Metabolism Trip is a book of photographs and short stories documenting Charlie Koolhaas’s journey through the remaining buildings of the Metabolist Movement. A non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle.
Charlie traveled across Japan in 2009 to photograph how the projects invented by these idealistic thinkers had survived and aged, and how they were being inhabited today. What she found were triumphant and at times eerie constructions that had taken on a life of their own.
Charlie created portraits of the Metabolist Architectures and their Architects as they toured her through, sometimes dilapidated, sometimes thriving, buildings, that had been reinvented, even if just by being destroyed, or occupied in a painfully utilitarian way.
She reveals the quirks in how these idealistic designs were now inhabited by cuteness, weirdness and shadiness, with things like furry mascots, golf courses, cocktail waitresses, and Ikea furnishing.
