These two units are almost all that’s left of one of Tokyo’s most legendary buildings. [Music] Do not attempt to adjust the picture. Dakan Capsule Tower. It’s astonishing to sit here and look at this building. It’s crazy futuristic visionary thing. Few structures evoke as much passion and admiration as this chunky 1970s tower block.
But then again, few buildings have ever tried to be as revolutionary as the Nakajin Capsule Tower. It encapsulates a time when Japan raced into the future and its engineering and technology led the world. But more than that, this was a building that tried to rethink not just how we live in cities, but how we build them. It was supposed to be a building as a living organism where with the power of mass production, your home could be changed and upgraded just as easily as your car.
It’s one of Japan’s most famous buildings. Knacking in Capsule Tower. Do I love it? I absolutely do. And if you’re one of the Capsule Towers legions of fans, you’ll also know that ultimately it failed. Now you see it, now you don’t. Fans gathered to take a final photo as demolition officially began. Or did [Music] it? Now, in case you’re not one of the legions of super fans of this building, just know that the Nakajing Capsule Tower was unlike anything else you’ve seen before.
Located in downtown Tokyo, it was a modular apartment building made up of 140 near identical capsules. In case it doesn’t already look strange enough, each one of those capsules was designed to be taken out and upgraded with a brand spanking new pod whenever the owner fancied it. Now, to understand how this concept made it to the drawing board, we’re going to have to go back a bit.
Japan in the 1960s was on the up. It had rapidly rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War and was experiencing an economic miracle that saw its GDP double in the space of just 7 years. And it become the world’s third largest economy by the end of the decade. The biggest and most powerful center of all that economic frenzy was Tokyo.
Millions flocked from the countryside to the rapidly growing metropolis. In the 20 years leading up to 1970, Tokyo’s population more than doubled from 11 to 23 million. It was great news for many, but not for the city’s urban planners. This place started to grow uncontrollably as factories started to sprout up around the city an
d dense residential areas grew next to industrial zones with poor sanitation.
Japan had never experienced such rapid urban growth. And so to try and find an answer, urban planners began putting forward increasingly radical ideas like a floating city out in Tokyo Bay or a city in the sky built on stilts. The appetite for experimental ideas was supercharged by Tokyo hosting the 1964 Olympics.
Kenzo Tang’s bold, cuttingedge buildings became a symbol of national pride, cementing Japan’s reputation as a place with its face firmly set to the future. And it was into this daring atmosphere of confidence, problem solving, and wealth that the Nakajing Capsule Tower was born. It was the brainchild of architect Kizu Korakawa, a prominent member of an architectural movement known as metabolism.
Now, a lot has been written about metabolism. And in many ways, that’s to try and make it sound more complicated than it actually is. If you want the full architectural theory, there is a massive 200page manifesto written by Corawa himself. But if you don’t want to read that, don’t worry because the whole thing comes down to a fairly simple idea.
Cities change and the infrastructure and buildings that make up a city should change with them. He put that to use in the Nackaging Capsule Tower by designing a building made up of individual mass-produced capsules that would last a few decades before being swapped out and upgraded as the needs of the building and its residents changed.
At street level was a two-story building containing a basement, utilities, and a cafe. Rising up from this were two towers constructed from a steel frame and reinforced concrete design consisting of an elevator shaft, staircase, and an exterior wall. Another radical feature was Kurakawa’s use of mass production and standardization.
And that was to do two things. One, to help the building change as it grew older, but also to speed up its original construction. The elevator shafts were delivered to site in pre-cast concrete sections already fitted out with the machinery needed to operate the lifts. Racks designed to house utilities like pipes and drainage were manufactured off sites in units three stories tall before being installed on the building.
Pre-cast elements were also used for the stairs which allowed them to be installed in close sequence with the rest of the tower, drastically shrinking the overall construction time for the building’s core. Then came the most iconic aspect of the tower, the capsules themselves. Each capsule measured 4 m in length by 2 1/2 m in width and height.
To allow for some degree of variety, four variants of the capsule were created by changing the location of the window, entrance, bathroom, and the point at which it attaches to the tower. Everything else was optimized for mass production. Now, we talk a lot about cuttingedge engineering here, but from my time at construction sites, I can tell you that one of the biggest challenges is actually miscommunication.
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But don’t just take my word for it. Click the link below and find out how they can help your business. It’ll help us out, too. Thanks for sticking with us. Now, let’s get back to that tower. The capsules were assembled in a factory that made shipping containers and produced by welding boxes made of lightweight steel.
This box has been stripped back to its shell, which allows you to see the reinforcing structures welded to the steel panels. They were designed to give the capsules enough strength to hold their own weight as they were canleed off the tower, held in place by just four bolts with utilities connected by a flexible tube. But while everything about the tower’s design was optimized for easy construction, the building site was anything but straightforward.
You see, the tower was built here in the Ginsa district of central Tokyo. Now, in the 1960s, this was the thriving center of business in Tokyo, which made it easy to attract the kind of shortstay salary men that the towers marketed at. But it’s also a fishly difficult place to build. The site occupies a small plot of land on the corner of a busy intersection, which meant there was nowhere nearby to stockpile components, leading to a constant stream of deliveries.
Only the capsules scheduled to be installed on each day were delivered that morning. But even that was complicated by the site’s location. Because of traffic restrictions, the heavy trucks used for delivery were only allowed into the area at certain times of day. The capsules would start their journey from the factory 450 km away before stopping at a staging point.
