The Nagakin tower, located in Tokyo, Japan, will be demolished, according to its new owners. This, after several years of uncertainty about the future of the building.
The tower was built in 1972 and promised to offer a futuristic option for urban life. Its interior is made up of 144 “capsules” or rooms of 10 square meters with a single round window, integrated appliances and furniture.
The designer of the building was Kisho Kurokawa, who defined this infrastructure work as an example of “metabolism”, an architectural movement that was born after World War II under the thought that buildings and cities are not static entities and are constantly changing.
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The structures under this post-war model were conceived as constructions with a limited useful life and that in the future they could be replaced, however, very few proposals of this movement were executed, which made the Nagakin tower one of the few existing copies.
The “capsules” have been deteriorating during their 50 years of existence. Most of them were left uninhabited over time and their owners gave them other uses such as warehouses or offices.
The building was sold in 2007 to a real estate company that planned to demolish it, however, the company went bankrupt the following year and the future of this structure was left in limbo.
In 2021, the building was bought by another real estate company called Capsule Tower Buildingand its spokesman, Takashi Shindo, told CNN that the last residents of the tower moved out several weeks ago and the demolition of this building will take place this Tuesday, April 12.
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The demolition of the work, considered today as one of the most unique and iconic of the architecture of that country, has generated different types of reactions in the citizenry.
There were even campaigns in recent years with petitions to protect the structure, but none were successful.
Tatsuyuki Maeda, a member of the Nagakin Capsule Tower Building Preservation and Regeneration Project, told CNN that “Japan does not have the legislation to preserve this type of architectural culture. It is unfortunate that one of the most representative examples of the country’s modern architectural heritage is lost“.
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