The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton · 19 Feb 2016 · 903pp · 235,753 words
Table of Contents Series page Title page Copyright page Dedication Series Foreword Acknowledgments Credits Preface I The ModelsIntroduction 1. A New Architecture? 2. An Accidental Megastructure 3. Blur and Accident The Nomos of the Cloud 4. Dividing Sovereignty 5. Over (and under) the Line 6. Land/Sea/Air/Cloud 7. The
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Control 37. Force Finding Function Finding Form 38. Envelope and Apparatus 39. Designing for Mixed Envelopes, Mixed Programs 40. Programs, Subjects, and Zombie Jurisdictions 41. Megastructure and Utopia 42. Platform Cities Address Layer 43. Scale, Scope, and Structure 44. Deep Address 45. Objects in The Stack 46. Addressability and Technique 47
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of silicon-based molecules (that includes our computers). In the long run, this may be for the better—and maybe not. 2. An Accidental Megastructure This accidental megastructure, this machine that is also a “state,” is not the result of some master plan, revolutionary event, or constitutional order. It is the accumulative
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they realize particular strategies for organizing their publics. They are identified with neoliberalism (not without reason), but their origins lie as much within the utopian megastructures of 1960s experimental architecture, counterculture cybernetics, Soviet planning schemes, and many other systems of sociotechnical governance, both realized and imagined. Platforms are infrastructural but rely
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algorithmic conduction of self-directed behaviors by free-range Users. The Stack discussed in the following chapters is a vast software/hardware formation, a proto-megastructure built of crisscrossed oceans, layered concrete and fiber optics, urban metal and fleshy fingers, abstract identities and the fortified skins of oversubscribed national sovereignty.
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information systems, then computation, which otherwise might be defined differently, comes to refer to “algorithms holding systems of information together.” The Stack, as a particular megastructure, emerges from this history of systems conceived in relation to computation, and computation in relation to systems. It has inherited some of its limitations, ambitions
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computation was “discovered” more than it was invented. The Earth layer is also made from the Earth itself, as the terraforming imperative of the Stack megastructure disembowels geological resources toward global conversions. These industrial processes are also as a kind of composition, one for which alternative geoaesthetics may point toward different
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that in the decades to come, the self-amplifying logics of ecological governance demand not only geoengineering, but also incredible computational energy capture-and-distribution megastructures far beyond our current capabilities. 16. Discovering or Inventing Computation? For the relationship between computation and its terrestrial substrate, the Earth, it is never
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the discovery (versus invention) of computation should make the practical distinction between the formal and the functional more apparent. The geopolitical effects of accidental computational megastructures remain design problems precisely because they are not determined by inflated notions about immanent (and imminent) logics. Anything else risks misleading conclusions drawn from deceptively
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algorithm boxes, and in doing so, we make things by accident, sometimes little things like signal noise on the wire and sometimes big things like megastructures. 17. Digestion In the dynamic between natural computation expressing itself through artificial computing machines and those machines in turn remaking the world, each bends and
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geographic chance. So irrespective of the mathematical limits of algorithmic reason, The Stack is interested instead in the limited and sufficient compositional capacities of a megastructure already under construction, the thresholds of which are geological, sociological, economic, chemical, and geopolitical as much as they are calculative. This chapter draws on
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infrastructure and the infrastructure of the interfacial image is exemplified as the systems logic of a geographic, bio-informational, planetary-scale epidermal sensing and computation megastructure by—who else?—the Planetary Skin Institute. For this project, the living and breathing geoepidermis is surveyed through a proposed meta-instrumentation of the biosphere
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would be modeling! Short of fundamental breakthroughs, his anecdote underscores the paradoxical recursivity that undergirds the demand for global ecological omniscience, especially for an accidental megastructure such as The Stack.69 With the promise of irruptive emergencies in mind, as well as Williams's figure of a megamachine eaten by its
