Digesting Metabolism: Artificial Land in Japan 1954–2202

"Casey Mack's exceptional Digesting Metabolism is a profound exploration.... Through his original and forward-looking research, Mack subtly forms a perspective on the movement that gives an engaged outlook to the future, a kind of learning from metabolism."
— Finn Geipel, partner, LIN Architects Urbanists; professor, TU Berlin

"Casey Mack recharges the legacy of the world-famous avant-garde of the 1960s by revisiting actual built projects to document their post-occupancy life and inhabitants. His historical and ethnographical account is touching in its honest portrayal of success and failure, and is most inspiring and instructive for building towards more resilient and livable cities."
— Dirk van den Heuvel, TU Delft and Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam

"An important work in foreseeing the relationship of tension between technology and art." 
— Osamu Ishiyama, architect; professor emeritus, Waseda University

"In this wonderfully refreshing work, Mack reconfigures the history of the Metabolists simply by moving the focus from megastructure to artificial land. In doing so, he eschews the easy slogan or image that infatuates so much of our design discourse for a more complex narrative of unfulfilled vectors — how the Metabolists addressed time, adaptability, flexibility. These vectors in turn identify that it is the world of the Metabolists in which we remain, and that it is these questions outside our comfortable control that as designers we must continue to grapple with."
— Brett H. Schneider, Senior Associate, Guy Nordenson and Associates; Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design

"Part study of housing typologies; part history of modern Japan; and part disquisition on how architecture might reconcile the spatial with the temporal, this book is a tour-de-force of scholarship and analysis.... Casey Mack weaves a fascinating historical narrative around the notion of 'artificial land,' spun from the threads of architectural ambition, idiosyncratic activism, social transformation, bureaucratic planning, and everyday practice."
— Dr. Julian Worrall, Professor of Architecture, University of Tasmania