Megastructures

Megastructure is an architectural and urban concept of the post-war era, which envisions a city or an urban form that could be encased in a massive single human-made structure or a relatively small number of interconnected structures. In a megastructural project, orders and hierarchies are created with large and permanent structures supporting small and transitional ones. According to John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, the lexical meaning of megastructure is an over-scaled, colossal, multi-unit architectural mass. The post-war megastructure movements led by avant-garde architectural groups such as Metabolists and Archigram regarded megastructure as an instrument to solve issues of urban disorder. Megastructure was once the dominant tendency in architecture of the 1960s, which resulted in numerous radical architectural proposals and a few built projects.