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Charles Stross in particular, have updated the Dyson sphere conjecture to include macrocomputational geoengineering.76 Beyond collecting energy to run machines somewhere else, the solar megastructure would also be a vast star-sized computer, known as a Matrioshka brain, that is able to support unimaginably complex and powerful synthetic calculation and
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per device and underpins other channels of involvement and lock-in, pushing User experience of The Stack toward dictates of affect, flattening and cajoling the megastructure to “just work.” Beyond individual touch, the physicality and tactility of Apple's platform are also available as architectural immersion in the global footprint of
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a future featuring nation-sized gated communities wherever they may encircle themselves. For this, the exceptional enclave and the camp work both ways. The dystopian megastructures on which experiential seamlessness depends, like Foxconn's factory cities where Apple objects are assembled, are the necessary mirrored doubles of the Apple polis itself
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niche in the environment to be filled (the long distance savannah).5 Architecture at landscape scale, whether as continuous networked urban fabrics or as withdrawn megastructure, is a particularly important communications infrastructure, in harmony or dissonance with those tunings and countertunings of tools and perception. In this guise, The Stack
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protect themselves against all human contact). In special cases, Cloud platforms design their own architectural footprints by gathering their higher-level cognitive-managerial functions into megastructural corporate headquarters, often city-scale buildings with backs turned on their immediate location (more on these below). Just above the City layer in The Stack
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homogeneous geodetic datum. Some of the most dramatic examples are, not surprisingly, the headquarters of Cloud platforms themselves. But like the Sith from Star Wars, megastructures always come in pairs: their purification of program from immediate urban situation and withdrawal into formal singularity is always necessarily and irreducibly dependent on a
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doppelganger megastructure (or more than one) somewhere else. 36. Exposure and Control Touchpoint by touchpoint, the City layer is perhaps where the birth pangs of Stack
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to descendant genres of urban-scale computation that their initial accounts could not anticipate. In other words, like any other territory comprising reversible exceptional interfaces, megastructures can sometimes be inverted in situ. 37. Force Finding Function Finding Form As already suggested above, too much of our actually existing Stack urbanism is
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very different. While Cloud platforms may capitalize interactions between any and all Users, their own designs for the City layer may be represented more by megastructural artificial geographies—formal utopias even—that allow them to program their own encapsulated territory according to more predictable plans. What kinds of cities are our
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matter, its global redistribution as manufactured objects, and the computational optimization of their itineraries through supply chains. All of these enjoy their own kinds of megastructural theater. At the City layer, this object-oriented economy of molecular logistics is expressed in “planetary supersurfaces” such as warehouses that are so large that
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Foxconn's dorms occupy Apple's subterranean parking, and Foxconn's massive assembly lines tag along with Apple's customer service training programs. Together these megastructures, along with the network of mall-based retail embassies, constitute the terrestrial urbanity of the Apple Cloud platform, but their symbiotic relationship may prove to
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February 21, 2013. 48. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 49. See Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976). The recent lineage includes the New Monumentality, Fuhimiko Maki's Collective Form, Kenneth Frampton's
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and Martin Van Schaik and Otakar Máčel, Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations, 1956–76 (Munich: Prestel, 2005). See also Sabrina Van Der Ley and Markus Richter, Megastructure Reloaded: Visionäre Stadtentwürfe Der Sechzigerjahre Reflektiert Von Zeitgenössischen Künstlern = Visionary Architecture and Urban Design of the Sixties Reflected by Contemporary Artists (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008
