The legacy of the iconic Nakagin capsule tower
designboom.com
designboom.com
Members of this movement created everything from Tokyo’s iconic phone booth, to the ubiquitous soy sauce container, to ski cabins and a plan to dredge the whole tokyo bay to construct a completely designed cityscape, with some truly wild proposals.
FWIW even ignoring the issue with maintenance of the commons, the capsules were originally designed with a 25 years lifespan, but neither refurbishement nor replacement was done during the tower's life.
At opening each capsule cost $110k (in 2024 dollars), during the update proposal 20 years ago renovation costs were estimated at $50k (in 2024 dollars), per capsule.
> The highly complex geometry involved
In my understanding the superstructural geometry was relatively simple, it's a pretty standard core with a lift and a stairwell around it.
The apparent external complexity is because capsules can be attached both longitudinally and transversally, and each "floor" is composed of a large landing for the lift stop and two smaller ones (aka there are three small flights of stairs per floor), and the capsules are attached to each landing, which creates a staggered appearance.
IIRC the tower also had a massive design flaw for mass market: access to the top of a capsule was necessary to remove it, so the capsules were not easily swappable for refurbishment or replacement, or just to move to a different tower with your capsule, something you'd imagine would be an advantage of the design.
The one place you do see capsule architecture is cruise ships. The rooms are built elsewhere and then slotted into the ship en masse. But in this case, ships are moved to a shipyard to be serviced. In the tower model, the maintenance machines have to come to the tower, which is much harder to make economically viable for single replacements.
Eh. If it had caught up it’s pretty reasonable that capsule design would have supported such a use case, by adding features to securely stow items as on ships or planes e.g. latches, strap hooks, etc…
They didn't even have hot water for years. That, plus the low occupancy, so the repairs are split between less people. Plus the land ownership, that maybe it was split from the apartment ownership and you'd need to pay additional fees. And I didn't know (or remember) what you commented about the inability to remove pods that had another pods over them, that's a maintenance bummer.
It's like a car (or your teeth), when you begin to delay maintenance. It's not only the cost of the summed delayed maintenance, but the additional surprises that could appear because the unmaintained property degrades faster.
Given these all happened around the a similar period I'm not surprised. It's cool to see the things that provided inspiration to others.
The economist in me in partially hopeful that there is a way to address such an inefficiency.
Take a plain partition wall. If you build it architecturally, it’ll be optimized. Likely out of metal/timber and sheetrock, or bricks. It mainly is what it is and needs full replacement by craftspeople for modifications.
Now take the same wall made vernacularly. Possibly made out of clay and straw, or stones, or timber. Might be two feet wide in certain places. It can be carved, reused, expanded by the user at will.
Efficiency and robustness are a necessary tradeoff. If you live in a cave you can carve out new rooms given a spoon and free time. But most of us would prefer the comforts of modern buildings.
I had the chance of joining a tour there years ago. Everything is build on a grid of 90cm cube modules and most rooms are bounded by movable panels - some plain other made of glass - which can be moved to reconfigure the space. That’s supposed to offer some flexibility as to how the building works.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_the_Economy_and_...
>Circular economy
中銀カプセルスタイル: 20人の物語で見る誰も知らないカプセルタワー(Nakagin Capsule Style)
December 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-4794224880
Also, land and building ownership is separated on Japan, so depending on how you got your home, you could own an apartment or single family home, but still be paying rental for the land that it uses.[1]
Edit: Also, from the West we aren't familiar with how often do they rebuild stuff like, for example, the temples. We arrive to a, let's say, 300 years old temple, and we're imagining it being 300 years old. Of course, being mostly wood, they're like huge Theseus temples that, during the years, they're fixed and repaired and pieces substituted and probably right now the oldest wood piece is 'only' a 150 years old. Others were burnt down due to accidents or war. And not only that, some others are regularly rebuilt as a tradition or ceremony. Like the one in Ise (Mie) that has been rebuilt every 20 years since the 690 [2]
0: https://www.archdaily.com/980830/built-to-not-last-the-japanese-trend-of-replacing-homes-every-30-years
1: https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/07/11/freehold-vs-leasehold-land-ownership-available-foreign-residents-japan
2: https://www.archdaily.com/1002972/the-eternal-ephemeral-architecture-of-shikinen-sengu-the-japanese-temple-rebuilt-every-20-yearsApparently a sufficient number of people don't want to live in microscopic hamster cages, no matter how cool they look, not even as pied-à-terres.
This is also why you see so many articles online about buying cheap houses in rural Japan: because typically new owners will demolish old buildings like this rather than refurbish them in the way a building is in Paris or London.
My guess is that the Nagakin became a little too retro and run down, and the lack of this preservation culture meant that no one really wanted to live there. It would probably still exist and be in good condition had it been built in say, London - like The Barbican, for example.
An interesting article on the ephemeral idea: https://www.archdaily.com/1002972/the-eternal-ephemeral-arch...
I have lived in (modern) rooms not much bigger. For someone living by themselves, it's not bad at all. And lots of people do live in such sized spaces - eg hotels, or cities like NYC.
I have no idea how expensive the rent there was, but if it was low enough, in a large city with enough people on a tight budget, lots would be interested. Heck, with the current housing shortage in many places (like NL) where even getting a place to stay is a challenge, there would definitely be takers for such a place.