[HN Gopher] The legacy of the iconic Nakagin capsule tower
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The legacy of the iconic Nakagin capsule tower
Author : pseudolus
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-05-24 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.designboom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.designboom.com)
| pvg wrote:
| Related thread in 2021
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27299363
| a1o wrote:
| Oh, I have seen these photos before but without context. Does
| anyone knows if there is any architectural photography book just
| about it? I would love to have it!
| pixelcort wrote:
| Yes there is a nice coffee table book that I keep in my living
| room!
|
| Zhong Yin kapuserusutairu: 20Ren noWu Yu deJian ruShui moZhi
| ranaikapuserutawa(Nakagin Capsule Style)
|
| December 23, 2020
|
| ISBN: 978-4794224880
| Luc wrote:
| More interior photos:
| https://www.designboom.com/architecture/noritaka-minami-1972...
| Macha wrote:
| A YouTube video which includes some internal footage:
|
| https://youtu.be/6SwvtBxxp2w
| ginko wrote:
| I guess early 70s might be pushing it but I'm having a hard time
| imagining that you could tear down a building like this in a
| European city without city conservationists getting officially
| involved.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| I think the Japanese don't get quite as invested in buildings
| of the past. They don't preserve and/or re-use buildings like
| we do in the US. Great for advancing architecture and design -
| not so great if you want to preserve history for some reason.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| IMHO, being an island on the Pacific rim, I think Japan has
| had centuries of "Well, that structure was lost to [insert
| natural disaster here], guess we'll have to rebuild".
| Whereas, Europe has "Its amazing that this structure has
| lasted through [insert any number of man made disasters, wars
| or disputes], we should see how much longer it can survive"
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Don't forget lightning. When touring temples in places like
| Mt Koya, it felt like all the buildings had been rebuilt
| because the original had been stuck by lightning.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Yep. Regular apartment or business buildings are teared down
| and rebuilt regularly, every 25 or 30 years, for compliance
| with new earthquake regulations. [0] Also, the 80's economic
| bubble long term effects are still showing: a lot was built
| with low quality materials, land lots were super expensive
| and there was less money for high quality building...
|
| 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-years
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| This matches the (albeit goth {dark|dirty}/industrial) aesthetic
| of William Gibson Necromancer (and others), and Blade Runner.
|
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| Dragon Ball must have been referencing this right? Not just the
| clean retro-futuristic style but the name capsule corp. too
| pimlottc wrote:
| I don't know that show but capsule hotels [0] are also a big
| thing in Japan, more widespread and probably more well-known
| than the capsule tower
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel
| os2warpman wrote:
| Nakagin is lauded by artists and designers but fell into
| disrepair due to low occupancy rates.
|
| Apparently a sufficient number of people don't want to live in
| microscopic hamster cages, no matter how cool they look, not even
| as pied-a-terres.
| keiferski wrote:
| Japanese culture has different ideas than the West when it
| comes to preservation vs. rebuilding structures, which is
| ultimately rooted in the fact that it's an island with typhoons
| and earthquakes, and thus architecture tended not to last long,
| historically at least.
|
| 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...
| user_7832 wrote:
| I think it's less of the size, and more of other things like
| amenities, and imo, those tiny windows.
|
| 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.
| user_7832 wrote:
| I really wish people explored such concepts more. There's gotta
| be a balance between "every unit/thing/room is a modular entity"
| and "the building is static, take it or leave it". If I had to
| guess, there seems to be significant inertia and friction in the
| whole process. You can't build something unless you have some
| money, and if it involves buying and/or demolishing existing
| structures, you need even deeper pockets, making it "sticky" (as
| it's a discontinuous function).
|
| The economist in me in partially hopeful that there _is_ a way to
| address such an inefficiency.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Of course there is! Vernacular architecture has been doing this
| for millenia, all the way to caves.
|
| 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.
| Incipient wrote:
| One issue with a tower like this definitely feels like it would
| be maintenance. The highly complex geometry involved, along with
| the number of external seals required, in an area that gets
| humid...keeping on top of it feels like it could have degraded
| too much to be worth repairing?
| masklinn wrote:
| The tower was ultimately demolished in 2022, though the
| capsules were removed first and two dozen are preserved.
|
| 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.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Capsule design in general was a popular idea, but swapping
| isn't feasible compared to moving. You would still want to
| remove most items from a capsule when being lifted by crane.
|
| 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.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Yep, what I felt from the last articles I read in the 3 or 4
| years before dismantling them, is the problem wasn't that the
| building had an expensive maintenance _per se_ , but
| maintenance being delayed for years and years.
|
| 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.
| aabhay wrote:
| For any interested, the best book I found on this topic is
| Project Japan (https://a.co/d/fcrNp6p). It dives into the history
| of the whole Metabolism movement (in my opinion, an effort to
| create more modular and dynamic architecture and entire city
| plans that could be deployed, migrated, and repurposed
| effectively).
|
| 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.
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