MTU Library Catalogue

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Megastructure : urban futures of the recent past / Reyner Banham.

By: Banham, Reyner.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: London : Thames and Hudson, 1976Description: 224 p. : ill. ; 27 cm.ISBN: 0500340684.Subject(s): City planning -- History -- 20th century | Architecture, Modern -- 20th centuryDDC classification: 721
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Barcode
General lending MTU Crawford College of Art and Design Library Lending 721 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 00059773
General lending MTU Crawford College of Art and Design Library Store 721 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 00059774
Total holds: 0

Bibliography: p. 221. - Includes index.

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The term megastructure names a massive, usually extensible building or building complex that comprises a permanent structural frame supporting demountable programmatic units. The movement emerged in the 1960s as a radical counterproposal to orthodox modern architecture. For Banham, it represented a significant, if ill-fated, attempt to resolve nagging contradictions in modernist thinking that for decades had pitted the individual against the collective, the transient against the permanent, spontaneity against design, and freedom against control. By the 1970s, modern architecture long had been aligned with paradigms of top-down control, as much in evidence in Walter Gropius's appeals to "total architecture" as in Le Corbusier's sweeping plans for Paris, Algiers, and Rio de Janeiro. At the same time, it had come to symbolize the pursuit of emancipatory freedom from, among other things, the anachronisms of historical styles, the deprivations of the industrial city, and the oppressions of the bourgeois state. In the decades following World War II, a modern establishment charged with reconstruction and urban renewal brought profound changes to cities around the globe, often in the face of staunch resistance from wary citizen groups assembled to defend the traditional urban milieu. Alongside, architects as diverse as Christopher Alexander, Bernar Rudofsky, and Alison and Peter Smithson advocated adaptable systems, vernacular forms, and open-ended planning that they wagered might grant individual citizens greater freedom over the organization of everyday life. Megastructure emerged from this complicated disciplinary context as an attempt by modern architects to have it both ways, to design their way out of an impasse to which half a century of contradictory impulses had led them. --Todd Gannon, from the Foreword Excerpted from Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past by Reyner Banham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.