Naturalism in Architecture Creating A Culture of Resilience
Naturalism in Architecture Creating A Culture of Resilience
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Abstract
Naturalism is the philosophy that adopted the theory of evolution and the domination of natural properties. The
popularity of naturalism was due to the rise of the extensive biological researches and the evolution of natural
sciences by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The emergence and the rise
of these scientific theories were the contributing factors to the domination of naturalistic trends. It had an ample
impact on urban and architectural schemes. Environmental catastrophes and the climate change that followed the
second world war that reached its peak in the last two decades of the twentieth century were the major factors
in attracting the attention to the importance of preserving nature. Naturalism was inspired by biological theories
using a biological metaphor. The philosophy brought to mind techno-scientific images which drew out the concept
of genetic architecture. These images tried to synchronize with the natural variables in order to achieve the concept
of sustainable development. This paper aims to examine the concept of sustainable architecture by studying the
architectural movements that are influenced by nature and biological theories, such as terms, models, projects, and
buildings. For a deep understanding of the current discourse, this paper searches for the impact of the philoso-
phy of naturalism on the history of sustainable architecture. The paper focuses on the notion of resilience while
picturing the transformation of economic, political, social and physical structures into resilient urban spaces and
organizational patterns which have the potential to grow and change—a subject mostly presented in a historical
review.
© 2018 The Authors. Published by IEREK press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords
Naturalism; Sustainable; Resilience
1. Introduction
“Sustainable architecture,” has become an excessively used term in recent decades as a response to environmental
catastrophe, and climate change. This notion has a broad applicability but usually used in partial application. The
term is always used to point out to recent environmental building solutions, focusing in using new materials which
capable to recycle or reuse, and ecolabeling, and with a little concern to social and cultural issues. Sustainable
architecture is scarcely discussed as a decisive key driver has a potential to make a greater systemic shift, which
would have to foster a radical rethinking of conventional economics, consumption manners, and sustainable life
styles. This paper traces the impact of the Naturalism’s philosophy on architecture with concentrating on the
case of Metabolism architectural movement in Japan which emerged in the 1960s and drew the attention to its
revolutionary and visionary urban planning and architectural schemes. Metabolism’s prime manifesto, addressed
a huge concern to cultural resilience as an expression of national identity. This vision had been seen from a
contemporary point of view.
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The movement of the Metabolism had influenced with the new political and environmental changes and directly
responded to the human and environmental catastrophe after the atomic bombing of Japan in the Second World
War. Its architecture came out as a complete and radical transformation of Japan as a political system, social,
and physical structures into resilient spatial and organizational patterns capable to change to respond to changing
activities. Metabolism is the belief that design and technology should express the vitality of the living organisms.
The basis of the ideas adopted by metabolism architects results from the idea that everything in life changes
and is altered by rapid technological developments. As a result of the changing human needs, buildings must
adapt their spaces to the new activities. This requires them to be able to change and grow as a living organism.
Metabolists employed biological metaphors, retrieved technoscientific images, and triggered the conception of a
genetic architecture in vernacular forms. They struggled to link between their visionary urbanism, institutional
infrastructures, and the individual capability in customizing cells and adaptable temporary order of dwellings,
which could expand, shrink or substitute according to the functions need.
Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist have one of the latest correlations with Metabolism is, Project Japan:
Metabolism Talk (2009). It is an extensive synopsis of interviews with the proponents of the movement, in the sev-
enties and eighties of the twentieth century, previously unknown archive material, and photographs documenting
the making of the book and revisiting the Metabolism’s architecture. The authors tried to explore the movement’s
revolutionary Agenda, projects schemes, and the reasons behind the success of Metabolism vision and ideas in
the 1960s, and its disappearance twenty five years later “in the bonfire of neoliberalism” (Koolhaas, Obrist, Ota,
Westcott, & Daniell, 2009).
