Daniel Ibañez

In architecture, the word "metabolism" typically brings to mind the short-lived Japanese Metabolist movement that has seen a resurgence in recent years through a book and exhibition. But the term – both as a natural/scientific process and a metaphorical trope – has more wide-ranging applications, and it's clear from the sixth issue of Harvard GSD's New Geographies that students and faculty in academia are trying to decipher metabolism relative to designing buildings, landscapes and cities. While the editors conducted an interview with Ken Tadashi Ishima that focuses on the Japanese Metabolists, the other contributions depart from this default idea of the term toward investigations of urban systems, the reshaping of geographies by humans, post-petroleum landscapes, temporary cities, and projective design practices, among many other approaches to tackling the issue's theme. Some of the contributions, it should be noted, emanated from a 2014 GSD symposium, "Projective Views on Urban Metabolism," which the editors helped to organize. The essays and interviews are dense, and each deserves the utmost attention and patience to yield the greatest insight into what is clearly a complex topic.… (mais)