ABSTRACT
The distinctions between city and countryside seems to wither. Our architectural environment is physically manifested in the form of buildings and infrastructure. As technology expands the possibilities of architectural form, it alters the properties of the field of architecture. Therefore, the formal possibilities expand both upscale towards countries and regions, and downscale towards the molecular scale of building materials and ubiquitous information and communication technology (ICT), both physically in terms of architectural forms and conceptually in terms of meanings and cultural narratives of architecture. City and countryside seem to merge and produce a general fabric of human settlement: a civic landscape or a field of architecture with nodes in points of high density. With the industrial revolution and with modern capitalism, the city became an instrument for class rule, for conscious social and economic management and, eventually, for social and political engineering on a new, global scale.