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wear matching uniforms, say supervisors routinely curse and yell.” 74. Herbert G. Wells, The Time Machine (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984). 75. Perhaps the most significant Cloud megastructure is not one built to house the higher brain functions of a private global platform, but one built to house the intelligence and surveillance operations
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infrastructural agency of Hertzian space in relation to territories of ground and water might understand the entirety of that spectrum as a kind of atmospheric megastructure, another invisible architecture enveloping and organizing the world within itself. Inside it, two channels compete for the ability to occupy a certain enumerated frequency
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projective images of utopian totalities are, like all such graphical interfacial tools, not only simulations but also fantastic instruments aimed directly toward The Stack's megastructure, this is perhaps, for better or worse, the most essential productive accident of the Interface layer. 55. Interfaces in The Stack 2: Apps and
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points of quasi-sovereign access as they draw lines, borders, and walls. Its primary architectural expression, besides the distributed grid, is the totality of the megastructure, erecting new topologies of control and overexposure, built into the programmatic field of ambient interfaces. These interfaces are integral to platform logics of simultaneous centralization
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diversification, qualitative and quantitative research, and, one hopes as well, the geogovernance of nutrition and food health (this is to say nothing of multistory hydroponic megastructures growing onions, orchids, and okra in deep midnight). The intelligent industrialization of food is potentially an extremely positive (even crucial) Anthropocenic strategy. If Heidegger self
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all layers of The Stack through ubiquitous but not always universal matrices are to the geodesign we undertake. They may be seen as planetary-scale megastructures in and of themselves, naming and mapping physical matter and temporal events at superhuman scale. Crucially, however, just like the interweaving jurisdictional volumes of
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the dissolution of American industrial productivity and the irrevocable destruction of the American small town.” In other words Walmart's relentless synthetic pricing and production megastructure allows the working poor to afford a diverse collection of commodities from roughly 11,000 stores in twenty-seven countries, but at the expense of
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, and in principle to make its continued overdigestion by ecological sinks prohibitively expensive and hence scarce by design. This dovetails with the logic of computational megastructures like Planetary Skin, which would wish to identify, address, and ultimately sort the price of ecologically sensitive molecules and chemical reactions. Some future permutation
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Discussion with Benjamin Bratton.” See http://dismagazine.com/issues/73272/benjamin-bratton-machine-vision/ Index absolute incommunication, 212–214 abstraction of physicalization, 29, 33 accidental megastructure of The Stack, 5, 8–17, 54, 61, 64, 72, 303, 367 accident produces a new technology, 13, 17, 356 accountability, User, 345, 347–
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183, 324 architectural program, 43, 165–166, 169–170 architectural space, 43, 164–165, 343 architectural-urban footprint, 183–189, 320. See also megastructures architecture. See also design; megastructures Anthropocenic, 182 apparatuses, 164–166 of biology, 196, 288 city without, 151 communication through, 148, 161 defined, 201, 391n30 dynamic expressionistic forms of
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See augmented reality Assange, Julian, 135, 285, 288 assemblage line, 231, 234–235, 249, 368 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 253 atmospheric carbon, stabilizing, 259, 303 atmospheric megastructures, 195 atomized human, 251–252, 287–288 atoms, 77 Atta, Mohamed, 321 audience-centric Cloud services, 129 augmented reality (AR), 236, 245–246, 382n40, 429n61
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geodesign, 321 geopolitics, 444n26 grids, 149–153 ideal cities distinction, 150 infrastructures, 151–153 interfacial problematics of, 167, 256 introduction, 70, 147–151 jurisdiction, 357 megastructural form, 176–183 sovereign accidents, 172–176 Stack integration, 154–155, 170 territories of, 154 Users, 148–149, 154, 163–164 violence below, 155 City
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317 Facebook model, 125–128, 187–188 Google model, 134–141, 143, 184–185, 187–188, 332, 369 interfacial regime, 339–340 introduction, 109–110 megastructure headquarters, 155 model of planetary urbanity, 258 political economic architecture, 124 popular discourse on, 312–313 present-day, 119–122, 318 revenue stream, 295 reversibility
