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“Agricultural City” by Kisho Kurokawa (1960)

February 24, 2015 by Mariabruna Fabrizi 3 Comments

Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa survived the Ise Bay Typhoon in 1959 and his experience inspired the design for an “Agricultural City” (1960).

This megastructure project consists in a grid-like structure of concrete slabs raised on 4 m stilts on the agricultural soil and is meant to synchronize the rural landscape with the living areas and to prevent the habitat to be flooded. The grid hosts roads, water-services, electricity, monorails and other facilities like schools and administration buildings.

Housing punctuates the slabs in the form of “mushrooms shaped houses“, one to three floors structures with a wooden frame aluminium cap meant to overcome the concepts of walls and roof and opened to the sky through a skylight. The single frame of the grid is 500x500m and it consists of twentyfive 100m x 100m blocks for 200 people, the basic unit of the agricultural community.

kurokawa-agricultural-city-04

 

The design concept is explained by the architect:

Natural growth of the agricultural city is provided by a grid system of streets containing the utility pipes underneath.While each of the square units composed of several households is autonomous, linking these units together creates a village. The living units multiply spontaneously without any hierarchy, gradually bringing the village into being as the traditional rural settlement has developed throughout Japanese history.

 

kurokawa-agricultural-city-01

 

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kurokawa-agricultural-city-03

 

kurokawa-agricultural-city-05

 

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Mushrooms shaped houses

kurokawa-agricultural-city-07

 

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Illustration: Morinaga Yoh

 

 

Via: Antonio Di Campli (The Metabolist City) and Metalocus

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Filed Under: Architecture, Territories Tagged With: agriculture city, form of form, grids, growth, Japan

Comments

  1. AGi architects says

    June 13, 2015 at 12:46 pm

    Functionalist architecture based in kish kurokawa‘s own experience. We still have a lot to learn.

  2. Oliver says

    December 22, 2016 at 11:48 am

    I would like to know how the city sustains itself ?- Subsistence or ?
    Also, how is the land assigned to the individual households ?-one farming plot per one housing plot or?

Trackbacks

  1. 49 Cities ~ WORKac – Alex Love 224.453: Spatial Design ~ Research and Development says:
    April 19, 2016 at 5:53 am

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