Kisho Kurokawa, one of postwar Japan’s most influential architects whose legacy was a philosophy as much as a collection of buildings, died Friday in Tokyo of heart failure. He was 73.

Kurokawa was the youngest founding member of the Metabolism Movement, which emerged in Japan on the cusp of the 1960s and bloomed most spectacularly during the Osaka Expo of 1970. The Metabolists advocated a renewable form of architecture in which buildings, or parts of them, could be adaptable and replaceable.

But even as his designs embraced abstract geometrical forms, he insisted they retain a thread of eastern aesthetics.

His philosophy was displayed in designs from the “replaceable” pods of the Nakagin Capsule Tower built in Tokyo in 1972, to Malayasia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport that incorporated a transplanted tropical rain forest into a design based on abstract Islamic domes.

Kurokawa also created the master plan for Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan.

The son of an architect, Kurokawa was born in Nagoya in 1934 and, as a child, witnessed the razing of the city’s wooden buildings by American bombers. He frequently referred to the powerful impact that staggering destruction had upon him, saying it helped shape his belief in an architecture that sought to move from “the age of the machine” to the “age of life.”