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of segmentation, 9, 21, 120, 144 geographic strategy, Google, 9, 120, 144 geo-graphy (earth-writing), 83–87, 149, 309 geography. See also Earth artificial megastructures, 176–183 constitutional, 111 defined, 371 economic, 199 essential importance of, 149 exceptional or unregularized, 30 informational, 29 Internet, 361 of jurisdiction, 171–176, 283
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279, 308 media computational, 198 digital, 55 global, 55 Media Lab, MIT, 201, 226 mediascape, 148 medicine, hyperilluminated, 267–269 megacities, 162–163, 182, 312 megastructures accidental, 5, 8–17, 54, 61, 64, 72, 303, 367 architecture of, 154, 183–187, 296, 320 atmospheric, 195 cities infolded in, 155 Cloud platform
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193–195, 296 Cloud layer, 154 elements of, 335 exceptional, 114 geometry of, 25 Google's Grossraum delaminating, 295 intelligent, 198 lines of demarcation, 32 megastructural, 154–155, 176–183 networks producing, 29 as political technology/political technology as, 335 and sovereignty, 97, 114, 119–120, 312, 316 urban interfacial, 155
Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
by John Grindrod · 2 Nov 2013 · 578pp · 141,373 words
in Mind’: Span and the Hippy Dreams of New Ash Green (1957–72) 7. ‘A Veritable Jewel in the Navel of Scotland’: Cumbernauld’s Curious Megastructure (1955–72) Part 3: No Future 1. ‘A Pack of Cards’: Tower Block Highs and Lows (1968–74) 2. ‘A Terrible Confession of Defeat’: Protests
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like by the impossibly distant year 2000? Sixties planners did their best to imagine. One of the most ambitious schemes was the superhuman speculative shopping megastructure named High Market. It had been sponsored by the glass manufacturers Pilkington Brothers, and drawn up by yet another husband and wife team, Gordon and
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was the best thing about it? ‘It can be extended indefinitely,’ enthused Jellicoe.68 The countryside may not have become home to High Market-style megastructures, but American-style out-of-town malls and European-style hypermarkets did begin to appear. Sadly lacking space-age transport infrastructure, these malls would instead
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small space as sardines into their tin.’1 Yet it wasn’t the housing that bore resemblance to sardine tins; it was the central area megastructure. Condensing all of the activities of a town centre into one huge building suited Hugh Wilson’s super-tight plan just fine. And in addition
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.’2 Geoffrey Copcutt certainly couldn’t be said to have been lacking in vision. In a 1963 article for Architectural Design magazine he described the megastructure as ‘citadel-like’, being ‘half-a-mile long, 200 yards wide and up to eight storeys high.’3 Relatively low-level but sprawling across the
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, “Yes I did, actually.” I think construction started in about ’62. But of course there was a huge amount of under-building required for the megastructure. I remember my first view of it when I came out in a bus from Glasgow. You saw the hilltop, and there were these three
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at Muirhead which had started off as temporary buildings but had got a supermarket and whatever, but none of them wanted to move into this megastructure because it was going to cost them so much money to fit out the units. But some of the photographs from when it was first
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by the structure’s intransigence: like a spoilt child it stubbornly refused to play nicely with the other developments. In the end the much-vaunted ‘megastructure’ existed largely in the minds of a handful of architectural critics and academics, with the central area never reaching a size that merited the name
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new components for old retail equipment, and reps hurriedly eat sandwiches in their cars between appointments. The remaining section of Geoffrey Copcutt’s Central Area megastructure, seen from the road that passes through it. Inside the Antonine Centre are vast walls of crisp matt white, giving it an unfinished nineties air
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huge hyacinth vase. With cars, buses and lorries segregated beneath the deck and pedestrians happily shopping, socialising and working above, this would form a gigantic megastructure at the heart of the town. The tight site would mean that the houses would need to be built much more closely together than in
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the end,’ he said, ‘was that I lived in one of the penthouses that I’d worked on.’ The penthouses sat on top of the megastructure. They were the Bond-villain lairs, the ultimate in postwar futuristic design, the Concorde of twentieth-century town planning. It hadn’t been easy for
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that the sixties Housing Minister Richard Crossman had described as having homes of ‘a tremendously austere, exhilarating, uncomfortable style’.30 The big shock after the megastructure was just how unshocking these areas were. Cars and pedestrians had been separated by that most traditional of materials: cobbles. With the pale grey roughcast
