The Organizational complex by Reinhold Martin actually extend ideas of McLuhan to provide a gripping analysis of corporate architecture as well as its integral message.  Observing particularly the created environment that surfaced in America after World War II, Reinhold proposes that architecture a medium, which can receive as well as transmit information. The first chapter expounds on the organization complex idea (Martin, 145-149).  Concerning the technological extension especially of the military-industrial complex, Reinhold looks to GyorgyKepes, visual theorist to explore communication and control issues, where architecture is the only possible media that allow the exchange between art and science. The book talks about the organizational complex, computer architectures, organic styles, the countenance of the office, pattern seeing, the typologies of knowledge as well as a conclusion title, hallucination. This multipart text and narrative are explained with more than one hundred and twenty enthralling drawings, photographs, and diagrams. The book represents the readers with a multifarious route-map via the corporate architecture that emerged in the United States following World War II. The capitalist organizational complex is perfectly represented by the Seagram Building, which is the most pervasive monolith of the 1960s, the 2001 black space, and other trifling black boxes of communications theory: A space journey and pointedly the world trade center. In a startling representation of a systemized and organized complex, the book reveals a decentralized city plan from 1945, showing an atom blast geographical area, all self-protective against the thermodynamic effects associated with nuclear bombs on cities of America. The most visionary plan is by Ralph Lapp of the city of New York, From Must, We Hide (1949) displaying a direct hit on Grand Central Station (Martin, 145-149).

In chapter two, Martin employs writings of Kepes to offer his analysis connecting science with art or cybernetics with aesthetics.  Chapter three thoroughly explores the office physiognomy. With the United Nations building and Rockefeller center, Martin provides fresh acumen in Kepes declaration, “Every feature of the man created environment has [an] inherent physiognomy and thus is an object of communication” (Kepes81).  The curtain wall is reviewed as the mediating edge, communicating information at various scales from the interior (micro) and urban (macro). In the following chapters, Reinhold Martin considers theGeneral Motors Technical Center, an IBM manufacturing and training facility, the Bell Telephone Laboratories Lever House, Inland Steel headquarters and Chase Manhattan as samples of architecture provided under the modernism rubric even as these structures acted as observablecommunication and control carriers. The organizational complex is present in the curtain wall—in its corporate message and modularity. The book terminates with an epilogue in which Martin revisits as well as recaps his thesis regarding the implication of organization nature as an agent of a landscape calibrated horizontally, in the way it meritoriously joined particular conditions where a possible opposition looms (Martin, 145-154).

According to Martin’s argument, the organization is what was exactly being communicated from the apparent repetitive pulse of the curtain wall. The entwined, occasionally seditious, connection between computers, corporations, and architecture lead to an invisible network of knowledge and control.  By re-examining the architecture of the corporate, in America after World war II, Martin tries to make the content discernible; the ostensibly blank frontages of office buildings were inaudible dynamic carriers of aesthetic, philosophical, military-industrial, and cybernetic information. The organization complex is a major contribution to the continuing technology and culture discourse. Martin invites the reader to reconsider as well as reevaluate curtain wall architecture as an exchange medium; the message made visible this compelling and proactive study.

Programming urban Surface by Alex Wall

Programming Urban Surface by Alex Wall talks about plans and programs for developing the earth surface into a single incessant network of infrastructure in a faceted and multilayered way. According to  Wall, the landscape no longer denotes the undeveloped, pastoral views out of the window of a country home but currently involve networks, systems, and architecture all working jointly as one to contribute to the society working (Wall 233-235).  Each building with its hollow interior is no longer the center of focus. The ambiguous spaces created between these mammoths is now the center of focus. The in-between spaces can be transformed with the help of particular surface strategies.  The book is in detail talks about various methods for developing as well as changing the natural and urban landscapes through the study of the urbanization aspects of the economy, population, sociology, and other factors. Wall describes the landscape as a functioning matrix of connective tissue that is in a continuous motion and links urban with natural elements to create the ground –plane dynamic as everything combines.   Particular terms are described as methods for designing and creating the surface strategies for urbanization (Wall 233-239).

Thickening: multiple, continuous, as well as dynamic layers, leads to multi-level of individuals.

