Metabolist My Brains Out!

Ahhhh! Someone made the Nakagin Capsule Tower in LEGO! Guess who was researching this building less than an hour ago! Cosmic Coincidence!!

This is the first (shared online) creation by a builder going by the name "SPACE, TIME, & REALITY." Crazy, huh?

The Nakagin Capsule Tower was one of the few built projects by a group of Japanese architects in the 1960s called the Metabolists. The Metabolists shared interests with Archigram, perhaps most famous for Plug-In City and Walking City. Of note to our dear readers, this passage from the book Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations 1956-76:

A typical British boy of Archigram’s generation, growing up in the 1940s, was apt to play with Meccano, and we might credit to the rivet-and-connector set the same influence upon the formative Archigram architect as was been described to the Froebel blocks at the disposal of Frank Lloyd Wright in kindergarten. Plug-In City deployed a very Meccano-like iconography. Nobel laureate chemist Professor Sir Harry Kroto—of the same generation as Archigram’s members and sharing their passion for graphic design and Buckminster Fuller Geodetics—has drawn a correlation between the decline in British engineering and the decline in Meccano, arguing that LEGO, which supplanted Meccano as a toy, produces less didactic structures.

However, Archigram did use actual LEGO pieces in a model of Plug-in City (photos of which frustratingly can't be found)

Speaking of architecture made of LEGO, readers may remember the recent James May LEGO House. Of course, the house is not made entirely out of pieces, a revelation that shocked and dismayed the hobbyist community: "I knew it was going to be a farce" - the ignorant Don Solo. How dare they adhere to basic health and safety regulations? How dare they be unsuccessful in completely rewriting the building code to allow this temporary novelty?

And when pictures were released, boy did knickers get twisted: "Someone kill this thing please." "It’s horrendous, what an awful color scheme !! A missed opportunity in terms of artistry." "This certainly falls in the bottom tier of brickshelf creations." "What a waste a bricks!" Because surely, if a well funded TV show struggled to get enough bricks for a ball, this James May guy would be able to get the millions of bricks required to make a color-coordinated, historically-styled HOUSE! Right? Right?? sigh.