
Letter of Recommendation: The Nakagin Capsule Tower - prismatic
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-the-nakagin-capsule-tower.html
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blatherard
This building makes me think of the currently popular "Microservices
Architecture" and wonder what many of the systems that have adopted it will
look like in a few years.

Particularly, this paragraph: "There are dozens of tiny problems that
contributed to its decline, each one of them minutely nudging utopia into the
grot of reality. There’s no hot water. The capsules were initially lined with
a three-centimeter layer of asbestos for insulation, but within a few years,
the toxicity of that substance was a matter of public knowledge and as a
result, the large ventilation systems taking up a significant chunk of each
living space had to be permanently disabled. Rearranging the capsules turned
out to be much more expensive than originally anticipated and very rarely
happened. The promise that they could be upgraded or replaced over time was
never fulfilled; the original and occasionally very shoddy materials are still
in place. (For instance, the paper blinds that once decorated the tower’s
portholes have mostly rotted away. Now, some residents paste newspaper to
their windows to keep the light out.) But all these swarming problems just
feed into the singular, large, incontrovertible one. The idea was beautiful
but unworkable; it wasn’t at home in the world."

~~~
EdwardCoffin
I found that paragraph a bit perplexing: it attributed overall failure to
problems due to lack of maintenance. Sure, you fail to maintain something that
needs it then it will develop problems. That doesn't indicate a design problem
though. The article cites a bunch of such problems, then concludes that they
are evidence of an unworkable idea, which doesn't follow.

I wonder whether the building could be refurbished, using lessons learned.
Replace the asbestos with some other insulation that is non-toxic, and clean
the ventilation system. Lack of hot water provided by the infrastructure can
be point-of-use hot water heaters. The comment about the rotting window-blinds
is just mystifying to me: those have nothing to do with the building itself,
any building with similar blinds would be prone to the same problem, either
regularly replace them or use something more durable. And with respect to the
problems rearranging the capsules, they never specify what problems impeded
this activity: perhaps something could be done to alleviate such problems, but
it is hard to say in the absence of any concrete information.

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dietrichepp
> Human relationships simply don’t work, at any scale, from the most intimate
> to the most abstract. The nuclear family is a repressive disaster, but
> monogamy and polygamy each have thousands of tiny, fast anxieties scurrying
> under their surfaces. Socialism and capitalism each unleashed unprecedented
> horrors racing across the world’s surface. We don’t know how to deal with
> one another; all we can ever do is fail in different ways.

I'm not going to try and pick this apart or disagree with it.

I do find it deeply fascinating that there is such a pronounced divide (or
spectrum) between people who prefer solitude and those who prefer
companionship. When we here of someone old dying alone our first thought can
be "Oh, that's so sad," but we might learn that the person was alone entirely
by choice.

It takes all kinds. Or, I guess, 十人十色.

~~~
smellf
According to google translate, "十人十色" means "various colors." Pretty sure the
machine translation lost some original nuance ;)

~~~
dilemma
Ten people, ten colors/ways/tastes/opinions.

"To each their own."

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david-given
(How can you have an article about a building with just one picture _of_ the
building?)

Here's a more in-depth article, with lots of photos, of the Tower, written by
a couple of architects who lived there for a year:

[http://www.failedarchitecture.com/nakagin/](http://www.failedarchitecture.com/nakagin/)

~~~
oska
That's a much better article, thanks.

And here's a newspaper article from Oct 2014 describing the current status of
the Nakagin:

[http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2014/10/03/arts/tokyos-t...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2014/10/03/arts/tokyos-
tiny-capsules-architectural-flair/)

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ahazred8ta
"Pop culture tends to be fond of ruins ... Architectural failure doesn’t get
the same regard. It tends to be demolished as quickly as possible or blankly
ignored or, if neither of those are possible, widely moaned about." :-)

