Weiss/Manfredi’s new book Public Natures has just been released with a round-table discussion between Nader, Preston Scott Cohen, Felipe Correa, Keller Easterling, Paul Lewis, and Hashim Sarkis.
“The relationship between the mega-project and utopia depends on how the former is historicized. In the scale of the mega-project as conceptualized in the early to mid-twentieth century, pieces of infrastructure seemed to have a kind of visionary status in their time, but have become quite miniature compared to what’s being produced today. The utopian has become brutally real and is now institutionalized within a developed bureaucracy that sustains that very scale today. And so the question is to what degree can a vision be sustained under those terms, because the power of singularity has, more often than not, come to be compromised in the process. Another utopian vision may lie in the possibilities of design by community or design by politics, or in finding ways of creating something that is not only architecturally, but also socially, larger than the sum of its parts. Architects must now figure out how to do a project that has the capacity to wield such specifications at various levels at this new scale that has been delivered to us.”
– Nader Tehrani
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