The dream of megastructure was not simply a formalist explosion in optimistic times. Rather, it was an attempt to allow the state to create spaces in which people could consider themselves individually fulfilled, while never hiding from view the infrastructure and service provided. Unlike in conventional housing, where heating, plumbing and waste infrastructure are all hidden, megastructure was in the last instance an attempt to make clear the functions and systems that are constantly required to live in a city at all. We should understand it not as an indulgent fantasy but as a political aesthetic of togetherness, immune to the deliberate aesthetic atomisation that would so often occur in architecture in the decades to come. It was an attempt to resolve the antagonisms between conformity to society and individual freedom, and in that way it represents many of the important struggles of the time. That it lost out in the end to changing fashion, growing cynicism about institutions and the very notion of progress, should not blind us to the potential of the options that were closed off in the process.
Douglas Murphy, Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture
