A Year in the Metabolist Future of 1972 (2014) | Hacker News Reader

A Year in the Metabolist Future of 1972 (2014)

failedarchitecture.com

13 pointsparsecs6 comments

To wake up in a capsule (Capsule B807) is to wake up in a place unlike anywhere else. There is a bed, a window, clothes everywhere and the sound of morning traffic. However, there is also something less tangible, something that makes every waking moment special. Maybe it’s the brilliance of the great round window or the quiet charm of the table, sometimes open and covered with junk, other times closed and silent. Maybe it ’s the door of the bathroom, appearing as if an entrance to a submarine. Or maybe it’s the scale of the room, a scale that seems just about right. Every morning brings a happy sense of the sublime.

I think, based on the photo just below of a room, that my reaction would not be well-approximated by "sublime".

The tone of this article is bordering on rapturous. My reaction would be something a lot closer to "Holy hell get me out of this rotting deathtrap of malaise and asbestos as soon as humanly possible!"

If you scroll down a bit further, you can find some pictures of rooms that people actually use, instead of the flooded and decaying rooms. Looking at the compact and efficient setups of those residents, I actually thought it seemed kinda cozy.

And the second you open your only door you’re in a semi-abandoned hallway of crippling depression!

no, i think i’ll pass.

I can imagine that many hallways in many fully mundane and fully inhabited buildings across the world look far more depressing. This is in Japan after all...

You must not have lived in very many places. A whole lot of high rise apartment buildings in big cities have dilapidated or oppressive common spaces (and private living spaces.)

I'm not sure why these pods failed, but I imagine it was probably down to cost or practicality rather than some fundamental 'ergonomic' problem making it undesirable in comparison to the similarly shaped and sized apartments that do exist.

Today the Nakagin is but a vibrant reminder of a path that was not followed, a sculptural ode to an unrealised future.

Did anyone truly expect otherwise? This sort of straw-into-gold intellectual pandering is the meat and potatoes of the art world but buildings are real things that run on people and money. Self-congratulating we're-so-smart-ism tends to get smashed to pieces when it runs into unblinking reality.

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