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 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'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.
Megastructure: 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.
