“House Inside City Outside House: Tokyo Metabolizing”

Should architects help the built environment adapt to the shifting demographic profile of cities? Should they respond also to new modes of living that arise with changing social mores? This exhibition, an expanded version of Japan’s presentation at last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, posits Tokyo as a unique incubator of novel solutions to residential problems. Although ranging in scale from a single-family home to a complex of forty-six apartments, the projects here by Atelier Bow-Wow, Ryue Nishizawa (of SANAA), and Koh Kitayama each make a virtue of porosity. Room-size models dominate all the galleries. This makes palpable, for example, the way work space for Atelier Bow-Wow’s eight employees gives way, as one climbs higher in the small single-family residence, to the comforts of home for the firm’s married founding partners. So, too, can visitors feel the radical openness of Nishizawa’s six-unit apartment complex, an assemblage of disconnected cubic rooms, some of which feature nearly floor-to-ceiling windows that open directly onto the sidewalk. Not a fence or a hedge is in sight, a fact that proved too unnerving to some of the people who were initially invited to live there.

The show draws on the midcentury Japanese concept of architectural metabolism to distinguish Tokyo’s constant reinvention from the seemingly static nature of “capitalist” New York and “monarchical” Paris (think Napoleon III). The curators have dramatized this in the first gallery, where satellite photographs of the Western cities are contrasted with a seductive animated video of development in the Japanese capital. Tokyo’s uniqueness in this regard is overdrawn: I will return from my weeklong trip to find new storefronts and the pockmarks of new demolition in my Brooklyn neighborhood. Yet a presentation of freshly commissioned research in the final gallery, labeled an “Index for the Coming City,” makes a persuasive case that in the twenty-first century, Tokyo, where the average lifespan of a residential building is only twenty-six years, will keep nurturing creative responses to the problems of urban life.