encapsulating feasts and culinary urbanism

[image: new york times]

japan's worst recession since wwii has changed the once overnight, graduated cubbies of capsule hotels, used by salarymen missing their trains, into long-term residencies for professional interlopers in the transition state.  no larger than 6.5 feet long and 5 feet wide, capsule hotel shinjuku 510's berths offer little more than a place to sleep, leaving the communal spaces (see nyc's new work city) like bathing and dining areas room to explore the habit and ritual of waking life- an intimate public.    

[image: new york times]

the communal dining space is, in some ways, a return to the cooking fire, around which food and stories are shared, relationships developed, and grammars born.  one such grammar could be a bento-styled, modern kaiseki ryori that seeks to mend a growing socioeconomic gulf- simple, restrained dishes  that engage and transport the diner.  these dishes could tame and untangle the mess of mfk fisher's udon noodles, giving refinement a place on the table amidst tokyo's clatter.  the solid geometry of the table is the interlocuter between the day's gravity and edible oneirisms occupying spaces much larger.

[images: www.archrecord.construction.com]

born from japan's technocratic metabolist movement, capsule hotels' original ideals, like the buddhist notion of impermanence and change, were meant to evoke the process of organic growth.  designer kurokawa kisho's now-failing masterpiece, the prototype nakagin capsule tower in shimbashi, japan, sits like an 8-bit bento box aware of it's own impermanence- not unlike biosphere 2 outside of phoenix.  while these units are sizable larger than shinjuku's, they were meant to afford full functionality to tokyo's stochasticity in as little space as possible- ephemeral stopping points along any one trajectory.  but it seems now, as a gulf in class arises, the empirically efficient systems that the capsules modeled is delimiting the mobility and freedom it created, re-focusing the attention from modular technologies and liberty to permanence and privacy shaded by a macrame curtain and earphones.