104


Return of the megastructure Stratford City shows how the designs behind the concept have developed


Rayner Banham writing in Megastructures: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (1976) summed up what he saw as the end of the megastructural age of Japanese Metabolist and British Archigram groups. Banham acknowledged that the golden age was over, to be replaced in his view by a nomadic, miniaturised culture of personalised mass communication and transportation devices in a hyper-mobile network city. He would be surprised to see the current crop of megastructural projects, from Canary Wharf (SOM, 1991), Berlin's


Potsdamer Platz (Renzo Piano, 1998) or indeed Piano's The Shard (2012). Banham might quibble that such projects like Stratford City, authored by many firms and fragmented into several enclaves, did not represent the true, monolithic quality of the Brutalist beast, like the 1956 Barbican scheme of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon in the City of London. By 1976 Banham, following Archigram, foresaw


1. Archigram's Walking City 2. Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum's Galleria Dallas, Houston, 1967


a much more American urban future in a widely distributed city, connected by highways and automobiles, as portrayed in his Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). Here, shopping malls formed the basis of the 'art of the enclave' in his appreciation of the premier urban public spaces of Los Angeles. Despite this preoccupation, Banham did miss the advent of the first American mega-mall megastructure of over 9,300m2


in Gerald Hines' Houston Galleria,


designed by Guy Obata of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK), beginning in 1967 (currently on its fifth expansion). This multi-


3. Jon Jerde and Associates, Canal City Hakata, Fukuoka Japan, 1996


1, 2


3


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