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The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo was one of the most distinctive buildings of the 20th century, both for its oddball form and for its tumultuous evolution. A space station stack of 140 prefabricated cabin-like capsule living spaces completed in 1972, the building went from high concept design to marketing triumph to architectural wonder to lamented demolition. Now, the building is taking on a new form inside the galleries of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, a year-long exhibition that opened July 10. The central piece of the exhibition is the roughly 100-square-foot capsule A1305, a complete and fully restored living chamber from the building that visitors will be able to step inside. [Photo: Noritaka Minami] “Especially for architecture exhibitions, sometimes we’re able to show actual pieces of buildings, or fragments,” says curator Evangelos Kotsioris. “But what is extremely rare here is that it’s a whole unit by itself.” That’s because the building had a wholly innovative design: two tower cores surrounded with individual rectangular living units, or capsules, that attached to the structure like appendages. Designed for the Nakagin Company by architect Kisho Kurokawa, the building came to epitomize the avant-garde Metabolist movement that developed in 1960s Japan as an effort to use adaptable architecture as an avenue for rebuilding postwar Japan and Japanese society. In the mind of Kurokawa, who died in 2007, the capsule tower was meant to evolve, with old capsules being swapped out for new ones as needs and times changed. This never happened, not exactly anyway. The building slowly decayed over the years and deferred maintenance doomed much of it to becoming uninhabitable before it was demolished in 2022. Some capsules and building parts were salvaged, though, and more than a dozen capsules have been fully restored. Capsule A1305 was acquired by MoMA in 2023. Kisho Kurokawa, Architect & Associates, 1972 [Photo: Tomio Ohashi] But the Nakagin Capsule Tower exhibition is more than just a showcase of an architectural curio. It features 45 other objects relating to the building and its design, including the only surviving physical model from the early 1970s, the original architectural drawings of the building, historic marketing material from the Nakagin Company for the building’s original use as a businessman’s pied--terre, and a digital building walk-through created with 3D scanning technology just days before the building’s demolition. Kotsioris also interviewed the group of residents who lived in the capsule tower during its final decade, and the exhibition includes documentation on the varied ways they repurposed the capsules. “The capsule itself, if you just look at it from the outside, it’s not telling you much. You cannot fully comprehend the radicality of the proposition behind it,” Kotsioris says. “I thought it was really important for its first presentation in New York to contextualize it properly, with the ideas about the birth of the project, the drawing, the models, but also interviews with residents.” The capsule in the exhibition is a faithful recreation of the way the building was originally marketed, as a part-time residence for businessmen visiting Tokyo for work. One famous ad for the building shows a smiling businessman inside a capsule, seemingly after work, lounging on the bed while talking on the phone and smoking a Marlboro, with the capsule’s built-in Sony TV and audio electronics playing in the background. Kisho Kurokawa, Architect & Associates, 1970-1972; restored 2022-2023 [Photo: MOMA] Kurokawa intended the building to be more than just a space for businessmen, envisioning the building with multiple capsule sizes for offices, hotel rooms, and family residences. That vision narrowed, but also evolved, as Kurokawa later went on to design the first capsule hotel in Osaka in 1979. Even short of Kurokawa’s original intent, the Nakagin Capsule Tower has influenced generations of architects, while also pushing new ideas about urban living in Japan, impermanence in the built environment, and prefabricated housing. “Even though there was a lot of speculative projects about capsule living and prefabricated dwellings, even from the early 20th century,” Kotsioris says, “this was really the first realized prototype on the ground that said this is an idea that you can actually put into action.” Nakagin Co. promo, 1971 [Photo: Courtesy Tatsuyuki Maeda / The Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project] MoMA members will be able to step inside the capsule during several special events throughout the exhibition’s run, which Kotsioris says should be a treat. “I remember the first time I entered a capsule,” he says. “There’s something extremely magical about being inside it, because it’s very small, but at the same time it feels spacious.” The Nakagin Capsule Tower exhibition explores the ways the building played multiple roles in its five-decade lifespan. Despite the compact size of the capsules, they evolved over time from a kind of temporary living quarters to more of a permanent residence. And, Kotsioris found, the individualist nature of the capsules changed over time, too, as maintenance and structural issues began to plague the building. “The more the building started to break down over the years, the more it generated social interactions,” he says. Residents told him that frequent earthquake evacuation alarms in the aging structure turned into social gatherings in the lobby. When the hot water boiler stopped working, a group of residents would travel together to a nearby bathhouse to take showers, and when the air conditioning broke, they’d gather in one of the units with a working dehumidifier for drinks after work. [Photo: Jeremie Souteyrat] These unintended uses of the buildinga version of the Metabolist architecture idea Kurokawa was designing aroundhelped it remain useful up until the end. “Kurokawa had one idea of how this project could be metabolized or change over time,” Kotsioris says. “And it did metabolize, but maybe in a different way than he would ever have imagined.”
