” So Mr. Kikutake looked into the dictionary and found the word “Metabolism”. They all agreed on this word, with the ending “-ism,” it sounded like the expression of the principals of their new movement.
Mr. Kikutake asked Kurokawa over the phone why he wasn’t out demonstrating but not without mentioning that he himself was already in his mid-thirties. Mr. Kurokawe answered that he would have gladly gone, but he hadn’t found a group to join and besides everyone was working at Tange today, so he could impossibly have left the bureau. He also said that thirty was no age at all and that he saw better possibilities for himself to change something than going out on the street could possibly offer. What good would it do anyone if he let himself get beat-up. If taken a closer look at, the student movement seemed too straight Marxist to him and he was no longer a student anyway. The anti-Americanism was hugely problematic, even though he also saw their concerns.

Mr. Kikutake didn’t like this sort of conversation very much. He very well understood himself as a part of the demonstration and shared the demands of the students. Especially the “World Design Conference” in May, where several members of the crème de la crème of international architects would be in Japan for the first time, could have used it as a platform for political agitation. The theme of this event wasn’t out of place: “What Designers Contribute to the Human Environment In The Coming Age”. None of the participators would have taken offense them talking about politics. Louis Kahn, Jean Prouvé, Paul Rudolph, Herbert Bayer, Peter Smithson, Ralph Erskine and Otl Aicher were of course sensitive to these matters. At that time, Kikutake was worried about the thought of them bringing the subject up themselves. That would have made him feel very uncomfortable. On the other hand the issues were so complicated it was hard to sensibly explain them to the visitors.

But his group had its manifesto ready, which they had worked on for two years: “Metabolism 1960, Proposal for New Urbanism.” The Metabolists sold the booklet to the visiting architects and designers in the lobby of the conference building. It was their political statement on Tokyo’s situation and it also included suggestions to society in general—suggestions on what to do, a demand for “metabolistic” development. Kurakawa had asked to meet him downtown. Tokyo, this big city, was battling a horrible disease. Due to its gigantic size it had lost control over itself and even tried to hide its handicaps and played it down with the inhabitant’s adaptability. The horizontal boundaries of the city were already abolished by the new possibilities of the public transport system and an increased living standard moved forward. A new harmful layer of tissue grew like cancer over the city. The transformation into a sleeping city had already begun. The city planners could no longer ignore the fact that the city had already reached the maximum level of confusion. They wanted to bring light into a city that had already lost its balance and that was without hope.

Kikutake was convinced that new structures would be created as soon as every single inhabitant would become aware of being a community as a whole. Therefore, of course, it would first have been necessary for everyone to develop a strong desire for more space to live, a place where they could spend their short lives.

Kikutake saw, how most of the cities either lost themselves in confusion or were dominated by monotone patterns developed by dogmatic architects. They lacked individual expression as well as a unifying character. They had no ability to expand and react flexibly in order to adjust to social or economical changes.

It was nice and cool inside the store. Still, his damp shirt stuck between his back and the imitation leather chair embracing him. Kenji Ekuan was literally melted into the ergonomic fit of the swivel chair and could impossibly move without fear of hurting himself. If he tried to increase the tension on his back noticeably more, he could expect to hear a crack at a certain, calculable moment, which would announce that his body was just about to dissolve, jerkily. This sound would also start off a series of movements, which he would no longer be able to control. The freed energy could, like a torque, affect the chair’s joints, with its jerkyness. The hairdresser had jacked the chair up so high that he wouldn’t have been able to stabilize himself by putting his feet on the tiled floor. He visualized himself jerking around with his arms in order to keep balance, while waiting customers looked up from their magazines and newspapers, shocked to see the little razor blades of the shaver that just one second ago felt so nice and warm tickling his throat, now working on his carotid artery. His shirt would soak up the warm blood without splashes until becoming drenched heavy and dark. Not one drop on the tiles, no splash in the joint between seat and arm-rests and the white cotton smock with its “Mr. Hair” company logo, a stylized Wilhelmian mustache, would be as white as his shirt. They would come and pick him up and praise the material of his shirt, have it analyzed scientifically. Soon they would find out his tailor’s address and question the poor guy to death. It was 2 pm. Mr. Ekuan wiped his forehead and arranged his tie. He did not forget to get his “10 plus 1” coupon stamped. His skin was porous and turned red, little red eyes. He pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his jacket. A strange new model that a representative of a London-based design agency had left in his office. His hands were shaking while he looked at them. With his short fingernails, he couldn’t manage to get the dirt out from underneath his other hand. He had another half an hour left. That would be enough time to make a short stop at the hotel to shower. He asked himself if Kisho would be wearing his embarrassing bow tie.

