Description
The official future is dystopian: a world of emergencies layered one on top of another (ecological, geopolitical, biopolitical, theo-political). Architecture offers multiple projective responses with unclear allegiances. One response is a renewed interest in the conceptual megastructure as a medium for investing urban and regional scale sites with a comprehensively architectural form and argument. These may seen as an overdue disciplinary re-calibration of scale.
Facing a planetary site condition determined by the satellite perspective of Google Earth and the emergent pervasiveness of cloud computing networks, what is it that a design discipline so defined by its expertise in the cleaving act of the envelope hopes to project? What is the relationship between part and whole demanded by an original response to the official dystopia? (In the employ of Hollywood and dubious developers alike, architecture has helped to provide a material image of what comes after the end of the world: i