Megaform as Urban Land
Fig. 2 Raymond Hood &
Kenneth Frampton
Fig. 1 Le Corbusier. Rio de
Janeiro, aerial sketch 1929
..
The flight of the plane provides a spectacle with a
lesson -a philosophy. No longer a delight of the
senses. When the eye is five feet or so above the
ground. flowers and trees have dimension: a measure
relative to human activity, proportion. In the air, from
above. It is a wilderness, indifferent to our thousand
year old ideas, a fatality of cosmic elements and
events.. . From the plane there.is no pleasure ... but a
long, concentrated mournful meditation ...The non-
professional who flies (and so whose mind is empty)
becomes meditative; he can take refuge only in himself
and in his own world. But once he has come down to
earth his aims and determinations have found a new
scale.
Le Corbusier. 1935.
Unlike the last half of the 19th century we are
unable to project urban form with much confidence
today, neither as a tabula rasa proposal nor as a
piecemeal strategy to be engineered over the long
term though zoning codes etc. . Today it seems that we
can only envisage the urban future in terms of
fragmentary remedial operat ions as these may be
effectively applied to the existing urban cores or (with
much less certainty) to specially selected sections of the
Associated Architects,
Rockefeller Center,
Manhatten 1936
mega lopolis. This is due. in the main, to the fact that.
as the century draws to a close, we are increasingly
subjected to sporadic waves of development t hat
either escalate out of control or, alternatively, take
place in spurts followed by long periods of stagnation .
Needless to say this pred icament confronts the
urban designer with an all but impossible task. one in
which civic intervention has. at times, to be capable not
only of engendering an immediate sense of identity but
also of serving as an effective catalyst for the
subsequent development of the surrounding area .
However. none of this is totally new and at different
times over the past century architects have been
acutely awa re that the contribution they might make
to future urban form would of necessity be rather
limited. This is already suggested by Camillo Sitte's
remedial urban strategy, City Planning According to
Artistic Principles of 1889, where clearly what is
envisaged, in relation to the "space-endlessness " of
the Viennese Ringstrasse, is a form of urban
intervention that would be capable of defining spatia l
domains through the continuity of built-form.
1 have coined the terms mega form and landform
first. in order to stress the generic form-giving potential
of such forms and second , in order to emphasise the
need for topographic transformation in terms of
landscape rather than in terms of self-contained single
structures. Thus while the term megastructure, first
coined in the 1960s, may appear, at t imes to be
synonymous with megaform, what is at stake in this
last is the overall continu ity of the form as opposed to
the articulation of a large building into its structural
and mechanical parts. And wh ile a megaform may, in
fact, incorporate a megastructure, a megastructure is
not necessarily a megaform. In much the same way the
term landform may appear to be indistinguishable
from landscape, save for the fact t hat the coinage
implies that what one has in mind in not merely a
matter of surface treatment and plant material. Of
course a landform may also be a landscape in the more
conventional sense but once again a landscape as such
is not necessarily a landform.
When one looks back at the history of t his century
one is immediately struck by the fact that Le
Corbusier's mode of beholding the city was radically
changed by his aviational experience. Once he had
seen the world from t he air, as he did when he
experienced flying for the first time on his visit to Brazil
in 1929, his attitude towards urban form totally
changed. This is at once evident in his Plan Obus of
1931 (fig . 1) that was inspired by the volcanic
topography of Rio de Janeiro, which he first saw from
the air in 1929. This panorama of a sweeping volcanic
corn iche led him to imagine an urban megaform in
which one could no longer discern quite where the
bu ilding ended and the landscape began . A significant
corollary to this topographic a priori was to render the
built fabric as a kind of artificial ground, upon which
and within which the occupant would be free to bu ild
in whatever way he saw fit. Hence while postulating
the continuity of the megaform as a monumental
topography, Le Corbusier left the cellular residential
fabric open and accessible to popular taste. At the
same t ime the Plan Obus was hardly a rational
proposition from either a political or a productive
standpoint. In its failure to conform to any received
model of the city it represented a total rupture with
conventional urban typology. Unlike his town plann ing
concepts of the early twenties it was neither
Haussmannian nor Sittesque. Nor had it anything to do
with Joseph Stubben's codification of regularised
urban space as this is set forth in his book Die
Stadtebau of 1890, Nor did it owe anything to t he
perimeter block type, still being applied in European
urban extensions at the time. Simultaneously it did not
conform to the emerging Taylorised Zeilenbau row-
house model, as this was then being adopted in the
Weimar Republic and elsewhere. In terms of
constructional rationality it totally repudiated his earlier
propositions for normative urban housing. Derived
perhaps, in part, from that naive projection of an
endless urban extrusion crossing -open landscape, as
we find this in Edgar Chambless's Roadtown of 1910,
the Plan Obus surely represented the idea of the
megaform taken to extremes. It was already conceived
at the scale of the urbanised region, thirty years before
the urban geographer Jean Gottmann recognised this
condition by coining the term megalopolis .
