In Tokyo, Rescuing the Residential Spaceship That Fell to Earth

In 1972, residents of Tokyo looked up to see something extraordinary looming over downtown. It looked like something out of a science-fiction film — a futuristic tower composed of 140 detachable capsules, each suitable for a single resident and with a porthole looking out, like a pile of eyes fixed on the city.

With its modular design and minimal aesthetics, the 13-story Nakagin Capsule Tower was a marvel of 20th-century design intended to express a postwar Japanese theory of architecture as a living organism. Metabolism, as explained by the architect Kisho Kurokawa, who designed the tower, envisioned cities and buildings with modular parts that could be attached and detached as needed, just as some organisms grow new appendages.

“If you replace the capsules every 25 years, it could last 200 years,” Kurokawa said in an interview in 2007, the year he died. “It’s recyclable. I designed it as sustainable architecture.”

Each capsule measured eight by 13 feet and was affixed to one of two central towers of reinforced concrete. But over the years, many of them were abandoned and left to decay, and residents finally decided to let the building die rather than save it. Lamenting its fate, The New York Times called the Nakagin tower “an architectural tragedy.”