Essay and Exhibition Review: Metabolism (2026)

As MoMA's 'The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower' came to a close this July, Ryan Webber revisits a Metabolist icon, not only in its formal proposition but also through Kisho Kurokawa's Philosophy of Symbiosis. Read against the technological optimism of the present, this essay argues that symbiosis never aimed for fusion or harmony, but rather pointed towards a coexistence that holds difference intact.