Within this historical perspective we may define the
generic megaform as displaying one or more of the
following characteristics. (1) A continuous urban mass
extending predominantly in a lateral or horizontal
direction rather than vertically; a form in which, unlike
the megastructure, the mass is not broken down into a
series of structural subsets. (2) A form capable of
inflecting the existing topography and context in a
morphological way. In this last respect it is not a free-
standing object but rather a continuation in some
manner of the existing landscape and its latent
potential. In this sense it may assume the character of
an artificial landscape or alternatively suggest a
geological metaphor. (3) A complex form with a varied
programmatic content capable of being read as a
densification of the dispersed city. In this regard it may
be experienced as opposing the discontinuous,
fragmentary, space-endless megalopolis.
One is reminded in this regard of Rockefeller
Center, New York (1930-39) which, apart from its
Fig. 3 Hans Scharoun, Breslau, Wohnhelm Ext'libition 1929.
Plan of prototypical residential block
height, surely meets many of these criteria. (fig. 2) And lectures 103
while we may not think of Rockefeller Center as a
polemical work, it is surely one of the finest urban set-
pieces that the 20th century has achieved. In this
regard, it is not only a metaphor for Manhattan but
also tends towards being a city in miniature as we find
Fig. 6 Hans Poelzig, House
this in the Palais Royale in Paris, even if the Manhattan
of Friendship, Istanbul 1916,
version lacks any residential accommodation. Above axonometric
all, Rockefeller Center maintains the plastic continuity
of its form to such an extent as to be readable as a
geological metaphor; an expression that was
reinforced by Raymond Hood 's proposal to install
gardens on the lower roofs of the complex.
However, if one looks for the origin of the urban
megaform in the Modern Movement one finds it
mainly in Northern Europe, rather than in the United
States or the Mediterranean. One finds it above all in
the German cult of big building form (Grossbauform) Stuttgart and Erich Mendelsohn's Alexanderplatz
as this appears in the work of many, so-called project for Berlin, both of 1927 (fig. 5), can be said to
expressionist architects. I have in mind, amongst many assume, each in his own way, a similar topographic
others, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Haring, Hans Poelzig, character; the one arising out of the contours of the
Wassily Luckhardt and above all, Erich Mendelsohn. site, the other out of the existing street form.
One finds in these architects a predisposition for Among the Scandinavian architects, the one who
creating large organic urban form, removed from the lies closest to the German tradition is Alvar Aalto, as is
dematerialised spatial dynamics of the 20th century already evident in his Sunila paper-pulp factory of
avant-garde. I have in mind such pioneering pieces as 1935-37, where a very striking relationship is
Scharoun's Breslau Wer~bund exhibition building of established between the brick mass of the factory and
1929 (fig. 3), Hugo Haring's Gut Garkau farm of 1924, the surrounding landscape. An equally powerful
or Hans Poelzig's House of Friendship projected for affinity between building and landscape is created in
Istanbul of 1916 (fig. 4). One is particularly struck in his Baker Dormitory, built on the edge of the Charles
this last instance by the way in which the distant River in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1938-40, the
silhouette of the building, punctuated by minarets, building flowing out, all but literally, into the riverscape
would have been enriched by a stepped form replete (fig . 6). Once one starts to examine Aalto's work in this
with hanging gardens. Mies van der Rohe's original light one finds that this syndrome is manifest
proposal for the Weissenhofsiedlung Exhibition throughout his mature career; from the "tented-
Fig. 4 Hans Scharoun,
Breslau, Wohnheim
Exhibition 1929.
Axonometric of Scharoun's Fig. 5 Hans Poelzig, House
unbuilt entry to the of Friendship, lstanbul1916,
exhibition perspective view
mountain" he projected for the Vogelweidplatz sports
centre in Vienna in 1953, to the Pensions Institute
realised in Helsinki in 1956, from his House of Culture,
built in Helsinki in 1958 to the University of Jyvaskala
dating from the same period. In each instance the
overall form is readable as a landscape metaphor. A
similar stress upon a dynamic megaform that fuses into
from a landform is evident in Aalto's plan for a new
cultural district to be built in the Tooloo area of Helsinki
(fig . 7).
Traces of a somewhat comparable approach may
be found in the work of Team 10; possibly in Alison
Fig. 7 Erich Mendelsohn, Alexanderplatz Berlin 1931.
Axonometric of a mixed use building combining offices, a
hotel, a cinema and ao assembly hall
Fig. 8 Alvar Aalto, Baker Dormitory, MIT, Cambridge 1940,
perspective
Fig. 9 Alvar Aalto, Baker Dormitory, MIT, cambridge 1940, first floor plan
and Peter Smithson's London Roads Study of 1953,
although here it may be argued that the work is
ultimately of a megastructural character. A megaform
concept certainly informed Jacob Bakema's Bochum
University scheme of 1962 and above all his proposal
for Tel Aviv of 1963 (fig 8). Here the basic challenge
was how to capitalise on the reality of the motopian
infrastructure given that under post-war capitalism the
automobile was already emerging as the dominant
mode of transit. As a result Bakema and many of the
other Team X architects thought of the autoroute was
the only permanent structure on which one could
depend when designing future urban form . However
one may note a split within Team 10 in this regard,
particularly when one compares say the work of the
Smithsons to Ralph Erskine's project for Svappavaara in
Lapland of 1963 or his much later Byker Wall housing
realised in Newcastle, England in 1981 .