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in its rugged grey masculinity Cumbernauld Central Area resembled less the Queen Mary than HMS Ark Royal. ii Copcutt himself had never used the term ‘megastructure’ to describe Cumbernauld’s central area. iii My own copy is stamped University of Wisconsin. Part 3 NO FUTURE 1. ‘A Pack of Cards’ TOWER
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.1 In the mid-sixties, architect John Knight had been living the sci-fi life in a penthouse in Britain’s most futuristic building, the megastructure that formed Cumbernauld’s town centre. By the end of the decade he’d fallen out of love with his profession, and drifted to Edinburgh
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want to go to, particularly in the evenings. Otherwise it would be a terrible confession of defeat.’15 Eight months later he unveiled a new megastructure for the site: the London Pavilion. ‘With pedestrian thoroughfares and services underground, police and traffic control rooms under the deck and open and covered concourses
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failed to get Portas Pilot money from the government to help regenerate it, so looks set to sink further into dereliction and disrepair. Cumbernauld’s megastructure has been so nibbled-at that it’s now barely a building, and there are even plans to plonk a glass box over the rough
Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham · 8 Nov 2016 · 519pp · 136,708 words
the city-cosmos geometries inherent in medieval city planning to modernist mass social housing towers and the contemporary global proliferation of massive skyscrapers and urban megastructures.21 Unfortunately for the purposes of this book, however, rather than addressing the broader geographies, sociologies and politics of verticalising cities, such debates tend to
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experience of political tyranny. Much more familiar, as we will discuss later in chapter 12, is the widespread engineering of manufactured earth to create distinctive megastructural urban brandscapes which are carefully designed with their representation through Google Earth in mind. Most notable here, as we have seen already, are the ‘Palm
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art historian Kenneth Clark even argued that ‘bomb damage itself is picturesque’.38 However, many devout modernists – keen to radically rebuild cities as vertically stratified megastructures of raised walkways, huge towers and massive highways – actually saw the unimaginable devastation from above as an unparalleled opportunity. As part of the ‘brave new
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picture further, in many cases, corruption means that the line separating the state police and the drug gangs is a very thin one. Favela Futures? Megastructural Fantasies The instinct to suggest the wholesale re-engineering of entire favela complexes through vertically structured mega-design projects – ostensibly as a solution to problems
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matrix’ organised and designed around the figure of the standardised (able-bodied male) human body.16 Thus, freeways, parks, schools, leisure facilities, elevated walkways, raised megastructures and all the other accoutrements of modernist living needed to be planned for as well. Planners and architects in turn ascended to the skies to
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dominant theme of post-war urban planning. Influenced by architectural radicalism such as the ‘plug-in’ city from the Archigram group,5 the huge raised megastructures proposed for Tokyo by a group of Japanese architectural futurists known as the Metabolists,6 and the one-square-kilometre ‘artificial platform city’ imagined by
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was the shift from one all-purpose system of roads to a labyrinth of single-purpose ones, organised three-dimensionally within the huge new concrete megastructures of the city. (Critics suspected from the outset that the dominating motivation behind the idea of raised walkways in the UK was simply to remove
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people from the accelerating momentum of proliferating vehicles.) City centres would thus be progressively re-engineered into huge multifunctional and multilevel containers12: three-dimensional megastructures designed using the latest modernist and functionalist concepts to ‘heap up’ housing, commerce, retailing and leisure while providing enough space for the mass-automobile society
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Tatton-Browns, between 1955 and 1970, the City of London embarked on an ambitious programme of vertical segregation. Raised walkways laced together modernist office blocks; megastructures like the Barbican operated through a series of vertical layers; and the gradual disentangling of systems of motorised and bodily movement were organised, project by
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legacy of deck access and walkway design’, he argues, ‘now absorbs a good share of the British government’s “problem estates” budget. Several recently built megastructures are being demolished and the original pattern of streets and sidewalks reinstated.’16 Internalising Downtown Despite the general failure of raised walkways in the UK
