[meta-MEGA] the Growth of Megaforms lies within their Decline

meta-MEGA the Growth of Megaforms lies within their Decline

IRP | KONSTANTINOS RETSINAS

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meta-MEGA the Growth of Megaforms lies within their Decline

Independent Research Project MA City Design 2019/20

Student Konstantinos Retsinas

Programme Lead Dr Godofredo Pereira

Tutor Cristina Goberna Pesudo

Practice Mentor by ACME James Denner

Royal College of Art November 2020

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Table of Contents

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Abstract | Manifesto

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Mega: a Critique

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it is not a Matter of Size

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Mega Architecture: a MAT Reading

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Free University of Berlin: mat-building archetype

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Villa VPRO: mat-building approach

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Landscape Language for Buildings

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No-Stop City: a non-design approach of infinite space

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meta-MEGA

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manifesto points

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the new landscape

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Conclusion

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Appendix

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Lingotto Factory: adaptive reuse in the scale of ‘mega’

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Post Huston: new rules of freedom

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Bibliography

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List of Illustrations

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Abstract | Manifesto

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When looking at deserted megaform and landform buildings we find ourselves wondering why they are still here. Why, after having been liberated from human occupation and completely abandoned do they still remain standing? As if by protest, they object to being exhausted by human and programmatic use, they do not give up on existence. To think of an afterlife for these buildings, firstly requires of one to view them in a way which would render them as ‘unproductive’ entities. Secondly one should find the appropriate agency through which to intervene by doing very little, with the purpose of allowing the building the possibility of continuous transformations. If a depository of mega-big buildings is what we are left with, their remains can be perceived like the undead; paradoxically refusing to die. The collapse, decay and underutilization of these megaforms should not be construed as a negative aspect of their existence, but rather as their life renewed.

The typological reconstitution of architectures in the scale of ‘mega’ is to be deployed through the manifestation of a design syllabus.

Declining infrastructures, abandoned buildings, and underutilized spaces In this ‘mega’ scale framework, declining infrastructures, abandoned buildings and underutilized spaces become subject to speculation. Their decline is to be conceived as the spatial manifestation of radical socio-economic transformations with a clear impact on architecture and the built environment pointing to how space is actually used and exploited.

Beyond exaggerating a condition of collapse, the project’s scope is to envision a future of growth that lies within their decline. Throughout this research, Sky City – an existing mixed use development with megaformic characteristics that sits in the Metropolitan Center of Wood Green, London – is used as a field for experimentation through the deployment of a multi-level investigation. By looking at the generalisable characteristics of this case study, the project attempts to generate a speculative method with which buildings of this scale can be treated by expanding the common architectural vision.

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Mega: a Critique Megaforms, megastructures, pieces of artificial earthwork, landform buildings and groundscrapers are to be thought of as an act of architecture of a heroic scale. But, hardly ever do we realise that buildings of this spectrum have unlimited capacities that allow for their transformation on multiple scales. In a sense one could argue that a building’s possible futures are left rather underexplored unless it reaches the edge of decay and collapse, destabilizing its various contexts, patterns and rhythms.

Postulating on the megaforms’ afterlife scenarios, this research sets the recent collapse of retail as its starting point. While retail happened to be one of the main drives for many of these buildings, within the urgency for change – that the Covid-19 pandemic is strengthening – around retail habits, the project aims to speculate the post-programmatic and place-creating character of such configurations of mega scale. The collapse of retail and its side effects is not only a pragmatic problem nowadays, but also a way to start thinking about a situation of a discontinuous moment in the life of these buildings, where temporality is highlighted by the destruction of the retail sector.

megaform

Tracing the history and theory of megaformic buildings – which is the starting point of this research – one can find that they date back to Kenneth Frampton’s exploration around the idea of megaform. Yet, one can clearly see on his original work the influence that architectural critic and writer Banham had with his approach on megastructures, along with architect and academic Maki’s prolific writing on the collective form – where the notion of megaform possibly made its appearance for the first time in writing.

In trying to interpret the forms of these unoccupied megaformic husks of buildings that the city is left with, in order to unravel the city’s latent potentialities, the contribution of architect and theorist Stan Allen, presents itself as one of great value. He revisits the theory of the mat-building and suggests a reading of architecture where interlinked spaces, ever-extending, and transforming surfaces are to be seen almost as characteristics inherited from such horizontally oriented structures. A reading such as this directs one closer to the understanding of an architecture attributed with landform characteristics that poses as a new terrain desperately awaiting further exploration.

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F01 Sky City Sky City was built in 1979 by Sheppard Robson and sits in the Metropolitan Center of Wood Green in Haringey crossing the High Street as seen on the right. The development is occupied by retail spaces of different scale and character on the first two floors and residential units above.

F02 Southdale Center’s Interior Southdale Center sits in Edina, Minnesota and was built in 1956 by Victor Gruen.

It is both the first and the oldest fully enclosed, climatecontrolled shopping mall in the United States.

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F03 Visual Scandal Photomontage by Tsunehisa Kimura in1979 showing an urban catastrophe and an extreme landscape that no one would ever think. He makes use of scale in a provocative way to talk about a humanmade metropolis in collapse.

