Masato Ohtaka

Japanese architect; associated with the Metabolist movement.

Masato Ohtaka was a Japanese architect who emerged as part of the generation that shaped postwar Japanese architecture through a radical rethinking of urban form and collective living. He was a member of the Metabolist group, the influential movement launched in 1960 that envisioned cities as dynamic, organic structures capable of growth and transformation. The Metabolists — including Kenzo Tange, Kisho Kurokawa, and Fumihiko Maki — proposed megastructural and modular systems for urban development that responded to Japan's rapid postwar urbanization and reconstruction.

Ohtaka's collaborative work with Fumihiko Maki on the concept of "collective form" was particularly significant. Their joint study Investigations in Collective Form (1964) analyzed how groups of buildings and urban elements could be organized into coherent spatial structures, proposing the categories of compositional form, megastructure, and group form. This theoretical contribution offered a nuanced alternative to both conventional planning and the more extreme megastructural proposals of some Metabolist colleagues, emphasizing the emergent order that arises from the aggregation of individual elements.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: co-contributor. Ohtaka co-contributed "Some thoughts on collective form" (with Fumihiko Maki) to Structure in Art and in Science (1965), the Gyorgy Kepes-edited anthology in which R. Buckminster Fuller contributed "Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures." Maki and Ohtaka's essay explored how collections of buildings create larger urban structures, contributing an architectural and urbanistic dimension to the anthology's cross-disciplinary inquiry into the nature of structure.

See Also

• Gyorgy Kepes — editor of the anthology
• Fumihiko Maki — co-author of the essay

Sources

• Structure in Art and in Science (source reference) — Zotero record for the anthology