Megastructure: Urban futures of the recent past

by Reyner Banham

A long-sought reprint of this classic of architectural history and criticism, surveying a movement that would inspire architects, fantasists, and filmmakers alike.It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds 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's 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Urban Futures of the Recent Past 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's 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.

Genres: Architecture, Urbanism, History, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Peter Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was a prolific architectural critic and writer best known for his 1960 theoretical treatise "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age", and his 1971 book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" in which he categorized the Angelean experience into four ecological models (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia) and explored the distinct architectural cultures of each ecology.

He was based in London, moving to the USA from 1976. He studied under Anthony Blunt, then Siegfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner invited him to study the history of modern architecture, giving up his work Pioneers of the Modern Movement. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham cut across Pevsner's main theories, linking modernism to built structures where the 'functionalism' was actually subject to formal strictures. He wrote a Guide to Modern Architecture (1962, later titled Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture).

He had connections with the Independent Group, the This is Tomorrow show of 1956 (the birth of pop art) and the thinking of the Smithsons, and of James Stirling, on the new brutalism (which he documented in The New Brutalism, 1955). He predicted a "second age" of the machine and mass consumption. The Architecture of Well-Tempered Environment (1969) follows Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948), putting the development of technologies (electricity, air conditioning) even ahead of the classic account of structures. This was the area found absorbing in the 1960s by Cedric Price, Peter Cook and the Archigram group.

Green thinking (Los Angeles, the Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971) and then the oil shock of 1973 affected him. The 'postmodern' was for him unease, and he evolved as the conscience of post-war British architecture. He broke with the utopian and technical formality. Scenes in America Deserta (1982) and A Concrete Atlantis (1986) talk of open spaces and his anticipation of a 'modern' future.

As a Professor, Banham taught at the University of London, the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also was the Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He also starred in the short documentary Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles.

Banham said that he learned to drive so he could read Los Angeles in the original.

Reviews

[Kathleen Tahk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Banham has an inimitable style of writing about architecture, which can be both witty and grating, as well as sometimes concealing his somewhat less than fully developed arguments. However, Megastructure, for the thesis of which I have several criticisms, remains probably the best look at an impulse in the architecture of the 1960s. Also, I have to like Banham on some level because though an Englishman, he taught for a long time at the University of Buffalo and published a book on the architecture of Buffalo. Here I always thought Buffalo was a cultural wasteland when I grew up there, but it turns out it was a center of cutting edge architectural theory of the 60s-70s (Bonus: Mike Webb of Archigram was there, too!)

[Awyxm · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought that this would be a book about arcologies or arcology-adjacent structures. Unfortunately, it just seems to be talking about large modernist buildings. If you're looking for neat pictures of enormous buildings the size of cities, Arcology: The City in the Image of Man or Lean Linear City are much better.