Trucks were then dispatched at 6:00 a.m. along an expressway in time to reach the site for the day’s work. Despite these hurdles, construction only lasted 14 months, completing in March 1972. The boxes already fully furnished in the factory took only 3 hours each to install. Now, because of the size of the capsules, Kurukawa looked at the interior design of yachts as inspiration for how to maximize the space.
This pod’s been restored to its original specification and features a TV, telephone, and real-toreal tape deck. Now, these are items that we might take for granted today, but at the time, they reflected Japan’s advanced consumer electronics industry, as well as the social status of the tower’s residents. That factor was also reflected in the lack of any cooking equipment.
It was assumed that the businessmen who the tower was targeting would instead spend their time eating out at the many restaurants and pubs nearby. When it completed, the Nakajin capsule tower represented a confident, dynamic city that was boldly creating a new world. But just as it charted Tokyo’s highs, it also became emblematic of what happened next.
In the early ’90s, Japan’s economic bubble burst, and as the country began to enter decades of stagnation, so too did the Nekaging Capsule Tower. The story of the tower’s demise is now almost as well known as the building itself. Famously, not a single one of the capsules was ever replaced. There’s lots of reasons for this, including a now notorious design flaw.
You see, because these capsules were so tightly packed, it was impossible to remove a capsule without first removing multiple capsules that surrounded it. In other words, if your neighbor wanted an upgrade, your capsule would have to be removed first. Another issue was the industrial techniques that Kurakawa had sought to pioneer in the first place.
Mass production relies on mass consumption. While Kurakawa worked on a few more small-cale projects that did have standardized capsules, there were never any more big buildings. The concept for the building relied on a thriving production line of similar units, which two decades after its initial run still didn’t exist. Rather than become a self-renewing organism, this building fell into disrepair.
In 2007, the substantial increase in the site’s land value, coupled with the building’s earthquake resistance and the difficulty of sourcing new capsules, led residents to vote overwhelmingly to sell the site for redevelopment. Over a decade of wrangling followed that, and in 2022, the Nagin capsule tower was [Music] demolished.
This muchloved building is now gone, but far from forgotten. A digital scan was made before its demolition and a campaign by this man Tatsuki Maida was responsible for saving some of the capsules for prosperity. Our project u keep 23 capsules. Another capsule is destroyed. It was a great to demonstrate building. However, Kishokawa want to change all the capsule every 25 years but we can’t because it’s the first time to move this capsule.
1972. So I think it’s a uh start of metabolism. Thanks to Maidan, a handful of capsules are now on display around the world where they continue to amaze and inspire. The consensus on the building itself was that it was a kind of noble failure, a daring, bold design that never really reached its full potential and that didn’t really change the world in the way that people ever thought it would.
But I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. You see, it might not look like it right now, but the legacy of the lackin capsule tower actually goes a lot further than just an exhibition in a museum. There have been countless examples of projects using the same idea of mass-produced modular construction to make the most of small spaces in densely packed cities.
The design for a housing scheme in Hong Kong proposed repurposing segments of industrially produced concrete water pipes as stackable micro homes for young students. This project in New York proposed using hexagonal pods in marginal spaces to create a lowcost homeless shelter. But there’s a catch. Generally speaking, projects like these are clever and eye-catching, but they rarely get off the drawing board.
The most mainstream example of this type are the construction of shipping container developments. You’ve probably seen a place near you where recycled containers have been used to build trendy shops or a street food market. They work because they’re easy to install and shipping containers are designed to be constantly plugged in and out of larger surfaces.
Crucially, its core components is one that’s easily available. Shipping containers aside, component-based design is a rapidly growing trend in the construction industry, and it works by breaking buildings down into a system of easily produced products which can be assembled on site. These types of developments are key to understanding what Kurakawa got right and what he got wrong about both metabolism and mass production in construction.
Where Kurakawa saw the smallest component of the capsule tower as an apartment, modern industrial construction breaks components down into floor systems, cladding, or heating systems. Now, there’s one final twist in this tale, and that’s that the Nakajin Capsule Tower’s radical blueprint for an everchanging building was never actually that radical to begin with.
Housing in Japan is unique in that typically buildings lose their value over time. This is partly due to the country’s geography. Japan suffers more earthquakes than any other country, and traditionally homes were rebuilt from time to time due to wear and tear. It’s also a legacy of the same housing boom that the capsule tower tried to cash in on.
This is Yanuka, a neighborhood in northern Tokyo. Whereas Nakaging catered for well-healed inner city businessmen, suburbs like this sprung up across Japan using pre-fabricated housing, also only intended to last a few decades. The irony is that while the capsule tower failed to renew itself with new components, suburbs like this are at the heart of a thriving industry that sees houses constantly dismantled and rebuilt across Japan.
The Nakajin Capsule Tower may have crumbled, but its ideas live on, not in sci-fi designs, but in the growing shift towards component-based manufacturer that’s now changing how we build our buildings. Kurakawa’s vision of an everchanging structure never materialized. But his belief that architecture should adapt and renew and respond to changing needs was ahead of its time.
And I guess in that sense, the Nakagen Capsule Tower didn’t fail. It was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Don’t forget that we’re raising awareness of construction’s mental health crisis and supporting charities in this space through our Get Construction Talking initiative. There’s a video series on our channel and you can find support or donate over at getconstructiontalking.org.
Thanks again to Ignite for sponsoring this video. Please do go and check them out and doing so will really help the channel. And as always guys, if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction, make sure you subscribe to the B1M. [Music]
