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More About This Title Manmade Modular Megastructures
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Humanity has come a long way since the first modular mega-structure was built at Ur, on land that is now Iraq. There, four millennia ago, and by hand, the Sumerians built a mud-brick ziggurat to their Gods. Today, the green deities of Nature we have invented for ourselves are worshipped with humility. Eco-zealots argue against the mechanised megaforming of landscape and the modularised production of megastructures.
The guest editors, Jonathan Schwinge and Ian Abley of the London based research organisation audacity, call for development on a bold scale. They argue that by rapidly super-sizing the built environment society is not made vulnerable to natural or man-made hazards, and that design innovation surpasses bio-mimicry. Designers can learn from materials scientists working at the smallest of scales, and from systems manufacturers with ambitions at the largest. This issue calls for creative thinking about typologies and topologies, and considers what that also means for Africa, China, and Russia. Megacities everywhere demand integration of global systems of transport, utilities and IT in gigantic structures, constantly upgraded, scraping both the sky and the ground, outward into the sea.
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Jonathan Schwinge was a scholarship student at the Architectural Association. His fourth-year diploma project ‘Airlander’ was exhibited at Imagination’s Ford Journey Zone in the Greenwich Millennium Dome. His final-year project ‘Lost-Exchange’ won the Grand Prize and Category Prize for the Bentley Systems Student Design Competition, USA 2000. Jonathan currently works at Allies and Morrison architects. Jonathan is working with Ian to turn www.audacity.org into a commercial website – a portal for architectural ideas.
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Introduction: Things Will Endure Less Than Us (Ian Abley).
Beyond Little Britain (Ian Abley).
Fumihiko Maki (Jennifer Taylor).
People, Not Architecture, Make Communities (James Heartfield).
London 2030: Taking the Thames Gateway Seriously (Ian Abley).
Travelling in a Straight Line (Oliver Houchell).
Cloud Piercer: Mile High (Jonathan Schwinge).
Architecture with Legs (Ian Abley + Jonathan Schwinge).
Standing Tall in the Estuary (Natasha Nicholson + Pamela).
Charlick Mega Rural: Made in Sunderland (Jonathan Schwinge).
Mass-Customisation and the Manufactured Module (James Woudhuysen).
Why Drive a TT and Live in a Broken Teapot? (Ian Abley).
Triumph and Tragedy on the Home Front (Martin Pawley).
Prefabricating Memory Lane: Whatever Happened to Systems? (John McKean).
Designer Volumetric atIKEAPrices (Ian Abley).
What’s Wrong with This Approach, Comrades? (Bee Flowers).
Functionality Rather than Good Intentions in Design (Michelle Addington).
Biomimicry versus Humanism (Joe Kaplinsky).
Our Overdeveloped Sense of Vulnerability (Frank Furedi).
Eero Saarinen and the Manufacturing Model (Jayne Merkel).
Think Big for the Developing World (Ceri Dingle + Viv Regan).
Appreciating Cumbernauld (Gordon Murray).
Cedric Price: From the ‘Brain Drain’ to the ‘Knowledge Economy’ (Stanley Mathews).
Waltropolis: City in a Box theboxtank (Emily Andersen, Geoff DeOld + Corey Hoelker).
Interchange Now (Robert Stewart).
Hollywood’s Noir Detours: Unease in the Mental Megalopolis (Graham Barnfield)
Building Profile: McLaren Technology Centre (Jeremy Melvin).
Practice Profile: McGauran Giannini (Soon Architects Shelley Penn).
McLean’s Nuggets (Will McLean).
Home Run: Evelyn Road, Silvertown, Niall McLaughlin Architects (Bruce Stewart).
Interior Eye: ‘Springtecture’ B (Masaaki Takahashi).
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"...compelling...plots an intelligent course..." (Prospect Architecture Scotland, April 2006)
