Curated by Mori Art Museum and the Metabolism Association

Perhaps the most ebullient critique of doctrinaire postwar modernism, the Japanese Metabolist movement of the 1960s and ’70s understood the city as a living organism. Inspired by images of cellular development, its members imagined a city subject to dynamic processes of growth and decay wherein cantilevered residential blocks unfurled above old neighborhoods, structural systems arose along helical spines, and chunks of the urban landscape detached themselves from shore to float on the sea. Some eighty Metabolist projects will be on view at the Mori this fall, tracing the movement’s influence from its technophilic cities in the air to the Nakagin Capsule Tower south of Ginza. Filling the museum’s panoramic 53rd-floor galleries, the show promises the perfect vantage point from which to compare Kenzo Tange’s legendary plans for extending Tokyo into the bay with the shopping malls (and Tange-designed TV studio) that actually exist there today.

— Michael Wang