138 Rem Koolhaas Toward the Contemporary City Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas stuned the otic we withbis este ppreinion of'New Yrs urban proces in Delirious New York (1978), deriving from ita “erosive rmanfeso"bsed one clue of congestion. In the ten eas since the book's pbliaion the proce of his fm, Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has growa to include aos reutbaniation poets ch asthe | Sijmemee sion of aster sis | of rousrdam. and most recently the edges of | Line whore he nae acres he Eglsh Chan sel willconnet. Centar ot posmodern | architects. who have focused their imaginations tn he center of cies Kolhas has tumed 10 the pepe and bi sudes ofthe sunoundings | of Atlanta, Seoul, and Tokyo will soon be pub- IsedsTheConenporary Cin. To previews 'pas-noemalemativeo Posner Ubar- ium, DBR hs gutered some excepts fom an interview conducted by Bruno Fortes (pub- shed originally in he Api 1989 issue of Carcitcence Aaj Ia. For me. the key moments of modernist Composition come from Mies, certainly over Le Corbusier. and from Leonidov. ‘uch before Gropius. I could continue to ‘make a ist, but I doubt this would seem very original. Everytime Ip through this series of modemist images, however, what strikes me i the extraordinary incongruity between the perfection and instant com- pleteness in their architectural plans (take for instance Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion or Terragni's Danteum) and the inflexible, nearly infantil, simplicity oftheir urban Projects, imagined as if the complexity of Aksily life could be accommodated right ‘way through the freedom offered by the fee plan, orasifal the experience of frag- ‘ientation and what this meant to perspec- tive could occur without disturbing the Bijmermees housing unis, Holland (c 1940). (Photo counesy L'Archieetire daiwa hu.) territory of the city. This is quite clear even in Otto Wagner's deceptive plans for the extension of Vienna. Thus, for me. the most visionary architect, the one who best under- stood the ineluctable Uisorder in which we live, remains Frank Lloyd Wright and his Broadacre City In the last ten years, the projects [have been working on have been situated in a territory that can no longer be called sub- urbia but must be referred to asthe borders or limits of the periphery. Itis here on the ledge of the periphery that we should ob- serve how things take shape. The contem- porary city, the one composed of these peripheries, ought to yield a sor of mani- festo, a premature homage to a form of modernity, which when compared tocities of the past might seem devoid of qualities. but in which we will one day recognize as many gains as losses. Leave Paris and Amsterdam—go look at Atlanta, quickly and without preconceptions: that's all lean say. Excepting certain airports and a few patches of urban peripheries, the imag the modern city—at least as it was ; Jected—has nowhere been realized. city that we have to make Uo with tod: more or less made of fragments of mo nity—as if abstract formal or stylistic « acteristics sometimes survived in their state, while the urban program didn’te off. But | wouldn’tery over this failure resulting strata of neo-modern, which | ally negates the traditional city as muc itmegates the original project of moder offers new themes to work with. Int ‘one can confront the buildings ofthis pe and the different types of space—sc thing that was impermissible in the doctrine of modernism. One can also from them to play witha substrata, m: the built with the ideal project. This situation comparable to one for whic! 19th century was much criticized, wh. Milan, Paris, or Naples the stratez remodeling without destroying the pi isting city was applied. Inthe las fifteen years there has be:er Design Boon Review i> oo immense production of images for pieces of Cities, which dense oF not, have a power of traction that cannot be denied. The prob- Jem is that they have been conceived in a 0m of unconscious utopia, as ifthe powers that be, the decision mechanisms, andthe ‘means that are really available might be enchanted by the beauty or interest they pontay. As if reality were going to latch ‘onto these schemes and come to see how important it was to build them. which as far as] know is tll not happening. Rather than ‘count on this sort of fascination, or bet on the absolute authority of architecture, 1 think you have to ask yourself which way the forces that contribute to defining space are heading. Are they urban-oriented or the ‘opposite? Do they ask for order or disorder? Do they play on the continuous or the dis- ‘continuous? Whatever the answer may be, there's movement there and dynamics that ‘you have to get to