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it eliminates reference to the ground altogether. Hong Kong is a city without ground.’40 Hong Kong has become, in effect, a connected complex of megastructures. These construct accessibility and interconnection within a three-dimensional field that extends from deep subterranean space to several hundred metres above the ground. Such a
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yet unbuilt, megaprojects like the ‘Universe’ and the ‘Waterfront’ would add further to this multiplication. Dubai ‘World’ is a 34 million tonne rock and asphalt megastructure constructed on a platform of compacted, manufactured land made of 450 million tonnes of dredged sand. This has literally been sucked up and out of
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towers, and especially the most important commodity chain underlying vertical construction in the Gulf: the speculative profits from oil extraction that have funded construction of megastructures like the Burj. ‘Today the fantasy skylines of Houston or Dubai achieve a similar inversion’ to the ‘inverted minescapes’ of San Francisco’s towers in
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Cook and Michael Webb, Archigram, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. 6Japanese architect Maki Fumihiko defined a ‘megastructure’ in 1964 as a ‘large frame in which all the functions of a city are housed’. Megastructures had, he argued, ‘been made possible by present day technology’, Maki Fumihiko, Investigations in Collective Form, St
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Concepts’, in Gideon Golany, Keisuke Hanaki and Osamu Koide, eds, Japanese Urban Environment, Oxford: Elsevier Science, 1988, pp. 324–36; and Zhong-Jie Lin, ‘From Megastructure to Megalopolis: Formation and Transformation of Mega-Projects in Tokyo Bay’, Journal of Urban Design 12:1, 2007, pp. 73–92. 8Cook and Webb, Archigram
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. See Reyner Banham’s definitive Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, London: Harper Collins, 1976. 9Ibid., p. 10. 10Aileen Tatton-Brown, and William Tatton-Brown, ‘Three-Dimensional Town Planning’, Architectural
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, September 1941, p. 83. 11Newcastle City Council, ‘Central Area Redevelopment Plan’, Newcastle, 1963, p. 12. 12The quote comes from John Gold, ‘The Making of a Megastructure: Architectural Modernism, Town Planning and Cumbernauld’s Central Area, 1955–75’, Planning Perspectives 21:2, 2006, p. 113. 13Institution of Municipal Engineers, Town Centre Redevelopment
Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives
by Stefan Al · 11 Apr 2022 · 300pp · 81,293 words
village, and an artificial beach enlivened by a 500-foot-long screen displaying sunrises and sunsets. What stopped us seventy years ago from erecting these megastructures, and why are we building them today? It wasn’t the geometry of Wright’s proposal. Surprisingly, both the Jeddah Tower and the Burj Khalifa
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, allegedly the world’s first structural health-monitoring system, making sure it would continue to stand. Technological advances alone do not explain the first hyperboloid megastructure. After all, who needs a TV-tower antenna in the age of cable and satellite? Almost as soon as our building was completed, our tower
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of people can live, work, and play in one single complex, without ever having to leave. The world of megastructures is fundamentally different from the world of regular buildings. Decades before megastructures became a reality, avant-garde architects like Frank Lloyd Wright obsessed over structures this size. It wasn’t all about
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-tall beehive housing 170,000 people. But since none of these grandiose visions had been built, renowned architecture critic Reyner Banham, in his 1976 book Megastructure, declared the concept dead. He cautioned that it was probably for the better. When I first visited Hong Kong, I was amazed by its skyline
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habitats with a low environmental footprint. His 1960 plan for Mesa City was meant to house 2 million people in a series of organic-looking megastructures, like 750-foot-high termite mounds. Despite Soleri’s many scroll drawings of the project, some as long as 180 feet, it was never realized
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air. In this highly interiorized and controlled environment, not a square inch is left to chance. But as ingenious and efficient as Hong Kong’s megastructures may be, they do come with strings attached. FROM ANCIENT ROME to modern-day Houston, cities and buildings have been shaped by mobility devices, including
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there is space for the sole purpose of saying it is there. These and other issues raise difficult questions about the mega-corporation behind the megastructure, such as whether or not real urbanism can exist under the rule of property managers. At worst, Hong Kong’s megaprojects represent a dystopian future
