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Laboratories - whether they exist in the form of castles, university buildings, industrial factories, or cross-national structures, have attracted much attention from historians as the site of knowledge production and its material culture. What, then, can we read from architecture beyond the laboratory spaces? This paper examines how the biological concept of metabolism was adopted by a group of young Japanese architects in the 1960s, who proposed the design of a flexible and changeable building in response to the fear and anxiety as well as technological optimism and utopian rhetoric in post-World War II Japan. This paper shows that this Metabolist movement provides an insight into how to survive apocalypse and regenerate the city whilst embracing mass destruction and existential anxiety. Recently, after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake that led to the Fukushima disaster, the ideas of metabolism have surfaced with renewed urgency in the language of resilience. This paper argues that, from survival architecture promoted by the Metabolists and their followers in decades later, we can see the cultural adoption of scientific concepts in coping with existential disasters - man-made or natural - especially in the era that is now called the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]