Year: 2013

Text:

Building Megalopolis, a component of the (link: https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/columbia-university-extreme-cities-project-1869 text: Columbia University Extreme Cities project) culminated in a four-week workshop and exhibition at Studio-X New York from May 1-30, 2013.

Developed by the Netlab together with (link: http://c-lab.columbia.edu text: C-Lab), Assistant Urban Planning Professor David King, James Graham, and (link: http://neildonnelly.net text: Neil Donnelly,) Building Megalopolis sought to understand the history and future of the urban corridor between Boston and Washington, (BosWash) identified by Jean Gottmann in his 1961 book (link: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic709752.files/WEEK%205/Gottmann_Megalopolis%20or%20the%20Urbanization%20of%20the%20Northeastern%20Seaboard.pdf text: Megalopolis) as “the cradle of a new order in the organization of inhabited space." Since then, BosWash has been a site for speculation and a generator of new architectural typologies. For this project the Netlab collected architectural works that rethought the late modern city, engaged the region, and sought to anticipate the future of architecture and the city in a changing sociocultural landscape.

In the timeline, our hope is to create an open framework for gathering and relating disparate kinds of information so that scholars and the public can contribute their understanding of how architectural, cultural, political, and intellectual currents gave rise to the megalopolitan imagination.

The Architecture Online Lab (Leigha Dennis and Troy Conrad Therrien) designed and built an interactive research tool, which organized content along a horizontally scrolling timeline with a variety of filtering options. The timeline was built as an opensource project with aspirations to be used by other research projects at GSAPP. The project is now available in the form of an interactive timeline at extreme-cities.gsapp.org.