DESIGNING THE APOCALYPSE

A young architect faces the climate crisis.

- SAM KNIGHT

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.

At the end of his first year at the architecture school of the Royal Danish Academy, Pavels Hedström went on a class trip to Japan. Hedström, a twenty-five-year-old undergraduate, revered Japanese culture and aesthetics, even though he had never visited the country. As a teenager growing up in rural Sweden, Hedström had been introduced to Zen meditation by his mother, Daina, and devoured manga and anime. In architecture school, Hedström was drawn to Japanese principles of design and how they applied to a world-and a profession increasingly troubled by the climate crisis. Hedström was particularly influenced by Metabolism, a postwar Japanese architectural movement that imagined cities of the future as natural organisms: ephemeral, self-regulating, and subject to biological rhythms of growth, death, and decay. In 1977, Kisho Kurokawa, one of Metabolism's founders, wrote, "Human society must be regarded as one part of a continuous natural entity that includes all animals and plants."

It was the summer of 2016. In Tokyo, Hedström and his classmates visited Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower, from 1972, which was one of the few Metabolist structures to be built. It consisted of modernist, detachable, cube-shaped modules, each prefabricated according to the dimensions of a traditional Japanese tearoom. But the Metabolist future never quite arrived. (The tower fell into disrepair and was dismantled in 2022.)