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new mobility, we can increase access with proximity, by more densely packing activities or with a larger variety of uses. Hong Kong’s subway-connected megastructures give people the most access to the most destinations. Meanwhile, developers are making America’s old-school suburban malls more like their dense counterparts across
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Building, Chicago, 58 Hong Kong dense and nondescript towers, 222–24 holistic design methodology, 233 land prices inflated by restrictions, 180 malls in, 229–33 megastructures, 215, 228, 232–33, 237 most skyscrapers of any city, 14–15, 214, 222 poor air quality, 251 public spaces discouraging the public, 232 subway
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dampers mass timber, 45–47, 80 material efficiency, 81–84 Maupassant, Guy de, 169 May, Ernst, 127 mechanical floors, 125, 178, 195–97, 204–5 megastructures, 13–14 in Hong Kong, 215, 228, 232–33, 237 Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, 207 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 123–24, 190 Mile-High
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Sullivan, Louis, 268 Sully, Maurice de, 57 sunscoops of HSBC Building, 132–33 sunset, later at higher floors, 21 super-large, 13–14. See also megastructures superplasticizer, 33, 38 super slenders, 15, 177–79, 194–201. See also air rights benefits of, 205–6 disadvantages to tenants, 206 a few by
Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture
by Deyan Sudjic · 1 Sep 2010
forget life itself and the spirit of man,’ Rudolph wrote in his unusually discursive brief for the students. Their proposal took the form of a megastructure, stepping towards the existing campus buildings. A continuous series of buildings, running one into another, was organised around a spine of lower structures that housed
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of linked stepped pyramids, perhaps the most ambitious attempt at that feverish, half-dystopian, biggest-of-the-big architectural idea of the 1960s – building a megastructure in Britain. Tradition had been abolished. The University of East Anglia wall, backed by an elevated walkway, contains student residences, as well as laboratories, teaching
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look out over the green landscape, and a lake. Foster’s building seems barely to touch the ground; it is tethered to Lasdun’s concrete megastructure by the most tenuous of umbilical cords, a high-level glass walkway. It penetrates the tube at an oblique angle, and then descends into the
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building which is not a repetitive cellular structure but a mixture of different kinds of spaces all the way up, as if it were a megastructure, complex and rewarding in its content. When the bank appointed Foster, they gave him a unique opportunity to redefine the skyscraper as a type and
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huge model of the 600-metre-high Rossiya tower, yet another design by Foster for Chigirinsky’s company, STT. It was conceived as a vertical megastructure that would be the tallest skyscraper in Russia, a city in a single building, with energy-harvesting capacity and a direct connection to the Moscow
New York 2140
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 14 Mar 2017 · 693pp · 204,042 words
the continent with its cities and farms, and the interstate highways and the railways and power lines. Overlapping worlds, a stack of overlays, an accidental megastructure, a postcarbon landscape, each of the many networks performing its function in the great dance, and the habitat corridors providing a life space for their
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. No one knows this system. It grew in the dark, it’s a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No single individual can know any one of these megastructures, much less the mega-megastructure that is the global system entire, the system of all systems. The bankers—when they’re young they’re
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snaps of the days when Rosen and Muttchopf had been kidnapped. Stacks within the great stack that was the city in four dimensions. An accidental megastructure, a maze they could reconstruct and then weave threads through. Outside the carrel the station emptied as people went home or out to dinner. They
Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee · 1 Aug 2022 · 864pp · 222,565 words
Jane Jacobs was exposing the failures of urban projects in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Fuller continued to think in terms of megastructures, which kept him in the public eye at the expense of his vision of decentralization. By contrast, many of his other views were strikingly progressive
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was covered by a dome—a concept that was based partially on the Houston Astrodome, which had made a strong impression on Disney. Beneath this megastructure, conceived to enclose fifty acres, internal buildings such as a hotel tower, stores, and theaters would benefit from total climate control, allowing for a variety