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Within a scenario of collapse for these buildings’ – wherever their catastrophe may derive from and head towards – the polemics of this research stand strongly against the overexploitation of their form by a monocultural framework dictated by the needs that a retail, office or any such sector might dictate. The resiliency and adaptability that these built forms could possibly demonstrate is still to emerge. Their formal and functional latent capacities are powerful enough for one to postulate and create a life anew for these buildings. For example, the typology of the car park and patterns of automobile that these buildings are connected with are becoming obsolete in the same way that shopping has become almost obsolete1. The recycling of commodities and service industries - promoted within the capitalist framework - ultimately block any possibility for a land settlement that could function as a thrust towards the production of a coherent civic space2, an aspect that this essay aims towards the critical reassessment of. The main hypothesis - yet to be proven - is that the tendencies and capacities of these mega buildings are strong enough to signify a life beyond their primary configured occupation.

1 Tae-Wook Cha and others, ‘Shopping (Harvard Project on the City)’, in Mutations, ed. by Armelle Lavalou (Barcelona: Actar, 2001), pp. 124–83 (p.176)

We also know that the footprint of buildings in the scale of ‘mega’ has a great environmental impact. One could probably cite many examples of such catastrophes like “buildings of ever larger supermarkets and shopping malls that are not only ‘unsustainable’ by definition but also invariably isolated from the topographic grain of the surrounding landscape. The maximizing of such shopping facilities, together with the recent proliferation of gated communities, can hardly be regarded as environmentally or culturally sound solutions to the predicament of land settlement”3, Frampton says.

2 Kenneth Frampton, Megaform as Urban Landscape: 1999 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture, ed. by Brian Carter (Michigan: The University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, 1999), p.39.

3 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Technoscience and Environmental Culture: A Provisional Critique’, in Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), 54.3 (2001), pp. 123– 29 (p.127)

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F04 NEW YORK: THE CONTINUOUS MONUMENT In this image – belonging to a series of collages titled Continuous Monuments around 1969 by Superstudio – one can easily reflect the massive deployment of a single piece of architecture taking over New York City. The structure is white, massive, grided, and surpasses a modern utopian iconography. Instead, it means to fantasize landscapes of artificial and homogeneous intelligence similar to those that megastructures introduce to everyone.

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This is what recent history would document as a delirious consumerism that was to be embodied in several types of buildings such as shopping malls, all of which engendered civic microcosms in their forms. Thinking of retail-animated life in built environments of a big scale and its recent decline reminds one of Koolhaas’s reading of the metropolis, where “bigness exists either to destroy or celebrate a new beginning”4. What we are facing now is an event of a discontinuous moment where temporality is shattered and malls in particular are being rendered completely abandoned.

bigness exists either to destroy or celebrate a new beginning

At this point, Japanese graphic designer Tsunehisa Kimura’s work appears as an awakening. He treats history in a different way through photomontages, and he talks about urban catastrophes and landscapes that no one ever expected the last century would bring. He uses scale in a provocative way to talk about a human-made metropolis in collapse. The future of mega-buildings according to the research conducted is being rendered almost apocalyptic. Spare elements of automobiles, fragmented architectural elements, and many other mechanistic parts, help towards the creation of the scenery. Thinking beyond their ‘decadence’ is almost like proposing a new reading for these architectures as an act of imaginary reconstruction in the way that Piranesi and his Appian Way teaches us.

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4 Rem Koolhaas and others, Small, Medium, Large, ExtraLarge: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, New edition (Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1997), p.942.

F05 Appian Way In this etching of 1756, Giovanni Battista Piranesi proposes a reading of architecture as an act of imaginary reconstruction.

Although there is something propositional in his work in the way he draws, it is based upon overlapping various layers of time and material that makes someone wonder what if the overlay he proposes was slightly different.

C01 Decline of Malls in London Chart showing the decline of malls in London in comparison with Beijing and Moscow, where malls are becoming the new trend.

SOURCE: Colliers International, Knight Frank

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D01 POST APOCALYPTIC LANDSCAPES This drawing belongs to of a series of images of catastrophes that the project anticipates regarding the future of megabuildings. According to this scenario, the megaform pictured above is empty and starts decaying as a result of its desolation.

While maintaining it may be very expensive, its footprint is so massive that demolishing it is not an option.

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D02 POST APOCALYPTIC LANDSCAPES In this scenario, spare elements of automobile patterns, fragmented architectural elements and various dispersed mechanistic parts organise the vocabulary for this post-apocalyptic landscape. Drawings 01 and 02 are experimental both in terms of representation and speculation. Their transparency and fragmentation allows one to visualize and conceptually experience the buildings’ collapse and decay. As their elements become autonomous they are able to reassemble anew.

