Launched at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo, the Metabolism group argued that cities should be conceived as living organisms that grow, metabolise and shed parts, not as fixed compositions. They separated long-life primary structure - megastructural cores, artificial land, transport spines - from short-life replaceable capsules and dwellings, so that change could be absorbed without redesigning the whole. Kikutake's Marine City and Tower-Shaped Community, Kurokawa's Agricultural City and Helix City, and Tange's Plan for Tokyo 1960, which extended a linear civic axis across Tokyo Bay, translated the theory into projects. The manifesto fused Buddhist ideas of impermanence and regeneration with postwar Japanese faith in technology and reconstruction.
It was the first fully articulated urban avant-garde from outside the West to reset the international agenda, breaking with CIAM's static functionalism and giving the megastructure and capsule their canonical form. Its separation of durable support from changeable infill still underpins open-building, adaptable-infrastructure and modular housing thinking, while its bay-fill projects prefigured decades of Asian land reclamation.
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