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E-Commerce
Some days, Have a great day!!! is just too much to ask. You might even be tempted to respond to this effusive well-wisher: Have you seen the news? Have you seen my to-do list? Have you seen my teams numbers? Have you seen my sleep score? Some days, you might just settle for Having a day. And yet, that doesnt feel great either. It would be nice to do more than get through the week, to do more than endure. I have guided many leaders whose company cultures were built on endurance. I have endured many days myself. I know how easy it is to paint a day or week as categorically hard or bad. But calling a whole day bad is like calling a gravel driveway flat. Sure, from a distance its flat-ish, but from an ants point of view, it might as well be a mountain range. What we sometimes miss is that even on aggressively bad days, there is often an hour or two that is kind of okay. Or maybe every single last hour is hard, but within an hour, there is a minute when you laugh at a colleagues joke or check out your good hair day in the mirror. Even if youre in a meeting when every last minute is painful reviewing your businesss financials, you still have access to a delicious five seconds of deeply breathing in the smell of your coffee. Or in other words: You can thin-slice your joy. Because the last thing harried, overworked people need is to add learn meditation to their to-do list. Similarly, deciding to focus on fewer things sounds nice, but your boss may respectfully disagree. It would also be good to distance yourself from people who stress you out and demand your attention unfairly, but you know what? Sometimes those people are your kids. In these moments, you can thin-slice your joy in two ways: savoring the joy already present in your day, and creating new moments of micro-joy. Savoring your daily joys Like scarfing down a meal while watching TV or getting some work done, its easy to anesthetize ourselves to pleasure without realizing it. The good news is that it takes the same amount of time to chew mindlessly as it does to savor the taste of your foodit simply requires attention. Here are three no-time-required actions you can take to bank more joy from your day: Appreciate a quirk. In your next meeting, look around the room (2D or 3D) and identify one quirky thing you like about a colleague. Maybe someone throws their head back when they laugh and its joyful. Or another person drums their fingers when theyre about to share a good idea. Its an appreciation of their humanity and individuality, which makes us feel closer to them. Smell first. Before sipping your coffee, tea, or other beverage, take three seconds to smell it first. Risk looking indulgent: close your eyes and breathe in for three secondsthen sip. If its a particularly rough day, sprinkle some cinnamon on that cappuccino. This practice is especially useful when you feel in your head. Reconnecting with our senses brings us back to the present moment. Revel in your work. The next time you write a particularly funny Slack message, a compelling email, or create some bit of work thats better than your average, take one minute to simply stare at it and enjoy how clever you are. Were so often on to the next thingand when we do review our work, we often do so with a critical eyethat we miss the part where we feel pleased with ourselves! Even enjoying a cute turn of phrase in an email is plenty to savor. Creating new micro-joys It would be lovely if we all had the time, energy, and budget to take up new hobbies, make new friends, and take two-hour lunch breaks. And if you can, you should! But also, joy is not all-or-nothing. A good thought experiment to get you dreaming about micro-joys is to consider what sort of habits, experiences, or moments bring you the most joyand then identify their smallest viable unit. Here are three micro-joys to try this week: Ask a random question. The next time you see a colleague you like, take two minutes to get to know them a bit better. You could say, Random question: Whats your middle name? or Random question: Do you have siblings? Longitudinal studies of human happiness are very clear about what mattersand thats the quality of our relationships. And yet, how often do we work with people and not know even the most basic facts about them? These questions shouldnt be a long diversion from your workeven a minute of knowing someone better and that person feeling seen can be a high point of joy in your day. Do a doodle a day. Spend two minutes on a simple doodle. Maybe you draw a different timepiece each day (watch! clocktower!). Maybe its an abstract shape or a hand-lettered word. Maybe you draw a family of ducks, one day at a time. Bonus points if you do each doodle on a Post-it and then create a collection at your desk. We benefit from art, play, and self-expression during the workday, but maybe youd garner some side-eye if you set up an easel in the office. If you love art, then a daily doodle can be your version of a micro-joy. Misbehave. Mischief at work can give us a much-needed shot of adrenaline, connection, and adventure. This might look like rearranging the office furniture, using Comic Sans font in your next presentation, or playing a quick round of guess that tune with your colleagues as you hum your favorite throwback song. At best, work is steak: rich, juicy, delicious. But sometimes its just notsometimes work is broccoli. On those days, your job is to throw some cheese on it. Never gonna give you up . . . never gonna let you down . . . take it, reader! Louder, so coworkers can hear! And have yourself a great day! Or, you know, a daywith at least one truly great moment.