Folding:  which is the joining of exteriors and interior spaces

Thickening: continuous, multiple, and dynamic layers contribute to the multi-levels of people.

Folding: joining of interior and exterior spaces. Folding creates smooth geology that connects exterior and interior spaces into a single continuous space.

Non- Programmed use: it involves equipping the ground with furnishings that the public can modify

New Materials: Natural and synthetic mixed together stirs new activities

Impermanence: most modifiable city aspects, desires, and needs can change over sudden.

Movement: movement reworking, change people and traffic flow.

The article highlight the fact that modern cities are in constant change. There is a strong paradigm shift from designing individual objects to the manipulating the larger urban surface as one. It implies that building types or design are of less importance than the cityscape layout. Wall argues that a resilient urban center or city is one that takes into consideration the future. It implies that designs should take care of future changes, which requires a balance between untouched space and the design. This design change is quite visible in Europe(Wall 233-235). It is apparent that Cities of North American are created a single building at a time rather than looking at everything around as one continuum. Winnipeg specifically reveals this trend, with random building placed hither and thither with little reason or rhyme. For example, the new IKEA building structure, the large infrastructure is put in a region surrounded by factories and processing plants. Besides, everything is cheaply and quickly made with no thought or concern for the future. Due to this, just a few places within the town promote socialization because there is extreme urban sprawl as well as isolated building next to one another (Wall 233-235).

Exit Utopian

The reading directly analyses the most important moment in contemporary architecture as well as critically asses the role played by the new-avant-garde in the current world. The reading is comprehensive and covers many global topics (Schaikand Otakar 63). The reading talks about the key exponents of utopian and visionary architecture in the final stage of the modernist era, corresponding to the social transformation and cultural disorders of the 1970s and 1960s. The reading revisitsgreat buildings of the past offering inspiration as well as inspiration for architects to design for the future. The reading talks about the work of plug-in city by avant-garde group Archigram. Even though these structures were never built, their ideas and projects stirred debates, combining society, technology, and architecture; when plug-in city was proposed in the year 1964, it provided a captivating new style to urbanism, reversing the outmoded perceptions of the role of infrastructure in the city (Schaik and Otakar 63-65).

Around 1960 to 1974 Archigram created more than 900 drawings, which included the plug-in –city plan. This proactive project proposes a hypothetical fantasy city, having modular residential units which link up to a central infrastructural mega-machine. The reading tells us that the Plug-in-city is not actually a city but a continuously evolving mega-structure that slots in transportation, residence as well as other essential services all movable by huge cranes.

Persistent concerns and precedents of modernism lie at the hub of the theoretical impulse of Plug-In-City, not restricted to the concept of transportation integration, collective living and rapid change accommodation with the urban setting. The reading shows that the dissatisfaction of this status quo forced the experimental architectural collective to imagine alternative urban cases that considered the superficial formalism as well as dull residential tendencies common to the existing British modernism. The plug-In-City together with other projects including The Instant City and Walking City suggested nomadic life and more glaringly a liberation from the modernist suburbia answer (Schaik and Otakar 63-65).

According to the reading, new Babylon proposed continuous processes of creation as well as appropriation that fit well and attractively with the situationists’ concepts of chance and drift. In addition, the city wall—the skeletal structure infill of New Babylon that was lifted over previous cities of Europe—were planned to be highly-saturated domes furnished with color panels, filtered with lights, textures media based on the personal needs and desire of people as they walk through the city.  The city spaces would not be zoned but were ever-in-flux as well as bound to personal life experience. It meant that space was not owned however continuously negotiated and occupied. Besides, the New Babylon plans privileged the ephemeral nature squatting or off roaming above branding and ownership, the difference over monotony. The New Babylon project was part of both architectural theory and political experiment. (Schaik and Otakar 63-65).

Mega-structure Urban Futures of the Recent Past.