2. Resilient Urbanism
By the 1980s, as a result of great technological and industrial development, the interest in the natural environment
increased. Architecture started seeking for compatibility with the surrounding environment without harming the
natural environment and climate. There have also been persistent attempts to develop architecture and accom-
modate it with the requirements of the times and needs of users. Due to the consciousness of the environmental
catastrophe the world is passing by, the concept of environmental resilience has become mainstream .The notion
of resilience first emerged in the 1970s related to ecological systems. Recently, it has become one of the major
concepts in contemporary urbanism in the context of environmental, economic, and social crisis. It has usually
been defined as the capability to response to, and recover from various threats with minimum harm to public safety
and health, that is besides focusing on developing the economy of a particular urban area. However, the term of
resilience is mostly addressed in environmental and technical contexts and often disregards social and cultural im-
plications (Goldstein, 2011). Resilience gives systems the ability to adapt according to change; thus, it always be
capable to rethink assumptions and build new systems (Folke, Carpenter, Walker, Scheffer, Chapin, & Rockström,
2010). When Metabolism was presented to the international design community at the World Design Conference
in Tokyo, (WDC) 1960, the term was not in use yet. Metabolists impeded the notion of resilient urbanism in
technical, socio-ecological, and cultural terms. A resilient architect’s society presents here its systematic spatial
reorganization in order to achieve a balance between change and preservation as expressed in the design of dif-
ferent life cycles of infrastructures and individual dwelling unit, and of permanent and changeable parts of the
urban system which give the ability to add, subtract or substitute different urban elements according to change in
functions or needs.
Metabolism left its influences on the Japanese architectural community, beside it had a decisive impact on Western
architectural and urban discourse (Folke, Carpenter, Walker, Scheffer, Chapin, & Rockström, 2010). The WDC in
Tokyo was the first international event Japan ever held, it presented new urban discourse and turned the WDC into
a forum where discus differences between Japanese and Western culture. Metabolists were searching for Japanese
cultural identity differ from Western models, however, Metabolism took a new approach.
Dealing with new models, terms, and images that could be applied more generally, and reflected a broader shift,
not only in Japanese architecture but also to the contemporary architecture. Metabolists connected traditional
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models with a historic, universally applicable, and structuralist spatial conceptions with biological metaphor. All
of these underline the strong influence of organic theory and expressed by cutting edge technology. Metabolists
created their conceptual movement focusing on nature and organic schemes accomplished an accepted stereotype
of Japanese architecture.
3. Envisioning Reorganization
The architectural historian Ryuichi Hamaguchi divides post-war modernism in Japan into two separate decades.
After the second world war, all the main cities in Japan were destructed, particularly Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The guiding theories as early rationalism and functionalism were taken up again. Hamaguchi claims that around
the middle of the 1950s, an architectural discourse shifted from functionalism to ‘aesthetic consciousnesses. In
Japan, around 1960 architects started to engage in a broader discourse on cities planning and urbanities. Architects
launched numerous Conceptual Proposals for urban redevelopment. Kenzo Tange‘s Metabolist proposal for Tokyo
Bay was one of the first examples of this both theoretical and utopian approach to urbanism in Japan (Hamaguchi,
1966).
Figure 1. Tokyo Bay (1960) KenzoTange, with Kisho Kurokawa and Arata Isozaki.
By the end of the 1950s Japan was still fighting for achieving the task of housing millions of people left homeless
in affected cities. The consciousness of having lost the war, brought with it a deep concern of losing the Japanese
national identity with having a disconnection with one’s own culture. This is created the desire to retrieve the
national heritage of Japan. The Japanese architects tried to unite a new Japanese alliance to participate in creating
a utopian city planning.
It was a wonderful chance for the Japanese architects and urban designers to communicate directly with their
foreign colleagues during the WDC in Tokyo in 1960. This event plays not only as a catalyst for a generation
shift in general especially in the design community in an Asian context, but also as a marker for a growing self-
consciousness of a non- western architecture. In similar way, Metabolists defined Japanese culture vis-a-vis a
western audience. They used the term ”Japanese” as opposite to Western modernism, which they considered it as
an essentially uniform condition. The spokesman of the metabolists, Noboru Kawazoe, claimed that in Japanese
architecture there are a strong relation between functional and symbolic values. In opposition, he emphasized that
West modernism - which for him was purely functionalist.
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The Metabolism’s manifesto prepared for the conference (Kawazoe, 1960), was contained essays and visionary
projects and schemes, but the most visible was the drawings of Kikutake (Wendelken, 2000). The projects pre-
sented were theoretical designs and visionary schemes‘ discussing cities and urbanities dealing with the issue of
accommodating a population growing into the millions, drawing the attention to sites that had not been considered
before like the ocean or the sky. The publication also included an essay by Noboru Kawazoe, where he point out
to the nuclear catastrophe and promotes ‘the unity of man and nature and the evolution of human society into a
peaceful state of unity, like a single living organism.’ He ends his essay with: ‘Our constructive age . . . will be the
age of high metabolism. Order is born from chaos, and chaos from order. Extinction is the same as creation . . . .
We hope to create something which, even in destruction will cause subsequent new creation. This something must
be found in the form of the cities we were going to make—cities constantly undergoing the process of metabolism’
(Kawazoe, 1960).
The Metabolist manifesto at the WDC presented The concept of megastructure as a unique Japanese contribution
to modern architecture, and according to Reyner Banham its marking the maturity of Japanese architecture and
its independence of other cultures,’ and of “‘neo-colonialist” views of what it ought to be,’ (Banham, 1976) . The
term of ‘megastructure’ appeared for the first time in a paper by Fumihiko Maki’s Collective Form (Maki, 1964).
The idea of megastructure is like the natural evolution of the organic idea with respect to growth and development.
Different parts of the same organism work in the same mechanism as flowers, leaves, and fruits that grow from one
tree.
As a response to actual issues, the Metabolists developed their organic schemes of network cities. One of the
major problems was recognized as the lack of comprehensive infrastructure in Japan, which was the main obstacle
to urban development and economic growth. Progress of means of transportation increased mobility which was
promoted as a matter of individual freedom. The urban design proposals which presented by different members
of the Metabolism movement dealt with topological questions (The following). They did not take a traditional
way envision infill of streets and new public transportation systems to solve this problem, but they took a radical
approach dealing with new forms of total organizations that went beyond the conventional urban planning for the
existing city. The mission they decided to go through was set on unifying all urban aspects into one big organism,
which held as a containers for various functional units of different life-cycles. These megastructures branched
in a hierarchy from large traffic arteries and transportation lanes down to streets on the pedestrian level. They
linked all the public and commercial facilities with housing, which was being organized to become self-contained
community.
4. Metabolism in Architecture
The urban sociologist Ernest Burgess’ created a biological term” Metabolism” in his article ‘The Growth of Cities’,
first published in 1925 in the book” The City Metabolism” which inspired from the anabolic and katabolic pro-
cesses of a living body. Burgess used the term ‘social metabolism’ to identify the process of growth and trans-
formation of cities. The most revolutionary concept in Burgess’ at this time was the stating the cities’ growth as
‘normal’ and not as the reason for social demise, as in the rhetoric of the Garden City proponents (The foremost).
Because a city behaves in its formation and extension like a living organism it grows and changes, and thus endure
naturally cycles of disintegration and reintegration.
Beside Metabolism’s biological implication, the term was often showed up in the context of Buddhist values, espe-
cially by Western writers, focusing on the model of death and rebirth. Günter Nitschke in a special Japan number
of AD in 1964, edited an essay claiming that ‘Metabolism’ can be translated to the Japanese expression ”Shinch-
intaisha”, which means renewal or regeneration. Cherie Wendelken has pointed out to the Buddhist concepts of
transmogrification and reincarnation (Wendelken, 2000). In this way, we find out that the notion of ‘Metabolism’
carries both a universal scientific connotation as well as a Japanese spiritual values and beliefs.
Metabolism as a biological metaphor focused on the reorganization of the relationship between society and the
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individual adopting the Comprehensive planning which would make people free (Lin, 2010). The disintegration
of the city into ‘cells’ corresponded to the breaking away from conventional family structures especially in the
modern western societies and the strengthening of the situation of the individual in Japanese society.
As a native Japanese model for the impermanence of architecture and a boost for Metabolist principles served the
national monument of the Ise shrine, reconstructed every 20 years since the 7th century in the Shinto tradition.
Another example, the historical model of the 16th century Katsura Detached Palace, which was extended twice
over 150 years into an asymmetrical plan, as representing a Japanese tradition of metabolic and ideas of growth
(Koolhaas, Obrist, Ota, Westcott, & Daniell, 2009). Metabolism created an organic stand for visualizing the regen-
eration of Japanese culture after the destructions of fire bombings and two atomic blasts and severe environmental
catastrophe. It granted the acceptance of Japan as ground zero - a site of rebirth where culture would be regenerated
from an underlying spirit of Japanese traditional values and beliefs and give it a new dimension as a modern nation.
For that reason the Metabolists proposed an organic connection between the individual and a fundamental cultural
pattern (Wendelken, 2000).