know. because they are the matter ofthe project. ‘Take for instance the IBA (Intemation- ale Bauausstellung) in Berlin, In 1977, before the final programming of the exhibit ‘Oswald Ungers and I were the Ione dissent. ing voices from Krier, Rossi, Kleihues, and the others, who had already decided to ‘make Berlina test-case city forthe recon struction ofthe European city. Ungers and ‘pleaded fora quite different route. one that ut history first: the city was destroyed, tom apart, punctured, and chis was its memory. ‘Second was the economy: West Berlin was Stagnating losing population ever since the ‘construction of the wall despite thousands of institutional and fiscal incentives, and thus one could not see how a suficienttumn- ‘round would suddenly occur to econom. ally justify a project of general reurbaniza- tion. These were strong enough reasons to ‘suggest that the IBA should not have taken Place. Instead one had the chance in Berlin {enhance reality, to adapt to what already ‘existed. Above all, Berin provided the oc- «asion to make of the city a sont of terito- fialarchipelago—a system of architectural islands surrounded by forests and lakes in ‘hich the infrastructures could play with- ‘out causing damage. It could have been realized in an almost picturesque mode (ike Pic's stations) with fee periphery from Which one slides into great vegetal inter- Stices. In the long run, the historical acci- dents (Berlin destroyed by the war, and re- destroyed by the 19505) could have offered metaphoric role very much the opposite of the one chosen by IBA. Remembering the projects of Mies, of ‘aut the twin towers of Leonidov. and the like, one must also remember that these Projects were first great distributors of space, more spatial defines than mere ob- ‘ets. admit that there was a utopia inthis Vision that was just a strong, and perhaps insymmeny tothe current desire todensify, ‘onsiuc. and give a all eosts an architec. tural dimension. Nowadays every empty spaces prey tothe frenzy oil. t0 stop up. ‘Butin my opinion thee are two reasons that ‘make urban voids at least one of the princi- Pallines of combat, ino the only ine for People interested in the city The frst is ‘Quite simple: itis now easier to control ‘empty space than to play on full volumes and agglomerate shapes that, though no one can rightly say why. have become uncon- trollable. The second is something I've ‘noticed: emptiness. landscape, space—if {You want ouse them as lever, ifyou want to include them ina scheme—ean serve as ‘battlefield and ean draw quite general sup- ‘Por from everyone. This is no longer the ‘ase foran architectural work, which today {is always suspect and inspires prior distrust. One of the current projects of OMA is the urbanization of Bijmermeer the larg- xt of the modernist grands ensembles con- structed in Holland in the 1960s—it's something like Le Corbusier without alent, but conceived according o impeccable doc. ‘ne. Its animmense territory—just one of its twelve sections equals the area of the his- toric center of Amsierdam. Today on this immense surface where twelve capital cit jes might have been built, nothing is hap- pening. The apartments are empty, people live there only in hopes of moving some- ‘where else. and there were serious discus- sions to demolish the whole project. But when looking closer, it seemed 10 us that these negative elements were beyond re- ‘moval. Ittumed out that alot of people— ‘singles. couples, divorcees, those ded to the arts. and all of them neces. motorized—were quite attached to Biji- ‘mermeer und preferred to stay there. The ‘enjoyed the light and space. and the indiv- sociable feeling of freedom and abandon ‘ment. Thus it wasn't the spaces and builé- ‘ngs that were insufferable but rather the system of aberrant siretts and garage con- ‘nections that radically cut off people from their dwellings. For twenty years neith ‘Public nor private initiative has proposes ‘anything to improve this forgonen terrtor. Our decision was not to alter the housin: units but rather to try to give u force or intensity to the open spaces. superimposing ‘on the original project (a giant beehive structure filled with trees) a design where the highways. the parking garages. the schools. and the stadiums would be anticu- ated on islands of greenery and relate tua ‘central armature of new services. including Jaboratories, research centers, and movie ‘Studios. This would constitute an indisr=- sable investment if one wants to st ‘national campaign to deal with what at wa ‘moment is a huge blight in the middle of Holland. Af my interest in the banal architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. the derivatives of Emesto Rogers and Richard Neutra, seems. 