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The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

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Re: The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

#51

Post by tinus_hn »

ekianjo wrote: post #45
nicolas_t wrote: post #44

I always wanted to stay in the airbnb from that building to actually feel what it would be like to live there. What stopped me though is the fact that there's asbestos and that the conditions of the capsule were bad enough that I could end up inhaling some asbestos. How much of a concern is that really? You hear such horror stories about Asbestos but given how widely used it was and how little care was taken to demol…

Asbestos is mainly a concern in particulate form and therefore more for construction workers. Staying one night will have no impact on your health.

Asbestos is a game of chance. While of course there’s plenty of chance nothing will happen there’s also a small chance one fiber gets loose and ends up in a bad place and causes you to die a pretty miserable death.

Re: The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

#52

Post by pell »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30
kiba wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today, we're working on building retro sci-fi style rockets with volume greater than the ISS. Pretty exciting time to be alive.

Yes, though this and electric cars both required a single man with combination of wealth, charisma and ability to think beyond their own wallet - which is a very rare set of characteristics to coincide in a single person - who then could drag the market kicking and screaming into accepting EVs and reusable rockets. Unfortunately, depending on such happenstance doesn't scale, so it's not a reliable way of creating a b…

I think you're giving Musk too much credit here.

Re: The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

#53

Post by mooseling »

This reminds me of Jacques Tati's wonderful film, Mon Oncle (1958). There's a residential house with many similarities to the Nakagin Capsule Tower, and it has so much personality that it's almost a character in itself. Tati gets as much comedy out of its silly, "forward-looking" design as he can, and he contrasts it excellently with an equally ridiculous old house in the centre of the village.

Re: The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

#54

Post by buran77 »

masswerk wrote: post #18
mustacheemperor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can put on a lightweight headset and hang out to shoot pool with a group of strangers from around the world in virtual reality. In my lifetime countries, including political enemies, worked together to build a space station that has been continually occupied by humans, each usually staying long term, since it became habitable. I watched the F-35 hover over the water and shoot out of sight instantly at Fleet Week, a…

Hm. In 1969, you could watch a Harrier jet hover the water and shoot out of sight and several emancipatory legislations were a direct result of these era. (In fact, you could watch Apollo 16 going to the moon and celebrate the equal employment act passed just the previous month.) And it's also the 1970s, when awareness rose for environmental issues (like leaded gasoline and many more). Regarding pixels, well, there w…

The view OP presents is a bit grim though. Most of the real "modernity" of the '70s was not something regular people would enjoy. Going to the Moon, or the Concorde were no different from today's fusion experiments, including the fact that they were based heavily on "earlier work".

Perhaps society decided to turn that progress into something a regular person could benefit from. Think EVs, or a network of internet satellites, work from home (and everything supporting that), getting all your shopping delivered at home, all the virtual "networks" (I don't mean FB here, any networking possibility) you can imagine, and all the knowledge now available from the comfort of your own personal pocket device. There are also plenty of social movements and evolution, think on the line of equal rights, that may have been rooted in the '70s but were completely in the realm of the implausible until the last 2 decades.

Of course people no longer see that as evolution and modernity because so many were born into them already. They look like normality.

And even the "modernity" that was available to normal people in their daily lives was mostly for the sake of the looks. I lived in some modern buildings of the '70s (not unlike the one presented in the article) and that wasn't modernity, it was creativity and embellishment mixed with a lot of impracticality. They were more art than practical creation. The result of the same current that gave birth to The Jetsons a decade earlier, just put in tangible reality in the '70s.

Re: The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

#55

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rbg246 wrote: post #48
masswerk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That these planes were operated only by BA and Air France (and a similar plane to some extent by Aeroflot) was merely an accident. Concorde was developed as a mass transport and there was broad interest. Then the US ban and the oil crisis happened.

