Concrete and Code
Concrete and Code brings together two of postwar Japan’s most radical movements – the avant-garde art collective Gutai and the visionary architects and urban planners, the Metabolists – to uncover an alternative narrative of modernism. Gutai’s spatial exeriments mobilized bodies, materials and environments, emphasizing spontaneity, experimental materiality and systems-based thinking, while the Metabolists envisioned adaptable cities through megastructures and capsules, imagining urban life as a self-regulating, cybernetic system. Read together, these movements highlight the radical material, social and technological dimensions of modernism, often overlooked in traditional accounts.
Grounded in extensive archival research and richly illustrated with rare documents, images and materials – including records from Expo ’70 and the Gutai Art Association – the book situates these experimental practices within the economic, political and technological transformations of postwar Japan. The volume illuminates a pivotal moment in modern art and architecture, showing how Japanese avant-garde experimentation reshaped creative practice and postwar discourse on technology, environment and urban life.
Concrete and Code brings together two of postwar Japan’s most radical movements – the avant-garde art collective Gutai and the visionary architects and urban planners, the Metabolists – to uncover an alternative narrative of modernism. Gutai’s spatial exeriments mobilized bodies, materials and environments, emphasizing spontaneity, experimental materiality and systems-based thinking, while the Metabolists envisioned adaptable cities through megastructures and capsules, imagining urban life as a self-regulating, cybernetic system. Read together, these movements highlight the radical material, social and technological dimensions of modernism, often overlooked in traditional accounts.
Grounded in extensive archival research and richly illustrated with rare documents, images and materials – including records from Expo ’70 and the Gutai Art Association – the book situates these experimental practices within the economic, political and technological transformations of postwar Japan. The volume illuminates a pivotal moment in modern art and architecture, showing how Japanese avant-garde experimentation reshaped creative practice and postwar discourse on technology, environment and urban life.