Masato Ohtaka and Fumihiko Maki were standing in the midst of the fog in their dark suits. Fumihiko was coughing heavily. The dust settled on his lungs. He looked tired. After the late night meeting there had been little time to relax.

Now the three of them watched how the big iron balls broke into the rocky north front of the hotel. The demolition machines drove into emptiness again and again. The protruding plateaus and the generous window openings took them up and bought some time for the basic substance. The extravagant windowsills broke like crisp bread. After several impacts, the reinforced concrete gave way. The bare reinforcement stepped out and sadly hung the terrace to the dining hall from the last wires. The masonry between the reinforced concrete ceilings fell to soil and made dust clouds.

The impressive building that almost solely survived the big 1923 Tokyo earthquake—that cost 200,000 lives—undamaged was now being finished off by crane operators sitting inside their big yellow machines.

These people, who had never sat in the lobby enjoying long-drinks served in crystal glasses, didn’t know that there used to be a plaster cast of Nike from Samothrake standing at the reception. Neither did they know that the branches of cherry blossoms bloomed in the two green vases all year round, if it was necessary they were flown in from foreign countries. The Breuer-Chairs had been picked up last week. The pond in front of the main entrance formally surrounded by the driveway for limousines had dried out. The skyscrapers that had gathered around the Imperial like wayward sons throughout the last years, were suffocating it slowly. A skyscraper would also be developed here. The Imperial had been standing there for too long. From 1912 till 1923, almost 50 years. The entrance hall had already been taken down by hand a couple of days ago. It was meticulously taken apart in pieces, catalogued and shipped to Meji-Mura. A theme park was just being created there, which assembled different buildings from Japan’s founding era. Among them, Frank Lloyd Wright’s hotel was supposed to be rebuilt as a fragment in an idyllic landscape surrounded leisurely by a police station, a jailhouse, a railway factory and the first iron variation of the Shin-Ohashi-Bridge also from Tokyo. Antonon Raymond was among the spectators. Standing next to him were Kisho Kurokawa and Noboru Kawazoe, they seemed to get along well and were involved in a conversation with a representative of the Shimuzo Construction company. Even the youngest of the Takenaka Komuten Company joined the occasion and were surrounded by local politicians and the press. He gesticulated and probably spoke in flowery words about a new housing area in which the “historic family company” would stuff a few hundred poor dogs again, midst “modern infrastructure, high standard of living and individual ground plans.”

At hardly any inauguration of a new building in the last years, had there been more celebrities than at this destruction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s gigantic Imperial Hotel. And elderly Antonon Raymond who had then managed the construction, stood there crestfallen. Since he had opened his own bureau in Japan in 1921 he had been one of the most influential representatives of western modernism. He thought of old Frank, the good old days, of eternity and America. The fabric of his sleeves was already shiny at the elbows, a small cigarette was placed between his lips. This house was his career. That it had held against the earthquake was proof of its superior construction. Back then the still recent profession of civic engineer in Japan was developed thereupon. The institutional architecture education was not even 50 years old as they listened to Antonon Raymond’s theory: thick walls and low built houses. The city administration passed a bill immediately which limited the height of buildings to 30 meters, the exact height of the Imperial Hotel.

Kunio Maekewa had worked with Raymond for five years and Kenzo Tange had worked for him again and Kisho Kurokawa. Arata Isozaki and Fumihiko Maki had studied at Tange or had worked for his office until a few years ago. Masato Ohtaka himself had even worked for Maekawa as a chief designer. Mr. Ekuan knew Antonon Raymond well. Old Antonon was sad.

What a bloody day. Ekuan thought about yesterday as he passed the barricades. A policeman tried to stop him but he was signaled to let him pass. The meeting, which began so hopefully, ended yesterday in discord. Totally drunk, Mr. Kurokawa had yelled at Noboru Kawazoe, waving a cigarette in his face. He was in rage, his normally neatly parted hair was hanging in his face and he seemed to be all tangled up in his loosely fitting jacket. His tie was moving up and down underneath his unbuttoned collar. He accused Noboru of arrogance, paternal behavior, envy and thirst for power.

