Future man
In 1959, a young Japanese architect named Kiyonori Kikutake introduced two concepts that shook the design world — so hard that the vibrations are still felt today. See for yourself at “Tectonic Visions Between Land and Sea,” a room-filling, eye-filling exhibit up through Oct. 16 at Gund Hall at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Kikutake — whose work influenced architects from Louis Kahn to Rem Koolhaas — died last year. This solo retrospective of his work is a first in North America. One of Kikutake’s ideas was futuristic, and to this day remains a dream: a marine metropolis — self-sustaining, flexible, clean, safe. Tower-Shaped Community (1958), for example, would be built on circles of steel more than two miles in diameter. Below, bottlelike forms would keep the floating city stable, while doubling as farms teeming with aquaculture. It called for towering structures holding 1,250 steel living units in place —...