“This building is not an apartment house.” With this declaration, Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa introduced the Nakagin Capsule Tower as a radically new vision for urban living. Completed in 1972, the structure consisted of 140 single-occupancy capsules, prefabricated offsite and attached to two concrete-and-steel cores in Tokyo’s Ginza district. The building became the defining realization of Metabolism, an avant-garde Japanese movement of the 1960s whose members imagined cities and buildings that could adapt over time.

Kurokawa imagined his building and its modular capsules as a dynamic system. Originally marketed as micro-dwellings for commuting businessmen, the capsules were repurposed into second homes, offices, dorm rooms, art studios, tea rooms, libraries, galleries, and DJ booths. Once a symbol of Japan’s postwar techno-futurism, the building was controversially demolished in 2022 after years of deferred maintenance. Yet its legacy lives on.