For a few weeks now they had been back in contact, called each other, sent telegraphs, arranged meetings between two or sometimes three of them or send out mailings. The past three years they all had worked more or less for themselves and had made more or less frustrating experiences with the daily building routine.

Their first common publication “Metabolism 1960” was magnificently received at that time. It was about time to work on their ever-postponed second publication that was supposed to contain the answers to method and execution of their suggestions. They wanted to fill up and realize what had been received and dismissed as utopian. Over the years they got only a few experimentation fields, but no opportunity to practice Metabolism. In exactly the same way that they broke into the minds in 1960, they wanted to bring it into practice now. They wanted to come back with hoorays and cheers and a second “Proposal for new Urbanism” to stake their claim. The whole world was working with their models, especially the young British were publishing loads of plug-ins and pictures of mega-structures. But that was just fun—clever but childish. In the eyes of the Metabolists this was somewhat an unnecessary utopization of the whole thing.

After a suggestion by Mr. Kawazoe they had worked on the subject of “metamorphosis.” In the meantime, Kurokawa had submitted schematic principles and traffic systems, Noboru Kawazoe came up with a new manifesto, Kenji Ekuan showed variations of his “Tortoise Dwellings” while Fumihiko Maki and Masato Ohtaka delivered another theoretical work on collective urban structures.

For a while Kurokawa, Ohtaka and Kikutake had worked together for the Nippon Prefabrication Company. They developed Metabolistic prototypes for industrialized house building. Mr. Ohtaka worked on a manufacturing method for prefabricated houses, Kikutake studied renewal methods for furnishing units and Kurokawa developed models for prefabricated midsize apartment flats.

It soon showed that their work had no sort of practical use for the company. So it was stopped. They ended up with more sketches and models for their archives. Kurokawa came to Europe twice with these models to visit Team 10. Maki came once and now he was a professor in Washington. In 1962 they wanted to found a Team Tokyo together with Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki and others but they only met up once.

Now global preparations for a publication should be made. The already published studies of the members, were all methodical considerations on internal organisms and mechanisms of growth and change of cities or structures. All there was left to do was to discuss the available material, complete it, and explain it with some projects of the group members. It wouldn’t differ much from the first manifesto. It would be good to agree on one statement. Kawazoe could write it.

Mr. Kawazoe spoke about “Metabolism” as a general call for architects “to be aware of their responsibility, trusting the will of the masses.” “Metamorphosis,” however, shows “the fact that the group realized their potential roles as intellectuals and expresses hope to set targets for the way of the civilization and to clarify this way.”

Kikutake was nervously holding on to his Heineken, looking over to the pinball machine by the entrance to the washing rooms, where a couple was just spending their entire living. The music was way to loud for him and he could only understand half of it. Elvis and the Everly Brothers were taking turns hollering, sometimes interrupted by Chubby Checker’s hit “Twist”. He decided not to visit these bars anymore. But it was the only bar he knew that was open around the clock so he rejected the decision he had just made. It was five o’clock in the morning. They had met late, most of them coming straight from the office after having a short snack. Mr. Ekuan arrived in Tokyo around two o’clock in his Citroen, he had had an important meeting somewhere outside the city. Fumihiko Maki was the whole term holidays in Japan and had actually much time. He was well tanned and smelled of sun oil. His fresh shirt suited him very well. He had radically shaved his temples earlier that day, you could see paler skin shimmering through at the side of his head. Masato Ohtaka hadn’t said anything for quite a while and his eyeglasses where fogged up. Maybe he had fallen asleep for a few seconds. It would have been better to quit for the evening and continue the next day but Mr. Kawazoe was in excellent form and Mr. Kikutake couldn’t keep from telling the story about him coming up with the name for the group. It was history.

The next few days they only met once at the “Imperial”. Then Mr.Kikutake was off to a building site and Kenji Ekuan had a meeting with an electronics company that was working on new ultra small portable television set, then later he was taking part at a presentation by Honda. Sometime later Fumihiko Maki also departed for the U.S.