A case in point is Foster ’ s unbuilt Crystal Island in Moscow, a massive hyperboloid, Christmas tree – like tower that would contain a myriad of residential, cultural, and educational programs under its glass skin and within its 27 million square feet, four times the size of the Pentagon. After the financial crisis, development financing was frozen, and the tower is not likely ever to be built. Keller Easterling also links the project to utopian schemes of yesterday, some now registered into architecture ’ s critical canon, others still languishing in the historical junk pile of unacknowledged visionary cranks. Like Masdar, Foster ’ s secessionist Island chooses to recommends itself as an exemplar of green urbanism in that it can generate much of its own energy needs, allows carbon-friendly internal transportation from home to work to leisure, and as a city within a city, offers a centralized economy of scale and density for the consumption of resources. Easterling ’ s critique, however, draws on a Sloterdijkian trope of the planetary condition seen as vast interlocking layered interiors, and she argues that “ capital A ” Architecture ’ s response to the challenge of the Anthropocene is not properly met by bubble-era faux-Arcologies such as these. Ultimately it may well be that The Stack ’ s intensive global mesh of megacities will support megadense resource economies that drive the development of larger and larger buildings, like the larger and larger bombs of the 1950s and the larger and larger airplanes of the 1970s. Both of those arms races were “ won ” by the Soviet Union, with the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba and the 300-foot Antonov 225 airplane, neither put to much real use, and now Moscow could someday add Crystal Island to this collection of hypertrophic trophies. It may also be that this scalar recalibration of built interiors will realize the positive effect of drawing more and more networks, and even territories, within one building ’ s single, intelligent interfacial design scheme.
Even so, the proper architectural address of the design challenges of a now permanent ecological exception remains with the still-unfinished Copernican conceptual recalibration: that our planet itself is already the megastructural totality in which the program of total design might work. The real design problem then is not foremost the authorship of a new envelope visible from space, but the redesign of the program that reorganizes the total apparatus of the built interior into which we are already thrown together. <sup>52</sup> At best, flightless spaceships, such as Crystal Island, will be interim experiments that clarify the imperatives for more ambitious and meaningful geodesign. At worst, they are alpha versions of luxury enclaves, post-crash storage facilities for dead currency notes, or props for the closing shot of the next Planet of the Apes remake. However we may choose to read the lessons they provide, there is no expansion or any a single building envelope that can actually accomplish what is asked of these projects: “ architecture ” is perhaps the wrong metaphor for architectural thinking and experimentation to lean on. As the larger architectural imaginary tries to shift from what the professional assembly of buildings asks from it and toward the technological reassembly of the territory itself, we join it in groping toward a design brief for the governance and geopolitics of The Stack, especially in regard to that Anthropocenic ecological exception. In doing so, we realize that Foster ’ s building is simply way, way too small. <sup>53</sup> It is actually a miniature in comparison to what is needed, and far too beholden to the traditions and economics of urban program from a bygone era. Instead we would do better to draw energy from artificial envelopes that do less to seal off and subdivide urban polities and do more to enable the appearance of programs that we cannot already anticipate, measure, or rent and resell in advance: a megastructuralisim based not on the metaphor of the ark but on the scale and ubiquity of Earth ’ s atmosphere.
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