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it is not a Matter of Size In order to define what a megastructure is, Banham suggests that an accurate approach can be found in un-built forms. Walking cities, mechanically assembled buildings, habitable complexes, and other imaginary visions in the scale of ‘mega’ belong to such a megastructural language5. But the framing of megastructure in its purest manifestation can be found for the first time in Fumihiko Maki’s 1964 work titled, Investigations in Collective Form. According to him, megastructure is a “large frame in which all the functions of a city or part of a city are housed” and he continues saying that it is “a man-made feature of landscape”6. Trying to frame megastructure’s contribution in urban design, Maki stresses its tendency to order massive group functions. By referring to Kenzo Tange’s work when visiting M.I.T. as a professor, Maki makes extensive use of the idea of megaform to describe Tange’s proposal for a community of 25.000 residents.

introduction of megaform

According to Maki, Tange’s megaformic approach to dealing with this project produces a building that is continually subject to change attributing to its ecology a freedom around the decision-making process of the functions that it could host. By acknowledging the difficulties in anticipating changes around the many variables that act as inputs, the megaform becomes “rapidly obsolete, as well it might, especially in those schemes which do not allow for two kinds of change cycle, it will be a great weight about the neck of urban society”7. In this framework, the research is still looking into megaforms as kinds of forms that may easily adapt and accommodate for a multi-functionalist approach to offer a vast repertoire of possible futures.

collective form

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Maki’s collective form has three approaches.

From compositional form to megastructure (introduction to megaform), and group form, they all highlight the making of some kind of form able to address spatial transformations and trigger the urban fabric. The aim of this research is not to give one an account of all the theories related to a megaformic language, but to acknowledge certain relationships on how elements come together. Especially in Maki’s theory of group form, it is important to understand the principles involved in the making of collectiveness of form. Arguments on various scales can be made by looking at his different theories. The compositional form interests itself with the scale of the building block, whereas the group form describes some kind of human scale, and most importantly, megastructure and his merely scraped theory of megaform is in favor of the heroic scale of the urban quarter.

5 Reyner Banham, Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture, (London: Architectural Press, 1975), p.144.

6 Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form, (St. Louis: School of Architecture, Washington University, 1964), p.8.

7 Maki, p.11

D03 Language of Megaform A series of drawings around Sky City’s form that comment on the language of megaform demonstrating how it treats several elements of the urban quarter such as transportation linkages, roads, etc.

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By definition, the term megaform refers to the “form-giving potential of certain kinds of horizontal urban fabrics capable of effecting some kind of topographic transformation in the megalopolitan landscape”8, according to Kenneth Frampton. Megaform is a form that is large enough to extend horizontally rather than vertically. It is complex but not necessarily articulated into a series of structural and mechanical subsets. It is capable of inflecting the existing urban landscape in terms of its topography, not by standing on its own but rather as a continuation of the surrounding topography. Finally, it is oriented towards a densification of the urban fabric.

What establishes the status of a megaform building is a form that denotes from a distance within its context almost as a landmark in an inner-suburban development. Such structures tend to sit on crucial points of the city’s mobility patterns because of their proximity to public transportation as they have been initially connected with patterns of automobile and transportation linkages. If they are not part of the transportation infrastructure, then they should be easily accessed on foot for both residents and non-residents to have easy access to their amenities.

place-creating character its spatial aspect The theory of megaform deals with the overall form and the spatial performance that is inherited to it. Amongst megaform’s many essential attributes, the most important one - in Frampton’s own words - is “the overall horizontal thrust of its profile taken together with the programmatic place-creating character of its spatial aspect”9. There is a polyscalar and programmatic approach that could also describe artificial topography and landlike formations in similar terms. One could relate a megaform to a geological outcrop because it is heavily grounded and opposed to free-standing objects. The complexity of a horizontally oriented building’s form demonstrates its strong relationship with the ground, its connection to the urban context. This new ecological potential emerging through such megaform phenomena is what this research is interested in examining.

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8 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Urbanization and Discontents: Megaform and Sustainability’, in Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture, ed. by Sang Lee (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), pp. 97–108 (p.169)

9 Frampton, ‘Urbanization and Discontents: Megaform and Sustainability’, (p.169)

F06 L’llia Diagonal Megaform is particularly evident in the work of Rafael Moneo and Manuel de Sola Morales for L’llia Diagonal as realized at the urban scale of Barcelona in 1997 when it was built.

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D04 ATLAS OF MEGA An atlas of buildings and their respective elemental structures have been the focus of this research. The aim was to speculate on different case studies through the exploration of their various notions and correlations.

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D05 FIGURE-GROUND MAP | Scale 1/4000 Map illustrating the relationship between built and unbuilt space in Metropolitan Center of Wood Green. Land coverage of buildings is visualized as solid mass (figure), while public spaces including streets, parks and plazas are represented as voids (ground). This map only reveals a partial truth regarding the building’s life. However, the horizontality and form-giving potential of a megaform could allow a topographic transformation in the megalopolitan landscape.

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Mega Architecture: a MAT Reading The overall horizontal orientation of a megaform, together with the programmatic place-creating character of its spatial aspect, help for it to be understood as a freedom in which the ground can be organized so as it can affect the urban fabric. This being what matbuilding is referring to, the research sets the Free University of Berlin as one of its case studies. A mat-building is a large-scale, high-density structure organized on the basis of an accurately modulated grid. “A first look at any mat-building geometry shows a ground plan in the form of a regular grid that constitutes the general order”10, and that would suffice as a first approach on how to identify mat buildings.

