Concrete and Code: Material Politics of Art and Environment in Postwar Japan

Gutai’s spatial practices meet the Metabolists’s infrastructural visions of the city.

Concrete and Code brings together two influential strands of postwar Japanese art and architecture – the experimental practices of the Gutai Art Association and the speculative urban proposals of the Metabolists – to rethink modernism through the lens of material, infrastructural and social trans-formation. Gutai’s spatial experiments mobilized bodies, materials and environments, foregrounding process, contingency and the conditions of perception. The Metabolists developed proposals for cities conceived as evolving systems, in which growth, circulation and infrastructure reorganize urban life over time.

Grounded in extensive archival research and richly illustrated with rare documents and images – in-cluding materials related to Expo ’70 – the book situates these practices within the economic, political and technological conditions of production in postwar Japan. It shows how art and architecture articulated new relations between bodies, materials, systems of labor and social reproduction, and why these negotiations remain critical for understanding the entanglement of environment, technology and everyday life today.