In the 1960s, several groups of architects and artists began exploring the potential for new ideas of urbanism that embrace biological models engineered with emerging technologies. Imaginative and visionary while conceptually serious and complex, the projects in Metabolic City feature fanciful names--such as Bubble City, Helix City, Floating City, Instant City, and Marine City--for proposed systems founded on the principles of networks, adaptable habitats, life cycles of growth, and the promise of technological advances to address the challenges of rebuilding urban centers. Avant-garde for their time, the works featured in Metabolic City have regained relevance in today's world.

The three featured artists and architects of Metabolic City are the Japanese Metabolists, the architectural collaborative Archigram from Britain, and Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys. Metabolic City focuses on theoretical and conceptual overlaps in terms of the shared themes such as networks, adaptability, life cycles, and technology, revealing rhetorical and conceptual overlaps. Pieces on display will focus on the representations of the work, not the built structures themselves, and include photography, collages, drawings, books, and film.