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E-Commerce
Workers who take small steps to enforce work-life balancelike setting an out-of-office message on weekends or not answering emails on vacationare often considered less committed and promotable, even when theyre encouraged to take those actions. Researchers behind a new study looking at the phenomenon are calling this the detachment paradox.” We were only looking at stuff that happens when the worker is not supposed to work, such as evenings, weekends, and vacations, says Elisa Solinas, an assistant professor of marketing at IE University in Spain and one of the papers coauthors. What we still see is that the more the worker detaches, the more harshly they get evaluated. Managers both value and punish time off The researchers split managers into two groups and gave each the same fictitious story about a hypothetical employee, only for one group the protagonist took a small action to detach from work during their off hours. Managers perceived the employee who enforced some relatively minor work-life boundaries as more focused, less stressed out, and less likely to experience burnout. However, they also perceived that employee as less dedicated to work. The same people who said that [the workers] are going to be more productive also said that they were going to be less promotable, says coauthor Eva Buechel, an assistant professor of marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. So even the people who say this is really important and even encourage work-life balance penalize them [for detaching]. The researchers also came up with nearly identical results when they replaced the hypothetical workers with the managers real team members in those fictitious scenarios. Finally, researchers asked participants to describe members of their staff, including their ethnicity, age, tenure, job performance, collegiality, commitment, and whether they enforce work-life boundaries. In the end, workers who took even small actions to detach from work during their designated time off were broadly seen as less committed and less promotable by their managers. Theres significant literature on how people are evaluated differently based on things like age, ethnicity, and gender, and we didn’t really find any of that, Buechel says. I can comfortably say this [detachment] penalty has equal, if not more significance than those other worker-related biases. Give me a break With work-related stress and burnout rates on the rise, employees need more time to rest and recover, but research suggests theyre getting less of it. According to a recent survey of 2,000 American workers conducted by book summary app Headway, two-thirds of workers struggle to switch off on vacation, and more than half have experienced conflicts with loved ones over their inability to unplug while away. Just 4% of workers are left alone on vacation; the rest get bombarded with emails, messages, and calls, says Thalia-Maria Tourikis, a health coach and burnout prevention and recovery expert for Headway. Workers are encouraged to take time off, then pestered with emails and messages the moment they do, to the point of guilt, anxiety, insomnia, and burnout. Thanks to technology, there are few physical barriers between employees and their increasingly digital workplaces. As a result, Tourikis says, many struggle to mentally detach from work, even when theyre far from the office. Taking time off shouldnt feel like a sin, she says. If we want to be healthier and happier, we have to stop glorifying constant availability and start respecting annual leave. Small breaks can make a big difference Vacations have traditionally been considered an employee indulgence that came at the expense of their employers, but new research suggests the benefits are mutual, and more significant than previously understood. The prevailing assumption was vacation offers small benefits for well-being, and they fade quickly when you get back to work, says Ryan Grant, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Georgia who recently coauthored a meta-analysis on vacations and employee well-being. We found the benefits were pretty huge. Grant explains that the energizing effects of time off are actually 85% greater than previously suggested, and those effects persisted much longer, fading gradually over an average of about 43 days. According to the study, the most significant factor in determining the size and longevity of that post-vacation well-being boost was the ability to detach from work while away. It was the only recovery activity that had a strong positive association with well-being both during and after the vacation, Grant says. That suggests the more you psychologically detach during vacationthe less you check your email, communicate with coworkers, and just think about work generallythe better your vacation is going to be, and the larger your well-being benefits are going to be after. Detachment offers a win-win for employees and managers But this isnt just about enjoying that week in the sun or on the slopes. When workers can fully detach from work, their employers often benefit in the form of higher employee morale, resilience, and productivity, as well as lower healthcare costs, absenteeism, and turnover rates. [Managers] are trying to improve the organizations bottom line and improve employee performance, but not allowing people the time to detach and recover directly opposes that goal, Grant says. They’re actually doing things that run directly counter to what they’re trying to accomplish. While the occasional late-night email or Saturday phone call may seem inconsequential in the moment, Grant says such actions leave workers in constant fear of having their downtime interrupted, making it harder to fully recharge while away from work. In the short term, you’re like, Well, I need this thing done today, so I’m going to email my subordinate and say I want them to do this thing tonight, he says. But if you look at things in the longer term, the more you’re not allowing people to detach on a daily basis, the more the negative effects on their health and performance are going to increase over time.
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E-Commerce
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