Kisho Kurokawa studied under Kenzō Tange at the University of Tokyo and was a founding member of the Metabolist group that announced itself at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo. Metabolism held that a building should be a growing organism: a permanent frame carrying replaceable parts, sized and detailed like machine components. Kurokawa founded his own office in 1962 and spent four decades testing the idea at every scale, from the capsules of the Nakagin tower to airports at Kuala Lumpur and museums at Nagoya, Hiroshima and, finally, the National Art Center in Tokyo, completed in the year he died. He wrote extensively on symbiosis and, late in life, on ecology, standing for public office in 2007 on an environmental platform.
