Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemSpace, time and representation(University of Melbourne, 2006)
-
ItemMarine cities 1958 to 1978 : architectural experiments and ocean systems( 2005)This thesis recovers architectural designs for marine cities on and under the seas between the years 1956 and 1978. It comprehensively documents over 50 projects that fall into this distinct category redressing gaps in recent scholarship. The architects of these projects were not merely fantasists but employed overarching notions and methods related to General Systems Theory to engage with the Cold. War political narratives of the period. The thesis tests the hypothesis that in their designs for marine cities - both floating and underwater - architects drew upon diverse narratives circulating in popular culture related to and generated from the prevailing Cold War geopolitical context. The first section of the thesis draws on widely dispersed primary and secondary material, and this establishes a chronological and, contextual history of marine cities. During this Cold War era, popular culture was saturated with images of cities on other planets and under the oceans. At the same time, architects in Japan, England and France produced so called utopian proposals for schemes on and under the seas. In contrast to outer space, architects saw the colonisation of inner space as a more immediate possibility. During the 1960s up to the mid 1970s, marine cities were included in the period's contemporary historical texts as they were developed. The architectural high-point of all this activity was the construction of Kikutake's Aquapolis at the Okinawa Oceanic Expo of 1975. However, by this time these projects had become targets of the increasing criticism of modernist architecture. These critiques tended to exclude and foreclose the engagement of architecture with technology. As a result, marine cities became wrongly associated with the shibboleths of utopia, Science Fiction and megastructure. In the second section of the thesis, the narratives circulating in popular culture which architects drew upon in their designs for these cities are identified and examined. To achieve this, selected marine cities are examined at a number of different spatial scales. This aids an understanding of the way in which these narratives, and their associated technologies, were transmitted to, actively assimilated into, and given status within architectural discourse. This methodology assists in mapping the circulation and uses of technology in the collective architectural imagination. This analysis concludes that the architects of marine cities drew upon a broad systems framework less related to cybernetics and more directly concerned with holistic governance, biological notions of structural organisation, innovations in production, and life support systems.