Unfolding A Nakagin Story Newspaper Poster by Yang Tian is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2025 A' Design Award in Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design Competition Category.
IronGraphic· 2025
Unfolding A Nakagin Story Newspaper Poster
by Yang Tian
A' Design Award Winner in Graphic Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #162345The Design
About Unfolding A Nakagin Story Newspaper Poster
To re-identify Japan's Modernity after the war, Kisho Kurokawa, the youngest Metabolism group member, imagines modern housing as individual cells. They move, digest, grow, and decay, informing a new society where people no longer live in a fixed space. Unfolding a Nakagin Story uses the newspaper as a medium to document and expand this Metabolism imagination, through unfolding to fabricate an urban story.
The Recognition
About the A' Design Award
Unfolding A Nakagin Story Newspaper Poster is an Iron A' Design Award winner, a prestigious recognition granted to good designs that meet the professional and industrial requirements expected from well-designed creations. Iron winners demonstrate great skill, high specialization, expert understanding, and creative capacity of their creators. Unfolding A Nakagin Story Newspaper Poster is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished creation that is practical and innovative. This Iron A' Design Award-winning design integrates industry best practices and has competent technical characteristics linked with know-how and talent. Unfolding A Nakagin Story Newspaper Poster is respected for its thoroughness and is designed to provide quality of life improvements that help make the world a better place.
Where to Get It
Visual Storytelling and Editorial Design
We transform complex narratives into compelling visual experiences. Specializing in editorial design, publication layout, and conceptual graphics, we create work that engages audiences through innovative storytelling. Our award-winning approach brings architectural precision to every graphic communication project.
Discuss Your ProjectBehind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- To re-identify Japan’s Modernity after the war, Kisho Kurokawa, the youngest Metabolism group member, imagines modern housing as individual cells. They move, digest, grow, and decay, informing a new society where people no longer live in a fixed space. Unfolding a Nakagin Story uses the newspaper as a medium to document and expand this Metabolism imagination, through “unfolding” to fabricate an urban story.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Cover: 8" X 12"
Newspaper: 16" x 24" - Tags
- Nakagin, Metabolism, Heritage, Housing, Urbanism
- Production Technology
- Graphics are done in Photoshop and Illustrator, the architecture is modeled in Rhino with a grasshopper plugin to change patterns and orientation.
- Design Challenge
- How can we capture the concept of Metabolism, where buildings can grow and shrink over time? How should I identify individual differences while the building comprises the same rectangular blocks? These are the two biggest challenges I need to solve. By using newspaper as the medium, one can feel the growth through unfolding the paper. One can also read individual stories despite repeating units by showing the interior information of selected blocks.
- Research
- Focusing on post-war Japanese architecture, Metabolism was the most influential architectural movement from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Kisha Kurokawa changed the Western design ideology of FORM (ETERNAL) based living style to TIME (CHANGING) based living space. The Nakagin Capsule Tower is an iconic architecture that not only embraces ephemeral but also changes a collective to an individual-oriented living style.
- Inspiration
- To embrace the idea of flexibility and updating, the newspaper is a great medium as a representation tool. Newspaper changes every day with new information and unfolding it to gain new information reinforces the idea of metabolism. By unfolding the project, each time, the capsule patterns, window colors, shapes, and orientation change within an oblique neutral grid.
- Project Duration
- Duration: 3 months
Location: Boston, MA, USA - Operation Flow
- You could unfold it three times, each time, the capsule patterns, window colors, shapes, and orientation change within an oblique neutral grid, and 7 capsules have been highlighted to expose the interior activities of an individual with personal information next to it. Individual yet connected, neutral yet different for each capsule. You will experience the beauty of the Nakagin capsule tower after you unfold its stories!
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