In 1959, the Ise Bay Typhoon swept through Japan’s Aichi prefecture, destroying entire agrarian communities with an onslaught of catastrophic flooding. One year later, architect Kisho Kurakawa presented his proposal for “Agricultural City,” a design concept that lofted not just buildings, but the entire city grid onto stilts, elevating the built environment four meters above agricultural soil. Best known for his experimentation with capsule architecture, Kurosawa was part of a group of designers and architects who formed the Metabolism Movement. Conceived in the wake of war, environmental disaster, and cultural reckoning, the movement was founded with the intention of furnishing a design philosophy for an uncertain future. As the collective members wrote in their manifesto, which they introduced at the World Design Conference held in Tokyo in 1960, “We regard human society as a vital process, a continuous development from atom to nebula. The reason why we use such a biological word, the metabolism, is that, we believe, design and technology should be a denotation of human vitality.” For the Metabolists, the key to designing for the future was in embracing mutability, creating living infrastructures of resilience that could evolve alongside their contexts.
As MOLD begins the process of archiving our content, the metabolic philosophy feels particularly resonant. Across our twelve-year inquiry into the future of food and design, our publication’s primary preoccupation has been with mediating mutability through new models, tools, and collective ways of being. For us, food has always been an entry point. A way to break bread together, to contextualize systems of labor and power, to build ecological relationship, to imagine food sovereign futures. I am reminded of how Natilee Harren writes about food in her essay about the 1960s neo-art collective, Fluxus, that it is the perfect “metabolic readymade,” a medium whose universality “articulates the metabolism of life with the global circulation of commodities”. In one of MOLD’s final series, we bring together a collection of stories that peer into the processes of metabolism—from digestion to decay to regeneration— to better understand our current cultures of consumption.
In the first installment of the series, curator of Ecological Design Collective Anand Pandian takes us on a discursive journey through various architectures of decay, investigating how designers and artists from the Venice Architecture Biennale to Accra’s innovative construction studios are navigating the relationship between rot and repair. In his piece, he asks what it might look like to design for decay. Ludwig Hurtado reports on a different infrastructure of decomposition, interviewing those working at the forefront of the green burial movement. Orla Keating-Beer’s conversation with artist Asunción Molinos Gordo zooms in on the microbial as a starting point for understanding the metabolic processes of the city and its waste. In collaboration with our friends over at the Syllabus Project, we are re-publishing a syllabus compiled by artist, researcher and writer Adriana Gallo on the Metabolic Sublime(s). To round out the series, I speak with author, philosopher, and food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva about how the interconnected web of our food system and her latest book, The Nature of Nature: The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change.
Metabolism shows us that endings are also beginnings. While food may be an entry point, our existence has always been cyclical, a dance in the midst of death, digestion and all the living, metabolic processes in between. As Vandana Shiva once said, “Eating provides us an opportunity to return to the earth.”
With gratitude,
Isabel
