Kenneth Frampton

• Price: $11.50
• Paperback—48 pages (1998) )
• ISBN: 1-891197-08-8
• Dimensions: 6.5" x 9"
• © 1999 The University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Kenneth Frampton, New York

Editor: Brian Carter

Design: Carla Swickerath

Sample Selection

As architects and urbanists, we need to remind ourselves as to the destiny of Wallenberg's life, first because he was a distinguished, if unproven, architect and secondly because of the indisputably ethical character of his actions. It is to the lasting credit of Sweden that Wallenberg was able to save so many lives through that insecure neutral space afforded by the Swedish Delegation in Budapest. There is little demonstrable link between Wallenberg's diplomatic courage and his chosen profession, save perhaps for thc potential role of the ethical in the pursuit of both. It is a story of exceptional heroism which has a mythic and somber tone due to his inexplicable and still unresolved disappearance at the end of thc war.

Since 1961 when the French geographer Jean Gottmann first employed the term megalopolis to allude to the northeastern seaboard of the United States, the world population has become increasingly dense with the result that most of us now live in some form of continuous urbanized region. One of the paradoxical consequences of this population shift is that today we are largely unable to project urban form with any degree of confidence, neither as a tabula rasa operation nor as a piecemeal aggregation to be achieved through such devices as zoning codes maintained over a long period of time. The constant expansion of the autoroute infrastructure throughout the world continues to open up increasing tracts of former agricultural land to suburban subdivision. Despite this endless suburbanized development throughout the world and most particularly in North America, there remains the occasional capital city where somc kind of urban planning process is still being significantly maintained such as Helsinki or the recent refurbishing of Barcelona which is yet another example of an exception to the megalopolitan norm.

In the main, however, the urban future tends to be projected largely in terms of remedial operations as these may be applied to existing urban cores or, with less certainty, to selected parts of the megalopolis. Meanwhile, the urbanized region continues to consolidate its hold over vast areas of land as in the Randstadt in the Netherlands or the Tokyo Hokkaido corridor in Japan. These urbanized regions are subject to sporadic waves of urban expansion that either escalate out of control or enter into periods of stagnation. It is a predicament that confronts the urbanist with an all but impossible task, one in which civic intervention has to be serving as an effective catalyst for the further development of the region.

Owing to the dissolution of the city as a bounded domain, dating from the mid-nineteenth century, architects have long since been aware that any contribution they might make to the urban form would of necessity be extremely limited. This resignation is already implicit in Camillo Sitte's remedial urban strategy of 1889. In his book, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, he attempted to respond to the 'space-endlessness' of the Viennese Ringstrasse by recommending the redefinition of the Ring in terms of bounded form. Sitte was evidently disturbed by the fact that the main monuments of the Ring had been built as free-standing objects and he recommended enclosing them with built fabric in order to establish relationships similar to those that had once existed in the medieval city, such as that between the parvis and the cathedral.

Inspired by Sitte's revisionism, I have coined the term megafirm in order to refer to the form-giving potential of certain kinds of horizontal urban fabric capable of effecting some kind of topographic transformation in the megalopolitan landscape. It has to be admitted at the outset that this term may read as being synonymous with the term megastructure, as this was first coined in the l960s. In my view, the two terms may be differentiated from one another in terms of the relative continuity of their form. Thus, while a megaform may incorporate a megastructure, a megastructure is not necessarily a megaform.

One may illustrate this distinction by comparing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which is surely a megastructure, Lo Arthur Erickson's Robson Square development in Vancouver which is ultimately a megaform. This is largely due to the way in which its continuously stepped layered form serves to modulate and unify the existing urban fabric of downtown Vancouver. This particular example also happens to have been enriched by an exceptionally fertile collaboration between its architect, Arthur Erickson md the landscape architect, Cornelia Oberlander.