Letter of Recommendation: The Nakagin Capsule Tower

This building makes me think of the currently popular "Microservices Architecture" and wonder what many of the systems that have adopted it will look like in a few years.

Particularly, this paragraph: "There are dozens of tiny problems that contributed to its decline, each one of them minutely nudging utopia into the grot of reality. There’s no hot water. The capsules were initially lined with a three-centimeter layer of asbestos for insulation, but within a few years, the toxicity of that substance was a matter of public knowledge and as a result, the large ventilation systems taking up a significant chunk of each living space had to be permanently disabled. Rearranging the capsules turned out to be much more expensive than originally anticipated and very rarely happened. The promise that they could be upgraded or replaced over time was never fulfilled; the original and occasionally very shoddy materials are still in place. (For instance, the paper blinds that once decorated the tower’s portholes have mostly rotted away. Now, some residents paste newspaper to their windows to keep the light out.) But all these swarming problems just feed into the singular, large, incontrovertible one. The idea was beautiful but unworkable; it wasn’t at home in the world."

> Human relationships simply don’t work, at any scale, from the most intimate to the most abstract. The nuclear family is a repressive disaster, but monogamy and polygamy each have thousands of tiny, fast anxieties scurrying under their surfaces. Socialism and capitalism each unleashed unprecedented horrors racing across the world’s surface. We don’t know how to deal with one another; all we can ever do is fail in different ways.

I'm not going to try and pick this apart or disagree with it.

I do find it deeply fascinating that there is such a pronounced divide (or spectrum) between people who prefer solitude and those who prefer companionship. When we here of someone old dying alone our first thought can be "Oh, that's so sad," but we might learn that the person was alone entirely by choice.

It takes all kinds. Or, I guess, 十人十色.

(How can you have an article about a building with just one picture of the building?)

Here's a more in-depth article, with lots of photos, of the Tower, written by a couple of architects who lived there for a year:

http://www.failedarchitecture.com/nakagin/

"Pop culture tends to be fond of ruins ... Architectural failure doesn’t get the same regard. It tends to be demolished as quickly as possible or blankly ignored or, if neither of those are possible, widely moaned about." :-)