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Tange’s plan addressed a units of two square kilometers would stand a high-rise building complex symbolizing
entrance and exit, or interchange with a three level of terrific, graded due to speed to facilitate the transportation
of up to 2.5 million inhabitant along the city axes plus providing a city with a communication network and under-
ground parking. These axes would be bounded with housing for five million people on man-made islands, each
high rise building considered as amegastructure or a little city or community of its own. Tange presenting his
three dimensional Megastructure as a superstructure, consisting of terraces on which the inhabitants could erect
private houses according to their own tastes while the artificial land stayed in public hand. ‘Private space where
man lives and works in the air, and common space on the ground level where modern society unfolds freely its
own interactions are separated’ (Nitschke, 1964). The plan rejected the traditional form of the static master plan
and envisioned an ‘organic’, more dynamic system stretch out across the water of Tokyo Bay. This dynamic was
able to absorb programmatic changes and to respond to economic and social needs. Tange developed his schemes
to give an expandable urban forms that could grow and change.
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8. Conclusions
Naturalism has influenced architecture and urban design in many ways. The large impact of naturalism shows
in Metabolism. Metabolists develop their organic schemes to respond to changing activities. Metabolism is the
belief that design and technology should express the vitality of living organisms. The basis of the ideas adopted
by metabolists architects results from the idea that everything in life changes and is altered by rapid technological
developments. As a result of changing human needs, building must adapt their spaces to the new activities. This
requires them to be able to change and grow as a living organism.
The movement of the Metabolism regenerated a new relation with Japanese traditional culture and a gave their
architecture a new identity differs from Western architecture trends. The Metabolist schemes earned a large appre-
ciation of visionary projects on huge scales, especially in the west.
One of the major objectives of the Metabolists to find a new approach capable to solve the new urban problems that
came out with the rapid growth of megacities. They focused on of land scarcity, housing shortage, and unplanned
sprawl. They also addressed fundamental social considerations, philosophical metaphor, political reflections on
the structure and architecture features, and national identity and culture.
Metabolists created a radically different conception of the city, conceived that the strict separation of public and
private realms, making one part of the megacity an infrastructure at large and disintegrated the other part into
a micro landscape of cells. It shows that a population are moving freely associate and dissociate according to
personal needs. This society was not related to place; it integrated through the availability of the megastructure
and group form, metaphoric images such as cycle and tree, and the idea of an underlying cultural heritage.
The Metabolist visions of a resilience reveals various contemporary urban problems. The current discourse now is
discussing how to design sustainable cities which have similar challenges such as, land scarcity, housing shortage,
insufficiency of infrastructures, and a lack of transportation means. Sustainable architecture have not led to the
emergence of more resilient cities. Koolhaas and Obricht, point out to the retreat of the state’s organizations and
the prominence of the private market in driving development. They show the network of relations behind the
movement. They demonstrate the movement of Metabolism’s proponents and their ability to collaborate and build
alliances to represent a wide range of other disciplines in order to fulfill their concept of a resilient culture which
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9. References
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2. Folke, C., Carpenter, S. R., Walker, B., Scheffer, M., Chapin, T., & Rockström, J. (2010). Resilience Think-
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03610-150420
3. Goldhagen, S. W., & Legault, R. (2000). Anxious modernisms: Experimentation in postwar architectural
culture (pp. 279-285). Cambridge, Massachusetts/ London: MIT Press.
4. Goldstein, B. E. (2011). Collaborative resilience: Moving through crisis to opportunity. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
5. Hamaguchi, R. (1966). A View of Modern Japanese Architecture – 20 Years after the War (p. 19). The Japan
Architect.
6. Kawazoe, N. (Ed.). (1960). Metabolism: The proposals for a new urbanism (pp. 48-49). Bitjutu Syuppan
Sha.
7. Koolhaas, R., Obrist, H., Ota, K., Westcott, J., & Daniell, T. (2009). Project Japan: Metabolism talks...Köln:
Taschen.
8. Lin, Z. (2010). Kenzo Tange and the metabolist movement urban utopias of modern Japan (p. 95).
9. Maki, F. (1964). Investigations in collective form (p. 132). St. Louis: School of Architecture, Washington
University.
10. Maki, M. (2005). Toward Group Form, in Ockman, J. Architecture culture, 1943-1968: A documentary
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13. Wendelken, C. (2000). Putting Metabolism Back in Place. The Making of a Radically Decontextualized
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