Yes but this is my point is there are great reasons why concorde failed but equally it's technology was not enough of progress to overcome the fact that 747s could do things at much greater scale and more economically. The reach of aeroplane travel is far more impressive now than flying under a 100 people at supersonic speeds. I also dispute that there was mass transport plans - the total passenger load was tiny. Not…

Concorde failed because of politics, not technology. The US wanted to make way for its own SST project so it limited Concorde's access to the US market.

A Concorde B variant with an even longer range and quieter engines was already being developed, and airlines were very interested in it. if the US market had been more open it's likely other markets would have followed suit.

Once it was stabilised in the market other improvements would have followed. Concorde was always a first class for the first class market, not an air bus. But if supersonic travel had become established there would have been market pressure to commoditise it, and we might have seen a continuing supersonic long haul market working in parallel with the smaller more local subsonic services we have now.

Re: The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

#56

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rbg246 wrote: post #46
papaf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazing. The 70s looks at your example of progress, thinks of it as a big ARPANET and is not impressed.

Scale is everything though - great technology is nothing without reach

Politics is everything.

We have wristwatch and pocket supercomputers with access to a global network.

But many people also live in a far more precarious economy, the global network is far too much a source of poor-quality or tainted information and toxic social experiences, monitoring and manipulation of all kinds are pervasive, and a compulsory personal ethic of branding, consumption, and selling is far more prevalent than anything more adventurous or creative.

Re: The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

#57

Post by pydry »

rbg246 wrote: post #9
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #2

Travelling to the 70s must feel like going to the future: these futuristic capsule buildings existed, supersonic air travel was commonplace, and there were humans travelling to the moon. The epitome of modernity these days is how fast your car videos can load.

Having a total of 20 supersonic airlines wasn't exactly common place. And spending 1.5% of your GDP to send like ten people to the moon probably isn't that great an achievement from a cost benefit analysis (I know there will be fierce disagreement). Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazi…

The computers and communication tech you love were developed as a result of the moon landing. Loads of stuff like that entered the public domain.

That's apart from improvements in digital imaging, large scale manufacturing, material sciences and flight control that were derived from the project.

Moreover, it was a longer term investment in humankind becoming a spacefaring species - something that will be necessary for our survival.

It was a bargain.

Re: The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

#59

Post by FabHK »

baybal2 wrote: post #32
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #2

Travelling to the 70s must feel like going to the future: these futuristic capsule buildings existed, supersonic air travel was commonplace, and there were humans travelling to the moon. The epitome of modernity these days is how fast your car videos can load.

It's a big mystery for me how the things went down since seventies. I think the first signs of not decline, but I'd say "wind down" were quite apparent in eighties already.

> It's a big mystery for me how the things went down since seventies.

There is a insightful (if a bit messy, and occasionally wrong) book that purports to answer that question:

Where is my flying car?: A memoir of future past, by J. Storrs Hall. [1]

In that author's view, it boils down to

* a levelling off of energy consumption per capita, that previously had doubled every 10 years. (In particular, the author laments the dearth of advanced nuclear power, which would be good for the economy and the climate.)

* increasing regulation and risk aversion.

* as well as “centralized funding streams”, “bureaucratic inertia,” “cultural malaise and indifference”.

[1] Reviews:

https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/wh...

https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/28/where-is-my-flying-car-a-...

Re: The Last Days of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

#60

Post by Angostura »

rodgerd wrote: post #23

I think that "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the metabolists failed because the buildings they produced weren’t metabolic enough to cope with the ever-changing needs of the city’s inhabitants. Surely, preservation of their work as some kind of cultural relic would be the last thing that the young radicals of the late ’60s and early ’70s would have wanted." is the key quote. I'm sad to see an interesting buil…

From the article, it seem like the main failure was in execution. The pods were designed to be replaceable, swapped out regularly as needs changed. In practice, swapping out a single pod was impossible, due to the construction.

For some reason, I'm really sad to see this go. I remember it being all over the UK media when I was a kid.

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