Manmade Modular Megastructures (Architectural Design) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 047001623X ISBN 13: 9780470016237

Publisher: Academy Press, 2006

Synopsis

There will be 8.3 billion human beings on Earth by 2030, and the more the better. We have the opportunity to create a world of expansive megacities - including one around old London. Doing so will advance the art, science and processes of manufacturing. But to deploy those abilities we must shrug off the dogma of sustainability that insists only small can be beautiful.

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.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Abley, RIBA, is a practicing architect and founder of Audacity. Audacity is a campaigning company that advocates developing the man-made environment, using manufacturing on the grandest of architectural scales. It organizes authoritative international research, large conferences, and a provocative website - www.audacity.org Abley is also co-author with James Woudhuysen of Why is construction so backward?.

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.

From the Back Cover

There will be 8.3 billion human being on Earth by 2030. For the guest-editors of this issue of D Jonathan Schwinge and Ian Abley, the more the better. They controversially suggest that humanity might create a world of expensive megacities - including one around old London. Doing so will advance the art, science and processes of manufacturing. But to deploy those abilities, they say, society must reject the dogma of sustainability that insists only small can be beautiful.

Schwinge and Abley 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, scrapping both the sky and the ground, outward into the sea.

Edition details

• Publisher: Academy Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 047001623X
• ISBN 13: 9780470016237
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128
• Editor: Abley Ian, Schwinge Jonathan