A Piece of Japan’s Most Iconic Futurist Tower Just Landed at MoMA

This month, visitors to the Museum of Modern Art’s first-floor gallery will be greeted by a hulking architectural relic. No mere dusty artifact, it represents one of the few surviving remnants of a cultural landmark that overlooked Tokyo for decades. When it rose, the Nagakin Capsule Tower was embraced for its unprecedented design and swiftly immortalized in popular media. But just as vital to the tower was the close community that came to reside within its walls, one that avidly championed its preservation—even after it was destroyed.

When Nagakin was demolished in 2022 after years of decline, the city lost an architectural icon. But not all of it was gone: 23 of the building’s “capsules,” or single-occupancy modules, were salvaged, with 16 of them now having found permanent homes with art institutions and commercial facilities. Among those collectors is New York’s MoMA, which acquired a capsule in 2023 and has now put it out on view.

Capsule A1305 stars in the museum’s year-long exhibition “The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower,” following a six-month restoration process that reinstated as many of its original fittings as possible. Museum members will get to enter the capsule during special events.

The rescued pod is joined by archival materials, including original photographs, models, films, and recordings, that document the structure’s evolution through the years. More than an architectural survey, the show, noted curators Evangelos Kotsioris and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, will also spotlight Nagakin’s former tenants who came to inhabit, cherish, and safeguard the tower.

The aim, Kotsioris told me over email, was to “foreground the ‘many lives’ architecture can lead: as concept, blueprint, commodity, dwelling, and memory… The exhibition is a rare opportunity to unfold architecture not just as design, but as social life, preservation effort, and evolving popular narrative.”

Designing the Nagakin Capsule Tower

The Nagakin Capsule Tower that emerged in Tokyo’s Ginza district in 1971 was born out of Kisho Kurokawa’s vision for a new mode of urban living. Workers commuting into the city, he thought, would find sanctuary in the building’s 8-by-13 feet micro-dwellings, which were designed to center the needs of an individual occupant (as opposed to a family). Such a cocoon, he said, would be “a place of rest to recover in modern society, an information base to develop ideas, and a home for urban dwellers who love the city center.”

Nagakin would come to house 140 prefabricated modules, each dotted with a large circular window and assembled in a stacking pattern that gave the steel and concrete tower its striking, asymmetrical silhouette. Inside were vibrant, ergonomically minded spaces that could be customized with amenities from TV sets to alarm clocks. So modern and forward-thinking was the project that Kurokawa insisted: “This building is not an apartment house.”

At its core, the design reflected Kurokawa’s principles of Metabolism, a theory he co-pioneered in 1960 that sought to fuse biology and technology, emphasizing adaptable and modular designs in the face of rapid urbanization. This also meant building with materials that could be easily replaced or recycled, thus refreshing a structure’s “metabolic cycle.” Where most Metabolist designs remained speculative, Nagakin had the rare distinction of being realized, Kotsioris noted.

“Kurokawa managed to turn a radical, seemingly utopian vision into a concrete reality,” he said. “The building crystallized Metabolist ideals of flexibility, renewal, and continuous transformation in a form that still feels ahead of its time.”

Nagakin’s Twilight Years

But despite Kurokawa’s best intentions and the reception that greeted the tower’s opening (all units were sold), the 1973 oil shock dashed the promise of intercity mobility. Over the years, the building’s capsules would be reimagined as offices, student rooms, art studios, libraries, galleries, and even DJ booths by young professionals, creatives, weekday commuters, and the odd Metabolism fan.

Even as the structure began falling into grave disrepair from the 1990s, some of the residents remained Nagakin stalwarts. These tenants, said Vilaplana de Miguel, were “committed to preserving the building’s legacy, and their solidarity became a form of resistance against the repeated threats of demolition.”

A group of residents created the Nakagin Capsule Tower Building Preservation and Regeneration Project to push forward the restoration efforts in collaboration with Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associates. Chiefly, they sought to realize the late architect’s plan, first proposed in 1998, to renew the capsules through refurbishment or reinstallation.

Alas, their advocacy did not pay off. Nagakin’s management company, lacking either the funds or the will, leveled the building.

The Afterlife of an Architectural Icon

The tower’s fall did nothing to stop the preservation group. Ahead of the Nagakin’s destruction, it earmarked 23 modules for recovery, striking a deal with the demolition company to receive them free of charge. (The building was also captured in photogrammetry by digital consultancy Gluon and archived as a digital 3D model.)

Today, the surviving capsules are dispersed in and beyond Tokyo. According to the New York Times, two pods, owned by entertainment firm Shochiku, are on permanent display in Ginza, and another one is being trotted out by an Osaka steel company at its trade shows. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, has a capsule, as does the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

MoMA’s unit once sat right at the top of Nagakin’s Tower A and represents what Vilaplana de Miguel calls “one of the best-preserved capsules.” Still, it required attention after 50 years of exposure to the elements.

Beginning in December 2022, Kurokawa’s office led a restoration of A1305 that saw craftspeople revive the unit by hand according to original drawings and material specifications, said Kotsioris. The restored unit features original fittings—from cabinetry to bathroom fixtures—and even appliances, including a Sanyo refrigerator, Sony Trinitron TV, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The exhibition environment has even been painted in bold pinks, oranges, and yellows to reflect the color palette of Tower A.

“The result,” Kotsioris noted, “is a rare, near-total reconstruction of a living, time-stamped interior.”

It is rare as well, Vilaplana de Miguel added, for “an actual fragment of a building” to enter a museum’s collection, much less for it to anchor an exhibition, offering a singular lens through which to tell Nagakin’s story. “In doing so,” she explained, “we hope this exhibition can serve as both a blueprint and a provocation—demonstrating how museums might approach the archiving and display of ephemeral architecture.”

Today, as the urbanization and mobility Kurokawa foresaw continues to alter cityscapes, the show also stokes broader questions about urban living, housing models, and sustainable design. For Kotsioris, Nagakin invites us to consider alternative ways of living and building, particularly as urban space becomes a premium for single dwellers. Not for nothing, he noted, does the museum’s window facing 53rd Street carry the large text: “Would you live here?”

“This building, with its modularity and adaptability,” he said, “offers a timely lens through which to rethink how we inhabit the city—not as a relic, but as a living question.”

“The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, July 11, 2025–July 12, 2026.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com