The choice of Foster ’ s office for this project like this is not surprising, as he is arguably the preeminent architect of the Google Earth perspective: he might terraform the Moon because he has already, project by project, terraformed Earth. Regardless of how you may like or not like the projects, from Masdar to the new Reichstag and the Gherkin, few contemporary offices have done more to expand the perspectival scale of architectural figuration than his. Architectural students now include “ satellite ” view along the required plan, section, elevation, and axonometric perspectives on their projects, and his portfolio suggests one reason why. While a building ’ s face has usually been read from the view of a pedestrian front or entrance, Foster ’ s projects (especially but not uniquely) are sometimes best considered from tens of thousands of feet in the air, as landscape-scale interventions in relation to the urban regions that they gather into their midst. The megastructural scale of the projects also confirms a gathering of social totality into a single envelope (as drawn from high above, instead of in sectional view as for the Palace of the Soviets or OMA ’ s CCTV, or D ü rer ’ s Triumphal Arch, for that matter) into which that massive enclosure inhales utopian aspirations (of the client and their publics). At the same time, the universal management platform of the smart city, such as Foster ’ s Masdar plan (with IBM, Cisco, and others), gathers its world less through the anthropometric technique of the envelope than through the anticipatory and parametric management of the discrete energy event. By circumscribing and rationalizing a local polity of the electron as the core constituency of urban governance, this genre of urbanism supervises not only a social totality of humans but also a closed ecology of bounded energy flows. For urban projects such these, the preference is for green infrastructural systems that sense and spit back data suitable for macroscopic images of those flows which are then made into interfaces and thereby instruments for the recursive management of those flows (see the Interfaces chapter). As legacy cities are slow to acquiesce to this managerial and ecological reason, megastructural architecture refers back more and more to the Apollonian scale-image of the Earth to prosecute on behalf of its synthetic ecologies, now so much more manageable because they are legally and ecologically delimited by the building envelope.
City Layer
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