Metropolitan Architecture

Definition

Metropolitan architecture is Rafael Luna's term for the architecture of the city of millions — the third of his four programming categories, generated at the city level (100,000–1,000,000 inhabitants) by the high-rise and matured in the metropolis. Historically, it "is more closely related to the architecture that erupted from the growth of cities as a result of the American industrial revolution of the mid-nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth century. The development of the high-rise during this era allowed for greater density within a confined city area, and the development of electricity allowed for the city to be active day and night, inside and outside. Conceptually, these are two technological advances that changed the way the interior space could be conceived." Its intellectual origin is Elia Zenghelis's 1969 Urban Design class at the Architectural Association: "the advantage of millions living together in a restricted area," the "ideological foundations of metropolitan living," and within two years "the values inherent in the artificiality of the man-made world, within which urban form (or architecture) manifests itself."

The concept is defined in two ways: "first, it mimics the cityscape (buildings that looks like a city); second, it embodies programmatic elements of the city (a building that contains a city)." The first definition is formal-mimetic — massing resembling the city's massing regardless of interior program (the New York, New York Hotel in Las Vegas merging Manhattan's iconic towers into one building; OMA's The Hague City Hall competition, "the overall mass… divided into three bars that formed the silhouette of a grouping of skyscrapers"; MVRDV's Mirador, "conceptually a whole city block tilted vertically"). The second is programmatic — "The architectural shell acts as a setting, and programming takes a priority role," as in the Las Vegas hotel that keeps visitors "inside a single building doing a variety of city activities like shopping, eating out at new restaurants, attending a theater performance, visiting museums, gambling at casinos, walking through parks, and seeing new art in galleries, all while remaining inside the building."

The concept's defining condition is autonomy: "these buildings… have a certain autonomy from their context in that they create their own microcosms. If that is the case, these buildings can operate in a suburban condition, where they would become an attractor (like hotels on the Las Vegas Strip) as much as they would in a world capital where they would blend in, like a skyscraper in Manhattan." The microcosm's autonomy is both the concept's power (context-independence, attractor capacity) and its limitation — the quality the metropolitan hybrid redistributes into polycentrality and urban systems.

Key Thinkers

• Rafael Luna — the concept's definitional author: the two definitions (mimics the cityscape / contains a city), the microcosm-autonomy thesis, and the technological preconditions (high-rise + electricity).
• Elia Zenghelis — the concept's pedagogical origin (no page — see log): the AA Urban Design class (1969–71), "the ideological foundations of metropolitan living" and the "artificiality of the man-made world."
• Rem Koolhaas / OMA — the concept's practitioner-ancestor: The Hague City Hall competition's skyscraper-silhouette massing; OMA as the exemplar of programmatic hybridization (see form-vs-program).
• MVRDV — Mirador's vertical city block (no page — see log).
• Bernard Tschumi — the shell/program distanciation that underwrites the second definition's priority of programming.

Related Concepts

• Metropolitan Hybrids — the concept's offspring: the merger with hybrid architecture that redistributes the microcosm's autonomy into urban cores and systems.
• Interior Urbanism — the second definition's disciplinary domain: "a building that contains a city" is the atrium-hotel's city-within-a-city (atrium-hotel), the wiki's interior-urbanism concept at its most autonomous — and most privatized.
• Programming — the second definition's instrument: "The architectural shell acts as a setting, and programming takes a priority role."
• Hybrids — the merger partner that turns the microcosm outward: hybrid architecture's transplanting and program appropriation.
• Adaptive Reuse — the concept's skyscraper horizon: "The skyscraper, being the quintessential metropolitan architectural typology, presents a great opportunity for exploring these microcosms in the field of adaptive reuse."
• Housing — the density programme's dwelling content (Torre David's appropriated vertical city).
• spectacle — the mimetic definition's Vegas context: the skyline-as-image (see also decorated-shed and Venturi's Las Vegas).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — the founding source: the two definitions, the Zenghelis lineage, the microcosm autonomy, and the Vegas/Manhattan spectrum.
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the built register: the atrium hotel's city-within-a-city as metropolitan architecture's commercialized realization (see interior-urbanism, atrium-hotel).
• Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi 1977) — the laboratory context: the Strip as the city-condition Luna repeatedly uses to test metropolitan autonomy.

Open Questions

• Are the two definitions one concept or two? The skyline-mimic (NYNY Hotel) and the program-container (Vegas hotel) share autonomy but little else — form-mimesis and program-internalization are arguably opposite operations. Luna keeps them under one name; does the concept need the split formalized?
• The microcosm's autonomy is praised (attractor capacity, adaptability) and criticized (Vegas introversion, commercial monoculture) — is autonomy a design variable to be tuned (Luna's hybrid redistributes it) or a constitutive limit?
• Zenghelis's AA lineage grounds metropolitan architecture in "the advantage of millions living together in a restricted area" — a collectivist program. But Luna's examples are hotels and casinos. What happened between 1971 and 2015: did metropolitan architecture migrate from ideological foundation to commercial attractor, and can the hybrid recover the founding intent?
• Is the high-rise/electricity preconditions thesis still true — and what is the contemporary pair (logistics? air-conditioning? the smartphone?) that now determines "the way the interior space could be conceived"?