notes from Reyner Banham’s “Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past”

quotes/ideas:

“the build 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” (on Moshe Safe’s Habitat 67)
“[Megastructures] had taken so long to build, because of their great size, that the intellectual fashion that had given them birth had passed away before their completion”
“monumental follies”
“a megastructure was also a building which looked like a megastructure … resemblances had to be struck with buildings admitted, appointed, or discovered to the megastructure canon from past periods”
“planwise groupings of dwelling units along roadways, comprehensible forms recording growth and change but without overall geometric regularity”
“these could come and go without affecting the perceived form of the whole; even when viewed from the air, a clearly perceivable structure would persist though there was no regular geometrical town plan in the normal sense”
“‘plug-in’ concepts … the high-technological as against the handicraft-traditional”
“There was, indeed, a steady trickle of such projects throughout the intervening years, their mechanistic inspirations and determined formalism revealed by often crude collaging of unaltered technical illustrations on urban perspectives or aerial views, or by simple redrawing assemblies of machine components in such a way as to make their scale ambiguous”
“It was not the sealed envelope that interested so much as all the clip-ons, the sense of an unconstrained aggregation of functional elements without a controlling envelope”
“Space travel was remote, abstract, elitist, its prestige something that people like architects had to share with men in the street at a respectful distance. Sub-aqua activity, however, was the sort of adventure that more ordinary morals could get into if moderately affluent”

things to look up:

Fumihiko Maki’s “Investigations in Collective Form”
Kenzo Tange
Ralph Wilcoxon’s “Megastructure Bibliography”
Archigram
Antionio Sant’Elia
Metabolists (Japan)

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

The Architectural Condition: The Architectural Condition