Free University of Berlin: mat-building archetype To begin with, the investigation around

mat-buildings is traced at the scale of individual buildings. The most important characteristics of the majority of mat-buildings are their shallow and dense sections, the capacity of their large open roofs, the city that flows through them, their various volumetric voids and the interplay of the rhythmic repetition and variation that is applied in their formation. Stan Allen points to Smithson’s original reading of mat-building to identify mat characteristics in various other projects that would relate to mat-like buildings. Such examples are the Free University of Berlin and the drawing for the Frankfurt reconstruction of Römerberg’s centre by Candilis, Josic, Woods and Scheidhelm, and Venice’s Hospital by Le Corbusier.

10 Debora Domingo Calabuig, ‘The Strategies of MatBuilding’, Architectural Review, 2013 <https://www. architectural-review.com/ essays/the-strategies-ofmat-building> [accessed 22 October 2020]

F07 Free University of Berlin Original competition drawings illustrating the Free University of Berlin by Candilis, Josic, Woods and Scheidhelm. From the top to the bottom, they show circulation system, built/ unbuilt space, the overlay of the last and rooftop.

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D06 Organisation Grid

D07 Module

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D08 Figure Ground Plan

F08 Atrium

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To continue, he expands our knowledge of mat-buildings showcasing other projects such as Santa Catarina Market by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue, Villa VPRO by MVRDV architects and Nexus World Housing by OMA, most of which are still quit constrained within a contained boundary. While allowing for a minimal formal variation, these projects propose a high degree of programmatic variations. Villa VPRO especially, suggests an adaptive social ecology through its form. Along with a series of surfaces that can be occupied differently, the project deploys a collective intelligence comparable to the mat organizational logic. The accumulation of two strictly defined perimeter blocks and the way they both connect with the city through a clear mat section can be seen in the case of OMA’s housing project. By circulating the building’s interior, a series of septa including courtyards and patios that constitute to the making of a porous fabric can be seen.

Villa VPRO: mat-building approach

Stan Allen uses the lens of a matbuilding approach to read architecture that while in its deployment may not look precisely like a mat-form building, but persists as “an organizational strategy and an architectural effect”11 does. In attempting to expand our understanding of a mat-buildings’ logic, he provides us with the Santa Catarina Market in Barcelona as a key example. Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue read old traces and overlaid new ones in a highly complex mixed-use programmatic agenda. They make a distinction between a heavily grounded market and an extended figural roof to allow for the building to attach to the city differently. This radical contribution towards an urban-oriented understanding of the idea of MAT is to be extended beyond a single building towards looser configurations with even more indeterminate boundaries.

11 Stan Allen, ‘Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D’, in Case: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, ed. by Hashim Sarkis (Munich; New York: Prestel, 2001), pp.

118–26 (p.121)

F09 Villa VPRO Designed by MVRDV in 1997, the project proposes a revolutionary approach of a work environment. It resembles a landscape that is made of concrete, an accumulation of surfaces to be transformed accordingly.

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D09 Matrix

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D10 Section

D11 Floor Plan 02

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The horizontal extensivity that he specifies as a mat-building’s ultracharacteristic can be seen at endless horizontal shopping concourses as a mat configuration at its poorest manifestation. Even in the case of a shopping arrangement like the mall, there are bits of connectivity, mobility, emergence and ecology that support the argument, while the language used to describe it is sympathetically attached to a mat urbanism language and definition. Stan Allen himself identifies mat-building effects in unexpected locations such as “freeway interchanges, suburban cinemaplexes, intermodal transportation centerism informal markets in traditional city centers, proliferating spaces of leisure and recreation”12.

generating space in betweenThis is a moment of realization for intersection

points between mat urbanism and megaformic theory based not only on the horizontal extensivity of both, but also in the way that parts of a whole fit together. In addition, how void spaces are composed by architectural matter, how porosity promotes interconnectivity between interior and exterior spaces generating the various degrees of ‘in-between’ spaces, these being just a few of the overlaps between these two theories. Moreover, style and appearance in both theories become redundant in terms of their potential programmatic value.

Both the theories of mega and mat-reading of the building form are highly anti-figural and oppose themselves to representational approaches.

12 Allen, (p.124)

13 Alison Smithson, ‘How to Recognise and Read MATBUILDING: Mainstream Architecture as It Has Developed towards the MatBuilding’, 09, 1974, pp. 573– 590 (p.573)

14 Allen, (p.122)

In addition, “there is a clear indication of the mat-building urge towards collective grouping, and firm but recessive compatibility”13 as Smithson refers to in her manifesto of mat-buildings to be extended in mat-urbanism reading. A mat-building proposes “some kind of a loose scaffolding based on systematic organization of the parts”14 and that is to be seen as an extension of what Smithson structures in favor of her argument above. Thinking of the way that parts come together to constitute a whole is like condensing and losing relationships between parts.

D12 Porous Ground top right D13 Experimentation with the Ground bottom right

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Landscape Language for Buildings Mat-urbanism’s theory comes with a critique regarding the objectbuilding. This is why megaform is an interesting framework when we look at architectures and typologies of this scale. Megaforms are more related to the urban fabric configurations that are able to address changes in their surroundings, while megastructures are more autonomous and self-referential buildings that tend to assert themselves because of their figural, representational and monumental appearance. Volynets Iryna on her review on Benjamin Wilkie’s argues that “the buildings are no longer self-identical structures that simply exist in their context, but rather they are defined by urban context, nature, roads, trees, and the human beings who inhabit and use them”15.

To make a point around the idea of megaform and how prolific this notion appears to be today, this research has been extensively using a landform language to provide definitions, describe megaform in detail, and allow for connections of already known megaform examples with their various effects. To that end, some of the principles of Landscape Urbanism are to be acknowledged as a productive set of tools for further experimentation. Just as the landscape tends to change over time allowing for the different patterns of social and spatial interaction to emerge, we point to this variability and reversibility in the case of megaformic structures.

Such complex structures also have the tendency to transform, adapt, and are subject to ongoing transformation. Their horizontally oriented building form demonstrates a strong relationship with the ground, a connection to the urban context, and a new potential to emerge.

change over time

There is an inherent value in how a landscape changes over time. In the building analogy, we see this as a potential of a building’s life to expand beyond its original use, to amplify itself. Stan Allen in his conversation with Kenneth Frampton and Hashim Sarkis, argues that: “We associate this potential much more with landscape, and the notion that buildings themselves are used and recycled is much less easy to grasp”16. Rarely can such a notion be seen in architecture. However, this concept comes to be tested every time these controversial spaces need to accommodate for cases of emergency and catastrophe. Stadiums in Japan have the potential to be transformed into camps, hospitals, and so on. In the recent history of the Covid-19 pandemic, spaces such as airports were occupied by care facilities and stadiums to function as food distribution points. One such example is the Alexandra Palace in Haringey.

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15 Iryna Volynets, ‘Benjamin Wilke (Ed): Stan Allen: Four Projects’, in Nexus Network Journal, 19.2 (2017), 547–54 h t t p s : //d o i . o r g /1 0 .1 0 0 7/ s00004-017-0345-9 [accessed 22 November 2020]

16 Stan Allen and Marc McQuade, Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2011), p.257.

F10 Robson Square Designed by Arthur Erickson in 1973, Robson Square is located in Vancouver and acts as a landmark for the civic center and the public piazza. It clearly demonstrates megaformic characteristics along with a landscape oriented treatment of the public space.

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Landscape Urbanism is particularly interested in addressing what seems to be a horizontal condition. While being time-specific nonetheless, landscape urbanism also addresses conditions that appear on a long-term effecting horizon. By that means, it brings together such opposing powers and is subject to negotiation. Once more, within the building analogy, not all typologies can relate to these notions. Megaform appears to be the closest one described, analysed and eventually critiqued by landscape principles. To sum up with one of Allen’s manifesto points from the preface of his collective work of Landform Building: architecture’s new terrain, architecture as a discipline goes side by side with the experience of the landscape.

Landform building embraces the expanded notion of the interior. In his own words: “the vast scale of these megaform proposals brings landscape effects inside and blurs the boundary between interior and exterior. In this context, landscape is no longer viewed as pure exteriority but is understood as an immersive environment similar in experience to the contemporary city”17.

No-Stop City: a non-design approach of infinite space

Collages of the Non-stop city project by Archizoom in the 60s drive one’s attention to a horizontally oriented building form similar to a landscape endowed with the potential of different ecologies to emerge. The infinite plane indicates a nomadic way of living where people move and organize themselves freely while only a few elements remain fixed, including an absolute structural skeletal system. Although Stan Allen would probably disagree with the non-design or very generic approach of such an infinite space, he too connects Landscape Urbanism to the “notion of an open-ended, indeterminate attitude toward program”, which is to be understood like “anything can happen on a green field: you can play football, you could have a market, you can have a political rally, whatever” 18.

This provocative statement allows one to question both the design conditions and the degree of fixity to trigger diversity for such a space, balancing between the emptiness of a field where anything could happen and a rather fixed vessel where nothing can be modified. There is of course a degree of determinacy in the decisionmaking process around any kind of programme one might possibly come up with, which will potentially face a phase of trial and error.

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17 Allen and McQuade, p.35.

18 Allen and McQuade, p.256.

F11 Non-Stop City Designed by Archizoom in the 60s, this radical idea of a city is subject to multiples diagrams of occupation and domesticity as seen through the collages.

Within its horizontally oriented building form arises a new potential of ecology to emerge.

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D14 INFINITE PLAN The plan fosters a nomadic way of living in which people move and organize themselves freely and only a few elements are fixed including an absolute skeletal infrastructure. In this framework, the furnishing of the space becomes pivotal.

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D15 ANALYSIS

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D16 SKY CITY AS LANDSCAPE | Scale 1/1000 The investigation around Sky City as a landscape that changes over time is now being re-interpreted. Its various layers have been overlaid to postulate on the building as a palimpsest similar to the layering one finds in an excavation project.

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D17 SKY CITY AS LANDSCAPE

meta-MEGA The catastrophes that this project foresees in megaform buildings may be caused by violent treatment of their built structures, natural causes of decay, and conditions of overexploitation of their spaces.

Whatever the reasons may be, this project doesn’t seek for hope and prosperity. On the contrary, this project applies a kind of optimism and growth to the fall and decline of mega-architectures by deploying a protocol on how megaforms can be reevaluated and treated in the light of their underestimated breadth and width of their spaces of possibilities.

ever-changing transformation

A language of growth and proliferation that may be applied to these forms needs most importantly to acknowledge their given characteristics as specified within the theories of mega mentioned above. Then, the lens offered by a mat reading within a megaform context becomes a logical sequence on how to treat these buildings’ surfaces differently on both a formal and programmatic level thus allowing for ever-changing programmes to emerge, with the curtail aim of avoiding any type of specific use to be attributed to them. Acknowledging the right for ever-changing transformation for these buildings means more to let them be, rather than to tame their existence and natural course of life. So, if one was to intervene sectionionally in a megaform, a set of “surgical” tools would consist of subtracting, voiding, and emptying its mass. Rendering parts of a megaform completely useless would allow space in between to emerge as equally important and as fully functional as the rest of its spaces.

When great disruption within the built form occurs, its primary diagrams of massing, urban orientation, circulation and structure are highly affected by the intervention. Therefore, the relations that the original diagrams used to indicate, no longer exist in the same manner. Spaces generally understood as open and public are to be taken over by a new kind of domesticity, and can be given back repeatedly and prior to any negotiation. The investigation of whether a space is domesticated or not surpasses the question of where for example its private bedrooms may be and what the unit to whole relationship dictates within this context.

F12 Epic Interior The collage responds to a call for an EPIC CITY of epic architecture where ecologies set up new relationships allow social, professional, and domestic conflicts in the scale of the building block.

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On the one hand, it can be demonstrated that the private bedroom is to be rendered outside the norm of the family unit as outlined by the model apartment 1851 engendered by the hierarchy of the family structure. According to this, the private bedroom can exist anywhere provided that everyone agrees with the common knowledge that there can be no room without a view, no matter what its window overlooks. On the other hand, domesticity is to be framed within a reuse framework, as a fully-fixed proposition for the life of megaforms. In other words, if one is to design the megaform anew within its adaptive reuse agenda, that would mean to tame its potential towards a specific programmatic scenario. Normally, to redesign a megaform that has been either underutilized or been abandoned would mean to opt for a fully functional building.

Instead, this project aims to make it possible for different scenarios to emerge, all of which are to blend the boundaries between what one knows about these buildings and what these buildings could possibly be.

One of the variables to be taken for granted when thinking of the afterlife of the structures of this spectrum is that their structural skeleton happens to be the most heavily grounded part of a megaform’s establishment. Its structure imposes a systemic grid that is to be interpreted as an ‘ever-extending’ supporting system, the basis for its various loose and open organizations. Unconstrained by ownership structures and leases, new occupation patterns are to emerge where humans are free to act nomadically in the way they organize themselves. They should be able to move quite easily and make extensive use of the urban furniture presented to them.

Frampton in his theory of megaform makes a distinction between the ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ parts of a building. According to this distinction, he relates the ‘wet’ part of a megaform with the place-form - its most permanent element - and the ‘dry’ part of it with the product-form, its many loose assemblages that are less fixed and more susceptible to change that respond to the specific needs of its character19. Then, one may see robotic platforms, shelves and stocking areas pop up as part of the megaform’s finish that add on to its complexity coming from the assemblages attached to it.

19 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Seven Points for the Millennium: An Untimely Manifesto’, in The Journal of Architecture, 5 (2000), pp. 21–33 (p.27

F13 Epic Interior

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Contaminating buildings in the scale of mega, super, high, big with hybridism means to bring housing, work, leisure together with infrastructures, health care, wellbeing towards compact and sustainable cities within one building.

20 Benjamin H. Bratton, ‘Cloud Megastructures and Platform Utopias’, in Entr’acte_ Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, and ArchitecturePalgrave Macmillan, ed. by Jordan Geiger (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 35–51 (p.38)

Benjamin H. Bratton makes use of the notions of megastructures and utopias in his own work while trying to explain in spatial terms the formation of something that is generally understood as immaterial like planetary-scale computation, from cloud infrastructures to several interfaces. In his work it is not the megastructures themselves that interest him but the megastructural protocol that he makes use of. In his essay on Cloud Megastructures and Platform Utopias, PlugIn City by Archigram is merely seen as a recombinant landscape; Continuous Monuments by Superstudio reflect the massive deployment of transoceanic fiber optics and No-Stop City by Archizoom as the interfacial city without beginning, end, or middle . By looking at several cases that belong to the same spectrum, Bratton makes it possible to see characteristics of megastructures as they have never been seen before while deploying his own theory of megastructures when talking about Amazon or Facebook as a materialization of a cloud polis.

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MANIFESTO POINT

01

Humans are free to act nomadically and re-organize themselves.

They should be able to move quite easily and make extensive use of the urban structures presented to them.

MANIFESTO POINT

02

According to this, the private bedroom can be anywhere provided that there can be no room without a view, no matter what its window overlooks.

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MANIFESTO POINT

03

One may see robotic platforms, shelves and storage areas to pop up as part of the megaformâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finish that add on its complexity resulting from the assemblages attached to it.

MANIFESTO POINT

04

The structure imposes a systemic grid to be interpreted as an â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;ever-extendingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; supporting system, the basis for its various loose and open organizations.

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D18 THE NEW LANDSCAPE | Scale 1/200 Sky City is not constrained within a contained boundary. Instead, it can be seen as a landscape of multiple layers, along with their inherent sectional variation. The collective intelligence of the proposal derives from the mat organizational logic and extends beyond it, while its circulation diagram points to its interior rather than its periphery. Nature appears to devour interior spaces inside while at the same time several elements are organized on the basis of a regular grid.

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D19 SECTIONAL INTERVENTION | Scale 1/200

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D20 STRUCTURAL SYSTEM

Circulation

Transparent Room

Kitchen Box

Nature

Foldinging Surface

Slorage Box

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D21 KIT OF ELEMENTS

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D22 meta-MEGA SECTION

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D23 meta-MEGA INTERIOR

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D24 GROWTH BY DECLINE

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D25 GROWTH BY DECLINE

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Conclusion

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The argument constructed within this research began from the exploration of certain typologies through a critical lens. Almost like a protest, corpses of human and programmatic use, buildings with megaformic characteristics underwent strong criticism. In order to start thinking of an afterlife for these buildings, it is required of one to trace the history of mega-theories in architecture and megaforms in particular just so as to point out how megaform is more than a matter of size. From a mat-building approach to a landform understanding, a redefined theory of megaform emerged as an alternative response to its architectural characteristics, one that made it possible to be understood as an artificial landscape.

After Frampton’s definition of megaform as seen in its first publication in 1999 and several revisions of his own original work, this research surpasses the dialectic relationship that he claims exist between the ‘earthwork’ and the ‘roofwork’ of a megaform as a way of regarding the interaction between place-form and product-form21. Instead, it is the artificial topography, several values of a landscape approach such as the a-programmatic uncertainty and the idea of an everchanging transformation that suggest looking at the same typologies anew. The relatively recent history but not necessarily contemporary investigation around the theories of mega within the architectural practice were to be seen differently through a landform approach.

Therefore, the project is more about anticipating the future patterns for these buildings rather than trying to solve a series of problems that never end.

21 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Technoscience and Environmental Culture: A Provisional Critique’, (p.126)

22

Allen, p.126.

Finally, if we are to accept that we still live in modernity, we need to acknowledge two states, according to Stan Allen. Firstly, the iconic building comes as a celebration of the new condition, and secondly the spatial performance enacts the organizational and social dynamics of modernity. “Modernity has directed its gaze away from the thing itself and toward its constitutive relationships and its position in a contextual field. Today we pay increased attention to the interval – the sequence of parts and the space between things: […] architecture’s empty space”22. Late modernism has been connected with technological apparatuses and mechanical fantasies, the failure of which is present at the decomposing architectures of mega-building. If we are to apply optimism and growth to the failure of modernism then we can start deploying a language of growth and proliferation to our advantage of this building form that is currently fading out.

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Appendix

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adaptive If one were to give a specific rendering to an afterlife reuse

scenario, then it would important to acknowledge the idea of adaptive reuse as architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s celebration of life. Amongst many projects, Fiatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s former factory is a building form that clearly demonstrates megaformic or even megastructural characteristics whose transformations were of a mega effect in the city of Turin.

Its current reuse took around 20 years to complete by Renzo Piano Workshop Architects as the award-winning proposal of the competition and hosts so many uses that bring people together for different reasons under the same roof.

In addition, OMAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recent adaptive reuse of a former United States Postal Service facility in Huston that is still under construction clearly sets new rules in terms of the mixity of the programme that an empty free-standing box can host. But most importantly, it reminds one that innovation comes from new rules of freedom applied to it.

In this case, it is the circulation of the building that challenges its norms along with the use of the rooftop of an empty box.

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F14 LINGOTTO FACTORY The factory is also known as Fiat Factory and was designed by Giacomo Mattè-Trucco and built in Turin in1920. When it first opened its doors and up until its closure in 1982, it was the largest and most modern car manufacturing plant in Europe. In 1982 an architectural competition won by Renzo Piano gave birth to a new life for the building.

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D26 NEW PROGRAMMATIC MIXITY

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F15 Former United States Postal Service Facility

