REM KOOLHAAS PROJECT JAPAN

Skrevet af KOOLHAAS

This is a new architecture for postwar Japan. Once there was a nation
that went to war, but after they conquered a continent their own country
was destroyed by atom bombs...then the victors imposed democracy on the
vanquished. For a group of apprentice architects, artists, and
designers, led by a visionary, the dire situation of their country was
not an obstacle but an inspiration to plan and think - although they
were very different characters, the architects worked closely together
to realize their dreams, staunchly supported by a super-creative
bureaucracy and an activist state...after 15 years of incubation, they
surprised the world with a new architecture - Metabolism - that proposed
a radical makeover of the entire land...Then newspapers, magazines, and
TV turned the architects into heroes: thinkers and doers, thoroughly
modern men. Through sheer hard work, discipline, and the integration of
all forms of creativity, their country, Japan, became a shining
example...when the oil crisis initiated the end of the West, the
architects of Japan spread out over the world to define the contours of a
post-Western aesthetic. Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas
and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of
Metabolism, together with dozens of their mentors, collaborators,
rivals, critics, proteges, and families. The result is a vivid
documentary of the last avant-garde movement and the last moment that
architecture was a public rather than a private affair.