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Study | What is Metabolism
Japanese architecture and your body
What does Japanese architecture have to do with your
body?
In a weird way, everything.
In the 60s and 70s, Japan was looking for ways to come back from a stunning set of
human-made and natural disasters. These included typhoons, earthquakes, tsunamis,
the aftermath of centuries of warfare culminating in two atomic bombs, and so on.
Instead of having their spirit destroyed along with thousands of homes and lives,
Japanese architects imagined something new rising from the rubble:
A sustainable system of structures that could be resilient, adaptive, and
robust.
All could be interconnected, communicating with one another, and changing
dynamically as conditions changed.
The whole was centrally organized. Yet the system could branch smaller and
smaller, into self-organizing units. This system worked at every scale, from the
tiniest person to the broader society.
Each part of this system could have a natural rhythm and life cycle. The system
could “breathe” in an ongoing inhale-exhale of growing and shrinking, expansion
and contraction.
Everything flowed together in a complex, rich, harmonious ecosystem.
The name of this architectural movement?
Metabolism.1
The set of complex biological systems that we call metabolism is much like this form of
Japanese architecture.
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Study | What is Metabolism
Figure 2.1: Sample of Metabolist architecture: The Nakagin Capsule Tower building in
Tokyo
Your body is an incredible thing.
Before you were alive, billions of DNA pieces had to fit together just right to make “you”
happen.
Now that you’ve made it to whatever age you’re at, and able to read this, it’s a miracle
that you’ve survived this long.
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Study | What is Metabolism
Even just keeping you alive for one single second requires an intricate symphony of
approximately 37 trillion cells doing their jobs.
Since it’s estimated that there are about 1 billion chemical reactions happening within
each cell in a second… well… we’ll give you a minute to do the math. (And figuring that
out means each one of the 100,000,000,000 neurons in your brain will do 1,000,000,000
things per second for 60 seconds… anyway, you get the idea.)
With that in mind...
There are three important themes underlying this unit.
You’ll see these ideas come up again and again in different ways.
Metabolism is a complex adaptive system.
Metabolism responds to biopsychosocial factors.
Metabolism involves ongoing feedback loops.
Let’s look more closely at each one.
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