8 somewhat boring source. I cun only an- ‘swer that to die of boredom is not so bad. There were much worse architects than ‘Neutra. But let's face it, I like that kind of architecture. and quite often it has been ‘magnificently built. It has also at times reached a carefreeness and a freedom that interests me—not that I'm the only one to take an interest in it. But the question at ‘stake is what Bruno Vayssitre and Patrice ‘Noviant have defined as “statistic archi- lecture”: Power architecture whose power ‘is easy, that _has moved without transition from the isolated experience io the series. ‘from the series to repetition, and $0 on until ‘you get sick of it I'm trying to live with it bur also to detach myself from it. And ‘since nostalgia disturbs me, I'm try’ ‘More and more not to be modem, but to ‘contemporary. 76 137The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century 1985 Haas any area in history—except perhaps the Forum in Rome—ever been richer in architectural history than the Forum des Halles and its immediate vicinity, including Beaubourg? Here a whole urban region is now a seam- less, almost Babylonian amalgam of destruc tion, kiteh resurrections, authentic historical particles, a delirium of infrastructures, a mass grave ofigood and bad intentions, eravling - from the pit lke the rejected species of an alternative evolution. To what parallel Galae ‘pagos does this experiment belong? What of the culmination at La Défense, where all the geometrical rigor of a city collapses in a maelstrom of randomness and incoherence, ‘made more pathetic by the profusion of roads, ramps and other “connections” that Jook like a wind-tunnel test aecidentally exe= cuted in concrete? Yet, it mysteriously ‘works oF, atleast, is fll of people. ‘And what is the particular afliction that renders these treasures invisible, inaccesible, indigestible? Why are we all part ofthis ine clfectual chorus that moans in the name of humanity about its culminating achieve- ‘ments? The 20¢h century ends on this note! Yes, Europe is now, almost everywhere, ti= diculously beautiful for those who can for .get—for a fleting moment—zhe arbitrary delusions of order, taste and integrity. Its cit ies, through the objective agent of ideologi= cal mismanagement, are nov exhaustive textbooks of flaws; the European Metropolis is ike a reef on which each intention, each ambition, each solution, cach question and each answer implacably run aground, ‘Buc like the forms that ean be discovered in clouds, i is possible co will this landscape into an amazing spectacle of invention; ead with the same concentration as the 154 ite ‘map of a treasure island, it reveals astonish= ing secrets. One of the peculiar beauties of the twentieth ‘century context is that it is no longer the re- sult of one or more architectural doctrines evolving almost imperceptibly, but which represent the simultancous formation of dis- tinct archaeological layers; they result from « perpetual pendulum movement where ‘each architectural doctrine contradicts and ‘undocs the essence of the previous one as surely as day follows night. The resulting landscape needs the combined interpreta- tive ability of Champoleon, Schliemann, Darwin and Freud to disemtangl Berlin/Rotterdam Rotterdam and Berlin have much in common. Both historical centers, between the wars own specie mod- ‘emitis, then destroyed by the war; like Cain and Abel, the one good and the other bad. Then rebuilt in an atmosphere of opti- ‘isin and thoughtless modernity, so perva- sive that it became a vernacular. Now, (oday, both are caught in the grips of i tense revisionism. Berlin, first bombed, then divided, is eemter- less, a collection of centers sometimes noth ing more than empty spaces. In Rotterdam, the bombs emptied the center; it was re= placed by an artificial heart with emptiness as its core. In both cases, the current revi- sions are based on denial. ‘The richness of Berlin resides in the proto- ‘ypical sequence ofits models: neo-classical city, early Metropolis, modernist testhed, ‘Nazi capital, war victim, Lazarus, cold war battlefield, and so on. ‘Now IBA is erasing this evidence, destroy- ing in the name of history the very evi- Fevtle grounds for thei dence ofits destruction, which is exactly the ‘most significant fact ofits history (not to ‘mention its aesthetics). Rotterdam was the model city of the fifties, ‘when the serene order of its slabs and the ‘connective tissue of the Lijnbaan achieved paradigmatic status. In the sixties its pop larity tumbled abruptly; in the end, only planning delegations from Eastern Europe and the third world came to visit. In the 1970s, new generations of planners took over. The old generation had simply been “building the city;” now that same city was declared a “gigantic problem.” The unique quality of Rouerdam was the realization of ‘openness atthe scale of a whole center. Partly unintentional residue~simply the space around the slabs—this openness came under attack; plans were male for its dens fication or intensification, for the reali tion, even here, of the “compact city”: inten sification, as can only be expected from ar= chitects, in the form of material substance. They were blind to the mysterious qualities of this alleged void, first ofall its unlimited freedom. Blind to the fact that the toddlers who could be seen—in the filties—playing in the wading-pools at the foot of the slabs {happy evidence for the visiting tourist) had ‘grown up and now formed a mutant urban herd, perfectly equipped to fill and exploit this post-modern plane where everything ‘was possible and not a single social trope suppressed by architecture, That new pat- terns of migration had emerged: the trek from nowhere to nowhere as an exhilarat- ing urban experience. Through the shift in urban ideoogy, they became a new kind of dlispossessei those chased from their mod- ‘ern habitat. May their numbers be limited Jn the coming decades!Method I there is a method in this work, itis a ‘method of systematic idealization; a syster- atic overestimation of the exant, a bornbard- ‘ment of speculation that invests even the ‘most mediocre aspects with retroactive con ceptual and ideological charge. In this pro- cess, cach bastard gets his own genealogical twee; the faintest hint of an iden is tracked wih the-obstinacy of a detective ona juicy ce of adultery, [we pretend that ot work will be implanted in an ideal world of incelleccual prestige, artistic integrity and ‘most importantly, seriousness, it will auto- ratieally acquire these same qualities, and remain as tangible manifestation of a theo- retical perfection, long after the interpretae tive illumination of the author is removed? The mirror image of this aetion is the most clinical invemtory of the actual conditions of each site, no matter how mediocre, the mos calculating exploitation ofits objective pox tential, This combined with a tempramental insistence on an almost seandalos sand Fite cally unbeliovable~simpliiy that belies the complesity of the contestual interpretation, awhile at the same time doing justice to even its most delicate aspects. In some eases even providing the dignity of a retrozetive con- cept is to exploit it objectively. In chs man- ner, the interpretation of the Berlin wall as park run through with a 2en sculpture, made it possible to imagine the villas ran ning along it. In Rotterdam, it was the banal conditions of water and traffic, to- gether with the reductive inventory of mod com typologies, chat triggered the imagination. But maybe all these arguments are in the cend mere rationalizations for the primitive fact of a taste for asphalt, trafic, eon, crowds the very architecture of other people. The descton othe car of Ratledom dung Wedd Wor, ond reconsucten with bigs by Mare ree, Von den Boa, ond Baka eiImagining the Nothingness 1985 owas Where there is nothing, eventing is possible. Where there is architecture, nothing (se) is possible. Who does not feel an acute nostalgia for those characters who could (even less than 15 years ago), with the vulgar stroke of a red pen, condema—or was it berate, afer al?—whole areas of alleged urban despera- ‘ion, change whole destinies, speculate seri ously about the future through diagrams of untenable absurdity, leave whole auditoria panting with the doodles dhey lft on the blackboard, manipulate politicians with sav- age statistics... bw ties the only external sign oftheir madness... dhe ime when there were sil... thinker? In other words, we long for that whole histrionic branch of the profession that leapt ike clowns, pax thetic and courageous, from one elif to other, flapping with inadequate wings but enjoying at least the fee fll of pure speci Jaton Maybe such nostalgia isnot merely the long ing forthe former authority of this pro- fession—nobody can seriously believe that architecture has lost any ofits authority since its exinction—but also that for fantasy. Ik is ironic that in architecture, “May 1968” hhas been translated only into more architec- ture: more pavement, less beach, even thougls many commendable activities take place independent of architecture. Maybe the obstinacy of architets—a myo- pia that has lend them to believe that arehi tecture is not only the vehicle ofall that is good, but even the explanation ofall that is ‘wrongs not merely a profesional defor ration but a reaction tothe horeor of architecture's opposite, that is an instinctive