The project offers a critical reassessment of the Megastructure, the terminal phase of modernism's movement before its eclipse by postmodernism. This phase begins with the formation of Team 10 in 1953 and ends with Reyner Banham's memorialization of the movement in Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (1976). More than recounting the movement's rise and fall, however, this project investigates key ideas that motivated architectural thinking at the time and casts them in a new light. One of these concepts concerns the Team 10 idea of a flexible matrix, while another relates to the paradoxical logic of systems. These ideas tell a different story about some of the more familiar paradigms of the day that resonates with current debate.
Sarah Deyong is an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University, where she teaches design studio and courses in history, theory, and criticism. In 2008, she completed her PhD at Princeton University on the Megastructure movement, under the supervision of Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Sarah Whiting, and Spyros Papapetros. Essays she has published include "The Rise and Fall of the Megastructure" in the MoMA catalogue, "The Changing of the Modern Avant-Garde," in an edited collection by Terence Riley, and "Planetary Habitat" in the Journal of Architecture. Forthcoming articles include "Urban Acupuncture and the Paradoxical Logic of Systems" in a Praxis issue devoted to eco-logics, and a chapter on "High Tech" in a survey of contemporary architecture, edited by Elie Haddad and David Rifkind.