During the 1960s, he was already referring to architecture and the city as a ‘flow of information’ – he contends that he invented the term ‘information society’ (johokashakai) in 1961, long before it became common parlance. Throughout his career, he has single-mindedly pursued the biological metaphors of flux, metamorphosis and growth that are so prevalent in current architectural discourse.

Kurokawa’s ‘Philosophy of Symbiosis’ is a superbly robust theory – it is literally beyond criticism. How is it possible to contradict a philosophy whose central tenet says there are no contradictions? It has a resilience and flexibility that neutralizes any opposition: like judo, attacks are absorbed and reflected; like an oyster, irritants are transformed into pearls. Symbiosis is relentlessly positive in its outlook, condemning the dualistic rationality that preceded it, while promising a vital, creative future. Kurokawa is well aware that no building can ever live up to the full promise of his words, but as a guiding principle they deserve the attention of every architect.

While a founding member of the Metabolist movement and an associate of Team X, Kurokawa promoted a flexible, evolving architecture, directly responsive to environmental pressure. The proposals were both innovative and provocative, particularly in his experiments with modular buildings.

Despite the ongoing influence of those early projects, the image of growth was finally just that – an image. The Metabolists disappeared all too quickly, following independent lines of thought and leaving many of their most promising ideas undeveloped.

AIRPORT

It is with his current work in Malaysia that Kurokawa is revisiting, and perhaps realizing, some of those early concepts. The new Kuala Lumpur International Airport is a combination of flexible modular systems, with growth as a central requirement of the programme. The airport will be operational in 1998, but by 2050 the initial project is intended to have doubled in size.
The airport site is a 10-by-10 kilometre square, the largest in the world.

Malaysia seems desperate to impress: the world’s tallest building is now in downtown Kuala Lumpur (Cesar Pelli’s Petronas Twin Towers), the world’s longest building (2 kilometres) is being built along the Klang river, and KLIA will have the world’s tallest air-traffic control tower. An international level airport seems to symbolize the coming-of-age of emerging economies; this one is expected to become the busiest in the region.

The main terminal building is roofed with a repeated module of hyperbolic paraboloid shells, supported on conical columns containing service ducts and rainwater pipes. The roof simultaneously refers to traditional Islamic forms and the dynamics of flight, a mosaic of wings. While the structure lacks the apparent formal inevitability of most High-Tech architecture, it shows technical brilliance and an undeniable elegance.

The containment of nature within the airport buildings is the most overtly ‘symbiotic’ gesture. All passengers must pass through enormous inner courtyards containing native rainforest, enlarged versions of the Japanese patio garden. Kurokawa insists that a close relationship with nature is a defining characteristic of the Asian identity. The approach recalls his Melbourne Central project, where an existing nineteenth-century building is preserved within a glass cone, a symbiosis between history and modernity.

These gestures may seem overly literal, if not crude, but that is their strength. Kurokawa is quick to point out that symbiosis is not harmony, but coexistence in sometimes abrupt juxtapositions. As an arrival experience, the airport gardens will be extraordinary, a forest within an airport within a forest.

Despite his substitution of mechanistic metaphors with biological metaphors (‘from the age of machine principle to the age of life principle’), Kurokawa has always been a technological innovator. His rejection of the machine is no Luddite nostalgia for a simpler, more ‘natural’ past, but a search for a clean, invisible technology. At its simplest, this includes passive techniques such as sloping glass to reduce solar heat gain. The airport complex itself is computerized to the point of being a vast, intelligent organism.

ECO-MEDIA CITY

The new airport and Kuala Lumpur city will be connected by a superhighway and an express train line. All the intervening territory has been wired with state-of-the-art fibre-optic cables in preparation for developments that include the new administrative capital (Putrajaya) and a high-technology research city (Cyberjaya) Forming a 15-by-50 kilometre strip, the ‘Multimedia Super Corridor’ is a potential Linear City larger than the island of Singapore.

The Corridor is a kind of economic ‘demilitarized zone’, luring large-scale international investment with promises of low overheads, tax incentives and freedom from local bureaucracy. Kurokawa has convinced the Malaysian authorities that it is a perfect location for the implementation of his ‘Eco-Media City’ concept: small, technologically sophisticated towns, isolated in nature and intimately connected with one another by transport and telecommunications.

Each city will be privately funded and functionally specific – a university town, an industrial hub, a biotechnology research centre. Five different cities are currently in planning. The size of each is limited by a public ‘green belt’, a peripheral (rather than central) park. Beyond this is agricultural land and zones of untouched rainforest. The cities will run on solar and wind power, use electric cars, and intensively recycle materials and biological waste. A newly-developed paving material with 95% permeability will allow rainwater to cycle freely through the local ecosystem.

Kurokawa sees the resulting network as a single urban field. His model for the project is Tokyo, the archetypal network city. Rather than a unified, hierarchical form it is an agglomeration of smaller units; its structure may be read as holonic, Arthur Koestler’s term to describe the complex interdependence between the part and the whole in certain open systems. Eco-Media City expands the scale of Tokyo to become a set of dispersed urban nodes. The difference is that the open space between them precludes the kind of shifting, amorphous relationships that exist between Tokyo’s various enclaves.

A full symbiosis between architecture and nature is an attractive concept, but unrealistic – architecture is inevitably destructive to nature.
Symbiotic principles seem to be far more applicable at an urban scale, as strategic principles rather than formal compositions. An individual building can never move, flow or adapt to the extent that a city does.

While each component city in Kurokawa’s plan is limited in size, the system itself is infinitely flexible.

The Malaysian projects are a kind of homecoming for Kurokawa, potentially the fullest realizations of his concepts to date, with scales and programmes adequate to his ambitions. Their importance is in the precedents they may set, for sustainable architectural and urban models in regions about to surrender their irreplaceable natural beauty to the forces of modernization.