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last patent, and he asked his Cleveland office—to which he owed tens of thousands of dollars—to work on a huge model of a megastructure called the Gigundo Dome. With Norman Foster, he designed the Autonomous House, a rigid “double deresonated dome” with concentric shells that could rotate to regulate
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factory tower for the Gillette Corporation (Wong, 77). The company’s founder, King C. Gillette, had published a utopian manifesto in 1894 that anticipated ideas—megastructures, domed gardens, hexagonal layouts—that RBF later explored (King C. Gillette, The Human Drift [Boston: New Era, 1894], 84–109). declined to attend: Itinerary, May
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Press, 2008), 39. “second order metropolitan area”: Ibid., 42. RBF and Sadao revisited some of their concepts for Toronto in an unrealized proposal for a megastructure in Pearland, Texas (RBF, Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller, vol. 4, 233–34). Cinerama dome: Don Kirkland, “Freeway Signs Built at Torrance,” Independent Press-Telegram
City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith · 19 Jun 2012
first used in 1967. In a future world with ever more people and fewer resources, it no longer seems fanciful to imagine the creation of ‘megastructures’ (a word coined by Rayner Banham in the 1970s), in which a whole city is contained within a single building. The Situationist architect Constant Nieuwenhuys
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proposed a utopian megastructure called New Babylon as early as 1956. If, as scientists predict, the glaciers melt and sea levels rise dramatically, then ship-cities such as Armada
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us in which pollution would be eliminated and people would ‘live in the healthy atmosphere of the building tops’.32 A Walking City, a robotic megastructure designed by Ron Herron of Archigram in 1964. In the same year as this was published, Dorothy and her fellow travellers in The Wizard of
Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities
by Witold Rybczynski · 9 Nov 2010 · 232pp · 60,093 words
, said to be influenced by the Italian seaside town of Portofino.13 However, for the main town center, Whittlesey and Conklin designed a conventional sixties megastructure, with all the functions in what was effectively a single building. Simon objected that this solution was too expensive, and too difficult to implement in
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five identical towers; Libeskind placed his buildings around a huge memorial excavation; and the team that included Foreign Office Architects and UNStudio proposed a colossal megastructure of a type that had never been built before—and was, perhaps, unbuildable. Although architecture critics generally praised the results, not everyone was pleased. “It
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, about the same time as the Penn’s Landing Corporation came into being. As in Philadelphia, the first designs for Battery Park City were ambitious megastructures on superblocks, and they suffered the same fate. The project took a different turn in 1979, when the Authority commissioned Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut
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activity, whether it was shopping, or housing, or work.”9 Habitat, an attempt to raise housing density through a radically different design, was basically a megastructure solution. Modi’in is different: a city informed by post–Jane Jacobs urban design. I asked Safdie how Jacobs had influenced his thinking. “No doubt
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sun. This makes the Air Support Division’s HQ a kind of beached warship in the heart of the city. The inner sanctum of this megastructure is a dense sequence of small corridors and stairways, and even this at times resembles the guts of a military ship. Helicopter timetables and safety
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even the tiniest of grooved surfaces invisible within the lock itself. For Towne, each lock could clearly be blown up to the scale of a megastructure, a palace the size of a city block, its inner gates and cylinders like cavernous hallways and rooms his mind could then wander through. He
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Cole Burdette’s interest in clarifying the city’s system of house numbers and addresses, Codella is just describing the indoor equivalent: making state-funded megastructures numerically legible to the police forces tasked with patrolling them. Even navigating their behemoth interiors required tactical innovation. Residential tower blocks require what are known
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soldiers have dived. Recall LAPD tactical flight officer Cole Burdette—or even retired NYPD detective Michael Codella—with his own numerical suggestions for navigating urban megastructures. One immediately obvious possibility for resisting this—to avoid the tyranny of soldiers armed with 3-D maps or to deter outside invaders and architecturally
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