| This dissertation focuses on the megastructure movement, first considered a matter of historical interest by Reyner Banham in Megastructure, Urban Futures of the Recent Past (1976). As testified by its subtitle, Banham's book chronicles the terminal phase of modern architecture, before its eclipse by the ideological criticism of Jean Baudrillard, Manfredo Tafuri, Colin Rowe and others. Rather than simply recount the story of the megastructure, however, this dissertation begins with the criticism that condemned it, to ask: how does one reevaluate the megastructure from a different vantage point and by means of a different lens?; Here the key concept is the simulacrum, a term that Jean Baudrillard used against the megastructure to point to our postmodern, late-capital condition: the loss of reality and its "precession" by the sign. The simulacrum, defined as "a copy without an original," however, also harbors a positive meaning, which Gilles Deleuze described in essays from 1969 and on. For Deleuze, the simulacrum is never simply a degraded imitation of something else, but a creative force; it unmasks a founding difference, and in so doing, creates something new.; This dissertation argues that the simulacrum and the related problem of creative formation points to the megastructure's intimate relation with the creative arts and the biological sciences, at a time when philosophical and scientific accounts of vitality were themselves changing, due to the advent of the digital computer. The trajectory of this relation can be traced through the work of key megastructuralists, beginning with Team 10, whose work points both backwards to the historical avant-garde as well as forwards to the computational experiments of Christopher Alexander and Yona Friedman. But if all this is also symptomatic of what Peter Collins then called "the biological fallacy," this dissertation argues that the creative simulacrum is a constructive way to think about the dangers of this fallacy, because it speaks, not of organic approximations, of which the fabricated copy will always fall short, but of a new hybrid species, a strange and wonderful offspring of nature and logic, which we might otherwise call, following Deleuze, a new species of non-organic life. |
