Gauthier's ‘Linear City’

Abstract

Gilles Gauthier's (1995) treatment of ‘The Linear City’ was very incomplete, as he made no attempt to acknowledge even cursorily an obvious debt to earlier architects, especially those professionals who clearly predate Gauthier's thinking on the subject.Sky & Stone (1976) devoted five text pages to exactly the same idea, namely the 1910 ‘Roadtown’ by Edgar Chambless, who died in 1936, and, more significantly, the 1964–66 ‘Linear City’ by Michael Graves. Like Gauthier, several architects have seemed to crystallize an attitude and an approach which, for better or worse, had been in the air for some time without them actually realizing it until they saw it so crystallized. ‘Roadtown’ was evidently to be a continuous, serpent-shaped building which would be self-extending because of the railroad enclosed within it. Both buildings, along with Gauthier's, are representative of ‘Megastructural Architecture’. The term ‘megastructure’ was first used for this kind of building in the vocabulary of ‘Urbatecture’ in approximately 1964. The latter was the visible Earth-crust superficial architecture, as opposed to LaNier's (1970) invisible subterranean architecture called ‘Geotecture’.