Megashed

Outside the business pages, it will probably be Tesco the bulldozer that makes headlines, as it is lambasted for supposedly demolishing traditional high streets and replacing small shops with its category-killing megasheds.

Here, theboxtank (Emily Andersen, Geoff DeOld and Corey Hoelker), a collaborative blog about big-box urbanism and retail, considers the latent architectural possibilities of the now global phenomenon of space enclosing industrially clad megasheds - the potential of which was never underestimated by Cedric Price or Martin Pawley.

What do we feel when we see the marching lines of pylons, the rising telecommunications masts, the slow-moving rotors of wind generators, the proliferation of huge, windowless plastic-coated distribution megasheds that are redescribing our chosen homeland?

Anthony Gormley, one of the few people to squeeze any aesthetic interest out of the Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal, has called megasheds 'the most permanent unconscious memorial to the age of mobility' and said they are 'as much a part of our history as the rural barn'.

The Umpqua Basin was selected as a result of subdividing the Coast Range into six megasheds (watersheds of 1-2 million acres each), the largest areas that could be modeled given the computer hardware (2 gigabytes of RAM) available at the time.

How has ramping up to the scale of whole watersheds, and so-called megasheds, affected the way scientists think about and execute their crucial experimental work?

Because of differences between the two models in the amount of forest land in each megashed, we utilized the percentage of acres clearcut each period in a megashed from the WORTS analyses.