It seems to me that this tradition has enjoyed
considerable currency in Spain over recent years. It is
surely evident at an urban scale in the work of Rafael
Monee, from his extremely subtle Bank Inter building
completed in Madrid in 1976 to the continuous form
of his L'llla block, designed with Manuel de Sola-
Morales and completed in 1993 on the Diagonal in
Barcelona (fig. 9). While the Bank Inter was a relatively
small, vertical form, on a restricted site in a prestigious
neighbourhood, it was still visibly related to the larger
urban thrust of the Castellana axis. Thus, at one and
the same time it both asserted its own identity as a
free-stand ing building and contributed its inflected
form to the evolving character of the neighbourhood.
Fig. 10 Alvar Aalto, plan for the centre of Helsinki, 1961. Note how the cultural buildings
facing the lake are at the $cale of the rail head etc.
As I have stated, my attempt to discriminate
between megaform and megastructure finds a certain
parallel in a similar distinction between landform and
landscape. It is surely self-evident that Le Notre's
concept of the parterre is less organic in character
than, say, Luis Pena Ganchegui's setting for Eduardo
Chillida's sculpture, The Comb of the Wind, as this was
installed in the harbour of San Sebastien in 1986.
While such a comparison is invidious, we may
nonetheless identify a number of landforms that
posess the same three dimensional topographic
character as Ganchegui's set piece. One thinks of the
" staging ground" built on the Philopapu Hill in Athens
in 1958, to the designs of Dimitrious Pikionis or much
more recently of a restructuring of the immediate
environs of the Alhambra by the Austrian architects
Peter Nigst, Erich Hubmann, and Andreas Vass. Clearly
one needs to acknowledge the contribution of Enric
Miralles who has always striven to give his architecture
a topographic dimension that either animates the site
or fuses with its pre-existing potential. This last is
particularly manifest in the lgualada Cemetery built in a
disused quarry (fig. 10). It is interesting to note that in
Spain there is still no separate profession of landscape
architect.
It may be objected that all of the foregoing is
unduly formalist and that the future of the urbanised
region as an efficient, economic infrastructure is not
sufficiently being considered or conversely, that the
physical constitution of the city is of little consequence
today in our telematic age. Alternatively, it may be felt
by some that the European City can only be
 reconstructed typologically, along the lines of the
erstwhile Tendenza, or one may argue, along with the
neo-avant-garde, that the context of the historical
fabric is no longer of any significance. All of these
extreme viewpoints seem to me to be evasive to the
extent that they do not face up to the task of giving
shape to the urban tissue of our time. Meanwhile the
automobile, left to its own devices, continues to spread
its ruthless, anti-civic character.
Faced with the mindless forms of speculative
development, now transforming large parts of South-
East Asia, we recognise once again that cities can never
be designed as coherent wholes and that they are
equally intractable to being developed in a significant
way where the increments in question are too small to
be synthesised at another level of coherence. Perhaps
this was always the case, but what has changed
dramatically in the last fifty years is the rate of
technological change and the rapacity of development,
both of which tend to outstrip anything that urbanised
society has experienced in the past. Both city and
country are affected almost to an equal degree by the
relentless dynamism of motopia. In addition there is
the equally disconcerting fad that in many parts of
the world the land is no longer being significantly
cultivated, and that even worse, in a sense, there is
no more production in either an agricultural or
I
. Block, Barcelona, 1993. Multi-use block flanking the
Fig. 11 Jacob Bakema, plan
for Tel Aviv, 1963. Bird's-eye
view
industrial sense. Instead the late modern world is lectures 105
being "flattened out " by the abstract processes of
distribution, tourism, and information. Meanwhile
individualistic as opposed to radical democracy remains
reluctant to commit itself to dense forms of residential
land settlement that would be consistent with the
recovery of a coherent civic pattern. We may say that
urbanism as a critical culture barely exists today. In the
meantime development continues to be controlled by
zoning codes, mortgage companies, banks and land
speculators.
It seems to me that architects can only intervene
effectively under present circumstances in a piecemeal,
remedial way and that one of the instruments for this is
rendering larger segments of the built fabric as some
kin d of megaform or landform whereby the land is
once more " marked" in a significant way. For as
Vittorio Gregotti once put it, architecture does not
begin with the primitive hut but with the marking of
the ground.
Fig. 13 Manuel de Sola Morales and Rafael Moneo, L'llla
Diagonal
Fig. 12 Jacob Bakema. plan
for Tel Aviv, 1963. Sketch
showing relationship
between megaform and
microform
Fig. 14 Enric Miralles, lgualada Cemetry near Barcelona, 1992. Site plan and elevation