Research Catalog

Title

Megastructure : urban futures of the recent past / Reyner Banham ; foreword by Todd Gannon.

Author

Banham, Reyner,

Publication

• New York, New York : The Monacelli Press, [2020]
• ©2020

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Gannon, Todd,

Description

230 pages : illustrations, plans; 26 cm

Summary

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\u0027s 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, \u0027Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past\u0027 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\u0027s 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.

Subject

• City planning
• Megastructures

Note

• New introduction. First published: London : Thames and Hudson, ©1976.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (page 227) and index.

Contents

Introduction: Todd Gannon -- Introduction: dinosaurs of the modern movement -- Antecedents, analogies and mégastructures trouvées -- Beginners and begetters -- Megayear 1964 -- Fun and flexibility -- Megacity Montreal -- Megastructure in academe -- Megadecadence: acceptability and exploitation -- Epilogue: the meaning of megastructure -- Appendix: Maki on megastructure.

ISBN

• 9781580935401
• 1580935400

LCCN

99989191587

OCLC

• on1200306146
• 1200306146

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries