Motif #2 The Megastructure
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If High School #9 is less than a campus and more than a single building, it could be considered a small megastructure. One of the most significant of Le Corbusier’s urban rooftop buildings is the Unité d’Habitation, the first of which was built in Marseilles in the late 1940s. This housing scheme has been noted for several innovations, but one of them is having suggested the notion of a relatively large building that combines within one physical structure not only multiple program elements, such as housing and school, but also elements that generally belong to non-architectural categories such as streets and infrastructure. In the high school the roof is not just an upper limit of a building, but a deep plinth that sandwiches parking, classrooms, and public buildings within its thickness. The plinth itself is not quite a building—it doesn’t have a façade or a proper front, back, or side—but it is a system that integrates building components and combines them with circulation and event space at a scale that suggests the infrastructural. Indeed, one of the most notable aspects of the high school is the degree to which the easterly classrooms abut the adjacent freeway. Many an architect would have thought the noise and speed of the cars a distraction to students, but Prix did virtually everything possible to make it seem as though the freeway was coursing through the building itself. Whether or not this was meant to indicate to students that school was a way forward, it certainly embedded the building in the tradition of the megastructure, a typology invested in large-scale plans and big ambitions.
Another characteristic of megastructures, particularly as developed in the 1960s, was that they were exploited as systems into which not just typologically diverse but flexible and changeable units could be accommodated. At their most extreme, megastructures were giant empty cages in which often prefabricated and identical living pods, working pods, or schooling pods could be inserted and moved around as needed. The high school treats the classrooms, which from a design point of view were found objects, belonging to an earlier phase of the design and done by another architectural firm, as though they were provisional pods, susceptible to being, at least conceptually, moved, upgraded, and transformed in the future. In addition, the school is riddled with extra space—space on the roof terrace, space