Pod Living at Its Finest [View All]

Pod Living at Its Finest

By Momus
02:00 AM Dec, 05, 2006

I've just arranged a one-month apartment exchange with a friend in Tokyo, an Australian artist called Alin Huma.

For a month next spring he'll live with his partner and young child in my Berlin apartment, 538 square feet, while my girlfriend and I will occupy his Tokyo pod pad -- just 225 square feet. Despite halving my living space, I feel like I'm getting the better deal.

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The Capsule Tower's architect, Kisho Kurakawa, is a Metabolist. From the early '60s, these Japanese architects modeled their buildings on organic forms able -- in theory, anyway -- to adapt rapidly and radically to changes in the city's ecosystem. One way to do this was to use prefabricated capsules, "minimum dwelling units" which could snap in and out of larger structures. These pods referred back to the Bauhaus idea of the existenzminimum -- the basic minimum space required to sustain human existence -- but also to sci-fi-like developments then being proposed in other countries -- the Plug-In City, for instance, an idea from U.K. conceptual architects Archigram.

Thirty-five years later, though, all is not well at the Nakagin Capsule Tower. Last year The Independent newspaper reported that "residents in the country's most famous experiment in living and working in tiny pods have become so disgruntled with their accommodations that they are plotting its demolition."

Defective water pipes have proved hard to repair, asbestos is rife and not one of the capsules, designed to be replaced when they malfunctioned or got outdated, has ever been switched.

For aficionados of Space Age experimental architecture, though, these "roomic cubes" (there's a show unit open on the ground floor) remain highly glamorous. They still have their console-flush original 1972 built-in hi-fi systems, televisions and calculators and their original molded-plastic bathroom units.

More:
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72231-0.html