Under Threat: The Metastadt Building

Until recently the Metastadt building system was considered among the failed architectural ideas of the 20th century. This utopian architectural concept attempted to introduce pioneering changes in modern urban planning and to test in practice the possibilities of industrialized building. Its innovation consisted of combining engineering solutions with the newly possible computer-based methods for statics […]

Cumbernauld New Town: Reception & Heritage Legacy

Cumbernauld New Town, widely regarded as the most ambitious of the second generation of planned New Towns in the UK, was designated in 1955 with an initial target population of 50,000, was begun in 1957, and was largely built during the 1960s and ‘70s. Yet despite being internationally acclaimed – receiving the prestigious American Institute […]

Mapping with care as an outline for post neoliberal architecture methodologies – tools of the Never-never school

Modernist planning brought us a tradition of producing top-down utopian blueprints of the ideal habitat for the modern man. Decades later, we still heavily practice this tabula rasa planning: importing ready-made images and concepts to fill in seemingly empty places; while the ambition (or necessity) to vision other radical worlds has been significantly weakened by […]