An Eternal Return? Considering the Temporality and Historicity of Metabolism

From our situation today, in the chastened aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the ambitions of the Metabolist architects appear superhuman, Herculean, even incomprehensible. There is something of the wonder and awe that those in the medieval and early modern eras experienced when seeing the ruins of Ancient Rome: the work of giants rather than men. The Metabolist visions of great platforms on the sea from which enormous urban extensions rose, or giant inhabited lattices of high-rise towers linked by inhabited crossbeams today seem audacious to the point of naïveté. Yet the distance that separates us from them is not one of scale, or capability, or even will. The urban transformation of contemporary China and India, the fantastical visions of artifcial islands and instant cities in the Gulf, and the ubiquity of powerful computing devices in every hand may have exceeded even the Metabolists’ imagination. I suggest that their strangeness to us lies elsewhere—in their relationship with the future and their past. It is in this temporal dimension that Metabolists feel most distant from us, and perhaps here that a reconsideration of their agenda has the most potential for insights into our own contemporary situation. This chapter considers the ways in which time has fgured in Metabolist conceptions of architecture and cities, and in the reception of these ideas. Three scales of temporality are considered: the modalities of change in architecture and urban space; general perspectives on the larger historical situation at the national or global level; and the unfolding life cycle of the movement and its animating ideas. Each of these levels affords a number of distinct temporal geometries and rhythms. In their interaction is found the specifcity of the historical formation that the Metabolists occupy, as is that of ours.