recoil from the void, a fear of nothingness 156 ge Mops of Ban showing, clockwise rm the boty the exiting uon ai the ty stint ty, ond acon luton orchipeogos, tom a seminrled by (©.M. Unger, Bein, 1977Berlin Berlin isa laboratory. Its territory is forever defined and, for political reasons, can never be shrunk. Its population has declined con- tinuously since the wall was built. It follows that fewer and fewer people inhabit the same metropolitan territory andl take respon sibility for its physical substance. Ik could be assumed, boldly, that large ‘areas of the city have ended up in ruins sim- py because there is no dnger any ned for their The blanket application of urban reconstruc- tion in these circumstances may lead to it may be as file as keeping brain-dead patients alive with ‘medical apparat ‘What is necessary instead is to imagine ways in which the density can be main tained without recourse to substance, the intensity without ehe encumbrance of archi- tecture In 1976, during a design seminar/studio led by O. M. Ungers, a concept was launched with implications that have not yet been rec- ognized. “A Green Archipelago” proposed a theoretical Berlin, whose future was con= ceived in two diametrically opposite actions: the reinforcement of those parts of the city that warranted it and the destruction of those parts that did not ‘This assertion contained the blueprint for a theory of the European metropolis, since it addressed its central ambiguity: the fact that ‘many of its historical centers are in fact con- tained in metropolitan webs, that their urban facades merely mask the pervasive re- ality of the metropolis. In a model of urban solid and metropolitan void, the desire for stability and the need for instability are not incompatible. They can be pursued as two their actual destruct separate enterprises, ted by invisible connec ‘Through the parallel actions of reconstruc sion and deconstruction, such a city be- comes an archipelago of “architectural” is- Jands floating in a post-architectural land- scape or erasure, where what used to be city is replaced by a highly charged nothingness, ‘The kind of coherence that the metropolis can achieve is not that of a homogeneous, planned composition. It can be, at the ‘most, a system of fragments, a system of ‘multiple realities; in Europe, the remnant of the historical core may well be part of such a system, In the theoretical Berlin, “the green inter- spaces form a system of modified, some- ‘imes artifical, nature ... suburbs ... parks woods. . hunting preserves... gardens agriculture ... The natural grid would ‘welcome the full panoply of the technologi- cal age ... highways, supermarkets, drive-in cinemas, landing strips, the ever-expanding video universe.” Nothingness here was to be a modified Kaspar David Friedrich landscape—a teuto- nie forest intersected by Arizona highways in fact, a Switzerland, Nevods It isa tragedy that planners can only plan, and architects ean only design further archi tectures. More important than the design of cities is, and certainly will be in the imme- diate future, the design of their decay. Only through a revolutionary process of erasure and the establishment of “ree zones,” con- ceptual Nevadas where the laws of architec- ture are suspended, will some ofthe inherent tortures of urban lifé—the friction between. program and containment—be suspended. If the most recent additions to the sagheap of history have landed there because their stylistic ugliness has made their true con= tents invisible, the exploration and cultiva- tion of nothingness would explicate a hid den tradition. Some hippies have been here before, the ‘whole inarticulate horde of thinking mem- bers of the 1960s Anglo-Saxon countercul- ture—all the bubbles, domes, foams, the “birds” of Archigram (how bitter it will be to be rediscovered at the moment that am nesia has touched your own performance) the philistine courage of Cedric Price, Imaging nothing is: Pompeii, city built with the absolute amount of walls and roof ‘The Manhatan Grid, “there” a century be- fore there was a “there” there; Central Park, void that provoked the cis that now define it; Broadacre City, the Guggenheim, Hilberseimer’s “Mid Wese"—with its vast plains of zero architecture; ‘The Bertin Wall... ‘They all reveal chat this emptiness, the emp- tiness of the metropolis, is not empty, that ‘each void can be used for chose programs ‘whose insertion in the existing texture is a Procrustean effort, leading to mutilation of both activity and texture. The projects for Amsterdam, but even more those for La Villete and the Universal Expositions, are aitempts to imagine the quality of nothing- ness at the heart of the metropolis 157 (43