The reading introduces the concept of megastructure, which is the concept of a giant, multipurpose, adaptable building having most of the city functions and note that this was the dominant design themes of the late 1950s and 1960s, occupying the awkward middle ground between the planning of towns and architecture (Banham 36). This provided the architects the platform to create super-monuments on a level matching the modern city, adaptable; it provided the residents the chance of creating their individual small-scale environment within the gigantic frame. Yet, despite these undertakings, citizens and architects similarly had left the idea and sought more new solutions to their desires and needs—and ambitions—immediately after 1970(Banham38). This reading is, in fact, the most scholarly and definitive book about a  glitteringclarification on an idea that has transformed the face of the modern architectural history. The readings have numerous illustrations, models, drawings, sketches, photos in white and black. The reading extensively frames interpretation of megastructure. The reading defines megastructurilsm as a global movement rooted in the works of the Italian Futurists, Le Corbusier, the Russian constructivists, as well as the modern avant-garde architects of Japanese architects. The readings also highlight that the 1930s project of Le Corbusier for Fort l’EmpereurAlgeries, frequently called the ‘Plan Obus’, was a major reference for as well as the driving force that influenced themegastructure movement (Banham 38-45).

The reading states that basic to megastructure is “hardware” separation, the constructing outline incorporating the entire urban infrastructure including transport, water, and energy supply, from the “software’ that can be slotted in or out of the supporting structure as needed. Separating the supporting structure from each module should make the city to adapt without much effort to individual needs of its people and the changing economic and social conditions.  Architecture becomes portable; architects can relinquish in favor of residents and confine themselves to the technician’s roles. As well as Archigram, Friedman, Constant, other architects, as well as planners, also count as megastructuralists, whose designs are hard to deal with comprehensively during the exhibition(Banham 38-69).  The most significant is the Japanese metabolist, theoretician Cedric Price and English architect together with designers such as Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto. The reading shows that the urban visions of megastructuralistswere determined by ‘Möglichkeitsdenken,’ boosted by the 1960s prosperous economy, submerged with credence in the redemptive power of automation(Banham 38-69). The plan reflects the social revolution process sweeping through Europe in the 1960s and the anticipated increase in population.

Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities

The reading provides a detailed understanding of the design history of America (especially Modernism) and its effects on the current policies for sinking cities. The reading apparently describes cases of new and old revitalization process with a specific focus on the cities of Philadelphia and Detroit (Ryan 40-60). In the first section of the reading, Ryan comprehensively elaborates and with real intuition, why and how prominent planning approaches and techniques in the frame of urban rejuvenation failed. Employing the historical cases and situations of places such as Victoria Park and Jefferson Village in Poplar and Detroit, Ludlow in Philadelphia, and Yorktown, the reading exhibits how the principles of suburban planning failed in the attempt to rebuild as well as remake shrinking cities.  Although the cases provide policy and planning insight of high standard, their range is restricted. While Philadelphia and Detroit cases are somehow limiting, the reading is well rounded. The most telling contribution of the reading on the author’s core ideologies for policy responses for shrinking cities of America, what Ryan labels as social urbanism(Ryan 60-89). The reading provides the term palliative in an effort to capture the primary policy approach needed in shrinking cities. These places require improvement by illuminating their potential, and under the model, it is the responsibility of the community to articulate the potential.  In the promotion of palliative planning, the reading calls for an interventionist approach by the national government.  The problems of shrinking cities have effects that surpass the community’s limits, and therefore the federal policies should play a key role in contributing to long-term social stability.

Palliative planning need also be supported by decision-making process which is democratic, one that embraces the desires and needs of affected people. The principle is supported in the modern planning practice, and well understood that in every society is critical that planners take into account the requirements as well as housing needs of the underprivileged populace, more so their housing needs(Ryan 60-89). The reading clearly explains that democratic decision-making is very critical for the response strategy of a shrinking city. The reading argues for the need to provide visions of anticipated redevelopment forms that are reinforced by the redevelopment guidelines, which can attain these visions. Urban architecture and design must play a key role in developing and creating these guidelines and visions. The reading also talks about the patchwork urbanism concept (Ryan 60-89). The concept recognizes the dire need for changes and transformations in urban fabrics, in ways that abandon places and embraces vacancies as a method to create new urban forms and patterns.

Work Cited

Banham, Reyner. Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Print.

Martin, Reinhold. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2005. Print.

Ryan, Brent D. Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Print.

Schaik, Martin, and OtakarMáčel. Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations, 1956-76. Munich: Prestel, 2005. Print.

Wall, Alex. “Programming The Urban Surface.” 2019. Print.

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