Woods Bagot - Auckland CBD

My social media feeds have been active with outrage and sadness this month over the demolition of Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower, a Metabolist landmark in Tokyo that had suffered neglect and decay to the point where it no longer made economic sense for its owner. Clearly it had social value as a model for prefabricated, modular, and idealistically flexible individual housing units, the small footprint of which certainly gave it environmental credibility, even as the building itself barely lasted 50 years.

Nakagin Capsule Tower also represented an architecture of ideas, inspired on a fundamental level by doing as much as possible with as little as necessary. We cannot house our planet’s growing population without building new housing, which may be the most urgent calling for architecture everywhere, but a positivist approach demands a more rigorous appraisal of how we consume and whether that consumption is worth it outside of performing a functional role for a comparatively limited amount of time.

Every year, we overshoot the planet’s ability to support our consumption. In the USA, Earth Overshoot Day was March 13; in Japan, it will be May 6. Overshoot Day represents the amount of time from January 1 it would take us to exhaust the planet’s resources for the year if everyone lived the way we do in our respective countries. In 1972, when the Capsule Tower was built, Japan’s Overshoot Day was April 22, so in some respects the country is consuming less today even if it remains fundamentally unsustainable. But in a global context of the planet’s capacity, Japan consumes at the rate of 2.91 earths today compared to 1.98 in 1972—a nearly 47 percent increase that represents the diminishing capacity of our planet.

Consider a project like Woods Bagot’s C.F. Row in Melbourne, from 2017, which installed new multi-family housing within a preserved historical brick envelope. Adaptive reuse projects upset our view of consumption, since they challenge the architect to develop a position on keeping as much as possible of an existing building, questioning the removal of materials rather than celebrating the absence.  Naturally, keeping more of what already exists is a messier affair, since it challenges a reigning architectural crutch of “clean slate-ism,” or the presupposition that a new building or city will always be better.