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F16 Post Huston

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D27 NEW PROGRAMME

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Bibliography Allen, Stan, ‘Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D’, in Case: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, ed. by Hashim Sarkis (Munich; New York: Prestel, 2001), pp. 118–26 Allen, Stan, and Marc McQuade, Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2011) Banham, Reyner, Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture, Revised edition (London: Architectural Press, 1975) Bratton, Benjamin H., ‘Cloud Megastructures and Platform Utopias’, in Entr’acte_ Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, and Architecture-Palgrave Macmillan, ed. by Jordan Geiger (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 35–51 Calabuig, Debora Domingo, ‘The Strategies of Mat-Building’, Architectural Review, 2013 <https://www.architectural-review. com/essays/the-strategies-of-mat-building> [accessed 22 October 2020] Cha, Tae-Wook, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jutiki Gunter, and Daniel Herman, ‘Shopping (Harvard Project on the City)’, in Mutations, ed. by Armelle Lavalou (Barcelona: Actar, 2001), pp. 124–83 Frampton, Kenneth, Megaform as Urban Landscape: 1999 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture, ed. by Brian Carter (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, 1999) ———, ‘Seven Points for the Millennium: An Untimely Manifesto’, The Journal of Architecture, 5 (2000), 21–33 ———, ‘Technoscience and Environmental Culture: A Provisional Critique’, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), 54.3 (2001), 123–29 ———, ‘Urbanization and Discontents: Megaform and Sustainability’, in Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture, ed. by Sang Lee (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), pp. 97–108 Koolhaas, Rem, Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, and Jennifer Sigler, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, New edition (Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1997) Maki, Fumihiko, Investigations in Collective Form, 2nd edn (St. Louis: School of Architecture, Washington University, 1964) 80

Smithson, Alison, ‘How to Recognise and Read MATBUILDING: Mainstream Architecture as It Has Developed towards the Mat-Building’, 09, 1974, 573–50 Volynets, Iryna, ‘Benjamin Wilke (Ed): Stan Allen: Four Projects’, Nexus Network Journal, 19.2 (2017), 547–54 <https://doi. org/10.1007/s00004-017-0345-9 [accessed 22 November 2020]

secondary biliography Home, Robert K., Wood Green Shopping

City, (Planning and Development Case Study ; 2) (Surveyors Publications, 1984) James, Julia, ‘Shop City near Completion; Architects: Richard Sheppord Robson & Partners’, Building Design, 1981, 24–27 Lucarelli, Fosco, ‘Tsunehisa Kimura’s Digital Apocalypse – SOCKS’ <http://socksstudio.com/2012/11/20/tsunehisa-kimuras-digital-apocalypse/> [accessed 28 October 2020] Manaugh, Author Geoff, ‘Gunnery Pagodas / Manhattan Niagara / The University of War’, BLDGBLOG, 2010 <http://www. bldgblog.com/2010/07/gunnery-pagodas-manhattan-niagara-theuniversity-of-war/> [accessed 28 October 2020] Melling, John, ‘Wood Green Shopping City, London; Architects: Richard Sheppard Robson & Partners’, Arup Journal, 14.3 (1979), 14–19 ‘Quarantinology’ <http://quarantinology.com/> [accessed 20 June 2020] ‘Shopping Comes in from the Cold. Air-Conditioning Allowed a North London Shopping Centre to Provide Year Round Comfort and Helped Permit Roof-Top Development; Architects: Richard Sheppard Robson & Partners’, Building Services, 3.11 (1981), 23–26 Smiley, David, review of Review of Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream, ; Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City, by M. Jeff Hardwick and Alex Wall, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), 62.1 (2008), 76–78 Wall, Alex, Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City (Barcelona: Actar, 2005)

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List of Illustrations F01 Photograph: courtesy of the architects, in Arup Journal, 14.3 (1979), pp. 14–19 (p.14) F02 Photograph: Simon.com. Source: https://www.theguardian. com/cities/2015/may/06/southdale-center-america-firstshopping-mall-history-cities-50-buildings F03 Image: Tsunehisa Kimura. Source: http://socks-studio. com/2012/11/20/tsunehisa-kimuras-digital-apocalypse/ F04 Superstudio, the Continuous Monument, New York 1969.

Image: MAXXI. Source: https://www.designboom.com/ architecture/cristiano-toraldo-di-francia-radical-superstudiodesign-death-08-01-2019/ F05 Appian Way, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1756. Etching.

Antichità Romane, Vol. 2. Source: https://www.gettyimages. co.uk/detail/illustration/appian-way-engraving-from-variousworks-of-architecture-stock-graphic/540778057 F06 Photograph: Lluis Casals, in Frampton, Kenneth, Megaform as Urban Landscape: 1999 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture, ed. by Brian Carter (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, 1999) F07 Drawings: Candilis, Josic, Woods and Scheidhelm. Source: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/the-strategies-ofmat-building F08 Photograph: Lena Giovanazzi. Source: http://www. uncubemagazine.com/blog/15799747 F09 Photograph: Rob ‘t Hart. Source: https://www.mvrdv.nl/ projects/172/villa-vpro D09-11 Drawings: MVRDV. Source: https://archeyes.com/villavpro-headquarters-mvrdv/ F10 Photograph: Ezra Stoller. Source: https://in.pinterest.com/ pin/731201689469758703/ F11 Collages: Archizoom Associati. Source: https://architizer. com/blog/practice/details/archizoom-retrospective/

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F12-13 Collages in collaboration with Seungyeol Lee, Sci-Tech Seminar [EPIC CITY] by the faculty of Cristina Goberna Pesudo, MA City Design 2019/20, term 3

F14 Photograph: Fiat Group. Source: http://www.bbc.com/ autos/story/20140825-a-racetrack-in-the-sky F15-16 Photographs: OMA. Source: https://oma.eu/projects/ post-houston

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MA CITY DESIGN 2019/20 RCA SoA, London