Talking about supermoderrnism

Supermodernism is an architectural style that emerged in the 1990s. It has formal characteristics such as lightness, transparency and smoothed facades. The super modernist structures are airy, monolithic, minimalist defined by transparency and translucency from an abundant use of glass. Generally, the lines of this architecture are clean and simple, with a certain sensitivity to the neutral, the undefined, the implicit, expressionless. In the mid-1990s there were almost simultaneously publications of a series of books that described similar aesthetics such as Terence Riley’s Light Construction, Vittorio Savi and Josep Ma Montaner’s Less is More, and Marc Auge’s “NON-PLACES".

The supermodernism creates non-spaces characterised by neutrality, meaningless driven by the process of globalisation. The places lack spatial attachment and are used individually. Auge presents in his texts a differentiation between space and place where the globalisation causes both heterogeneity, and homogeneity using a branding identity. The postmodernist architecture is autonomous, buildings such as airports look the same everywhere around the world. The design of the super modernist buildings does not betray the function, it relies on direct experience. The buildings often have smooth monolithic facades with decorative panels and no relationship to their local context. For example, the Library in Ebeswalde by Herzog& de Meuron has facades covered by repetitive aligned images that obscure the scale and the number of levels. Thus, the supermodernism uses neutral colours and materials with an abundance of glass that create and transparency and that are autonomous from their surroundings.

Anthropocene is the age that represents the period of time during which human activity has had a dominant geological, environmental, and climatic impact on Earth. This geological epoch describes the significant effects of human activity on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems, which cause an anthropogenic climate change. The increased energy use, the globalisation of the industries, the pollution, the release of carbon emissions, have put humans in an existential crisis. The megacity is the predominant urban for the Anthropocene. This urban typology consists of a number of networked metropolitan cores with dense population covering a vast spatial territory. These urban agglomerations have 10 million or more people. Many of these megacities are in China, India, US, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and Turkey.

The challenges of this era are the occurrence of social polarisation, the forming of slums, the urban sprawls, gentrification, and pollution and the high demand for resources.

An example of gentrification could be London, where gentrification refers to the socio-cultural changes caused by the wealthy population taking over the less prosperous communities and transforming them into less affordable places. This forces the lower-income residents to move out of the community. The uneven service provision contributes to social polarisation.

In the undeveloped countries, the megacity takes the form of slums where the lack of infrastructure is a major problem leading to poverty and sickness.

Thus, the megacities are a result of the globalisation, population increase, and rapid growth in the international development industry.

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