Megastructures

This book explores the shared qualities of mountains as naturally-formed landscapes, and of megastructures as manmade landscapes, seeking to unravel how each can be understood as an open system of complex network relationships (human, natural and artificial). By looking at mountains and megastructures in an interchangeable way, the book negotiates the fixed boundaries of natural and artificial worlds, to suggest a more complex relationship between landscape and architecture. It suggests an ecological understanding of the interconnectedness of architecture and landscape, and an entangled network of relations. Urban, colonialist, fictional, rural and historical landscapes are interwoven into this fabric that also involves discontinuities, tensions and conflicts as parts of a system that is never linear, but rather fluid and organic as driven by human endeavor.

Explores some of the world's mightiest man-made structures, and how they were designed and built.

Universal Principles of Architecture illustrates in 100 concepts the importance, possibilities, challenges, and roles that architecture plays in shaping the world. Divided into Archetypes, Methods, Conditions, Relationships, and Imaginaries, each of the five sections in the book introduces in 20 principles architecture at different scales and stages of the design process. Through an inclusive and holistic approach, the book refers to initial design ideas, creative design approaches, reflections on the effects of the built and destroyed environments, and architectural desires and aspirations to transform the world and engage with the cosmos. Because architecture is the converging point where many fields of knowledge, ideas, forms, approaches, methods, sensibilities, and materials meet, the book provides a flexible and dynamic space where the material, conceptual, and social take shape. Written, illustrated, and designed by critically acclaimed architects, educators, and authors Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski of WAI Architecture Think Tank, Universal Principles of Architecture combines accessible writing with otherworldly images like the ones they have displayed in exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou Metz, Museum of Modern Art New York, Neues Museum Nuremberg, and Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology Lisbon. Intended as an intergenerational and transdisciplinary reference volume, the book presents an ambitious overview of what architecture has been and can be in a world full of urgent challenges and abundant opportunities for social and ecological responsibility, and design creativity. The titles in the Rockport Universal series offer comprehensive and authoritative information and edifying and inspiring visual examples on multidisciplinary subjects for designers, architects, engineers, students, and anyone who is interested in expanding and enriching their design knowledge.

A long-sought reprint of this classic of architectural history and criticism, surveying a movement that would inspire architects, fantasists, and filmmakers alike. It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds like: a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham's 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of which some examples were built but to this day remains--decades after its codification--more of a poetic idea than a real architectural type. Banham, among the most gifted and incisive architectural critics and historians of his time, sought connections between theoretical origins in Le Corbusier's more starry-eyed drawings to the flurry of theories by the Japanese Metabolist architects, to less intentional examples in military architecture, industry, infrastructure, and the emerging instances in pop culture and art. Had he written the book a few years later he would find an abundance of examples in speculative art and science fiction cinema, mediums where it continues to provoke wonder to this day. A long-sought study by an author who combined imagination, wit, and pioneering scholarship, the republication of Megastructure is an opportunity for scholars and laypeople alike to return to the origins of this fantastic urban idea.

There will be 8.3 billion human beings on Earth by 2030, and the more the better. We have the opportunity to create a world of expansive megacities - including one around old London. Doing so will advance the art, science and processes of manufacturing. But to deploy those abilities we must shrug off the dogma of sustainability that insists only small can be beautiful. Humanity has come a long way since the first modular mega-structure was built at Ur, on land that is now Iraq. There, four millennia ago, and by hand, the Sumerians built a mud-brick ziggurat to their Gods. Today, the green deities of Nature we have invented for ourselves are worshipped with humility. Eco-zealots argue against the mechanised megaforming of landscape and the modularised production of megastructures. The guest editors, Jonathan Schwinge and Ian Abley of the London based research organisation audacity, call for development on a bold scale. They argue that by rapidly super-sizing the built environment society is not made vulnerable to natural or man-made hazards, and that design innovation surpasses bio-mimicry. Designers can learn from materials scientists working at the smallest of scales, and from systems manufacturers with ambitions at the largest. This issue calls for creative thinking about typologies and topologies, and considers what that also means for Africa, China, and Russia. Megacities everywhere demand integration of global systems of transport, utilities and IT in gigantic structures, constantly upgraded, scraping both the sky and the ground, outward into the sea.