Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent

Past
Banham, Reyner. 1976. Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. London: Thames and
Hudson.

Summary
Banham's book collects a range of projects as well as definitions related to the urban and
architectural movement known as megastructures. Written at a time when popular interest in
these strategies had declined, Megastructures also provides a range of criticism of these projects.
The books is a good collection of both ideas and projects. It includes a number of high-quality
images of projects that are not frequently published elsewhere.

Notes + Quotes
Fumihiko Makis definition:

A large frame in which all the function of a city or part of a city are housed. It has been
possible by present day technology. In a sense it is a man-made feature of the landscape.
It is like the great hill on which Italian towns are built

Kenzo Tages proposal:

a mass-human scale form which includes a Mega-form, and discrete, rapidly-changing

functional units which fit within the larger framework.

Ralph Wilcoxon:

not only a structure of great size, butalso a structure which is frequently:

constructed of modular units
capable of great or even unlimited extension
a structural framework into which smaller structural units (for example, rooms, houses ,
or small buildings of other sorts) can be builtor even plugged-in or clippeded-on
after having been prefabricated elsewhere;
a structural framework expected to have a useful life much longer than that of the smaller
units which it might support.
Desire for relationship between the parts and the whole ( not so much order, but the
designed whole environment integrated as a varied and individualized thing leading to
this whole. Called group form.) led to interest in vernacular examples of hill towns and
self-built villages.

There was a real interest in the appearance of accretion or slow extension of the system
which implied the people were constructed and adding.

Other

Even if, in practice (as at Habitat, Montreal), the built result was apt to be more like a
memorial sculpture to a folk urbanism that was supposed to have happened already but in
fact had not, megastructuralists generally and genuinely hoped such processes could take
placebut within a framework created by professional architects and reflecting the
monumental and aesthetic values of professional architecture. (9)
There is another aspect of Kahns Philadelphia projects that need to be noted here. The
towers were largely for car-parking, and grew both functionally and formally out of the
traffic-circulation proposals that underpin nearly all these schemes (40).

Tange on Kikutakes projects (1959): The structural element is thought of as a treea

permanent element, with the dwelling units as leavestemporary elements which fall
down and are renewed according to the needs of the moment. The builds can grow within
this structure and die and grow againbut the structure remains(47).

Metabolism added the idea that new land needed to be formed and different built
elements of the city have different natural rates of metabolic change.
"[Yona] Friedman, however, asserts the existence of a necessite biologique de
l'amusement which claims a liberte de choix sans aucune opposition that in its turn can be
delivered only by his architecture/urbanisme mobile. The concept is important because it
implies another reason for the changeability of the subsidiary accommodations in his, or
anybody's megastructures: they were to change not only because the termination of their
original functions or structural integrity, like the leave's of Tange's metabolist tree, but
also so that they should not obstruct the vie ludique, the 'play life', of the citizenry" (81).

Quoting Constant: "The environment of homo ludens has first of all to be flexible,
changeable, assuring any ovment, any change of place or change of mood, any mode of
behavior" (81).

"The range of variability envisaged by the Fun Palace team went spectacularly beyond
what had been proposed by Constant for Neo-Babylone, where there were at least fixed
floors, even if everything else was provisional. The Fun Palace was seen as an adaptable
volume, to be floored, roofed, walled and serviced at will with the minimum of restraints
in any of its three dimensions." (88). Greater degree of technical assistance than Constant
(not direct manipulation).

"Such a high rate of changeability was seen as implying a high rate of recoverability"
(88).

"Mitchell and Boutwell are much more modest [compared to Corb] - 'We are not saying
that this is the city of the future, but rather one of the possibilities deserving serious
consideration'- and this sentiment is clearly much more in line with the megaperiod's

professed belief in the permissive and the open-ended, in a future with 'alternative
scenarios' " (197).
"The scheme as drawn treats the map of North America as exactly the same kind of ideal
surface as Le Corbusier had employed for this ideal Ville contemporaine, whose
topographical accidents have no effect on the design, in spite of the fact that the sections
of Comprehensive City that are provided by the architects show that tit nowhere stands
on legs tall enough to stride over the Rockies" (198)

"This, one may suspect, was one of the most persistent meanings or motivations for
megastructure: that in ispite of its extensibility and uncertain outline, its sheer
concentration of activities would bring an end to the situation where 'the huge,
uncontrolled sprawling chaos that we now call City is choking out civilization'" (199).

this urge to impose a simple and architectonic order on the layout of human society
and its equipment. In spite of their hang-loose, libertarian words, most megastructuralists
wanted cities to have an order that they could understand as architects, not the kind of
order that might be generated by business, transportation or whatever (199).

Singularity or totality. All inclusive system that encompasses and frames everything.

Structural design takes priority over all as the most accessible to architects.
Peter Halls critique of megastructure presented in Monumental Follies in 1968.
Destruction of existing urban fabric

A pastiche, not a parody of the style, would read something like thisParametric shifts
in technologic possibilities, released as fall-out from defense-oriented goals, create forms
appropriate to space-age desires and raise potentialities for hallucinogenic light-andsound cultures which ultimately blow the mind. (205).

When the Left finally began to mount cogent criticism of megastructure, it was with
arguments that probably derive from the neo-Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, maintaining
that the permissive freedoms offered by megastructures adaptability and internal
transiences were illusory, since all they involved were choices between fixed alternatives
prescribed by the designers of mega-system, and thus as meaningless as the consumers
supposed choices between different products offered by the capitalist systems
supermarkets (206).

Some time around 1968 it seems to have been perceived that a city or a large part of a
city designed by one man, or by any group unified enough to produce a comprehensible
design would be a perilously thin, starved and impoverished environment, both visually
and in larger, less precise cultural terms (216).
Quoting Chris Abel "It is this desire for coherence that negates the planners' eforts to
come to terms with adaptive systems. A living system by the very nature of its selforganising properties will defeat any such imposition of rules. The necessity to
compromise the system as circumstances change means that the urban system can never
attain the controlled form that is the planner's ideal" (207).

"However, it should be remembered apropos Plug-In City that Archigram, by the time of
the Cushicle and Suitaloon of 1968, had come to the same conclusions themselves - that
the permissive and adaptive qualities of the transient accommodations were of more
interest to them than was the ordering coherence of the great frame of the megastructure"
(207).
Autodestruction, self-cancelling concept