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    Junkspace with Running Room
    Junkspace with Running Room
    Junkspace with Running Room
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Junkspace with Running Room

    By Rem Koolhaas

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    In Junkspace (2011), architect Rem Koolhaas itemised in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is here updated and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from architectural critic Hal Foster.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNotting Hill Editions
    Release dateJun 6, 2016
    ISBN9781910749784
    Junkspace with Running Room
    Author

    Rem Koolhaas

    Rem Koolhaas (Róterdam, 1944) es arquitecto por la Architectural Association de Londres. En 1975 fundó, junto a Elia y Zoe Zenghelis y Madelon Vriesendorp, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) y posteriormente AMO, la vertiente teórica y más propagandista de OMA. Es uno de los arquitectos contemporáneos cuyo trabajo profesional y obra teórica han ejercido mayor influencia en la arquitectura de las últimas décadas. Es autor de Delirio de Nueva York (Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2004, publicado originariamente en 1978) y de S, M, L, XL (1995, donde se incluye Sendas oníricas de Singapur, publicado por esta editorial), Mutaciones (2000), Content (2004), Post-Occupancy (2006), Al Manakh (2007) o Elements of Architecture (2014).

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    • 5/5
      Junkspace is a stunning screed nailing the mess we are in (literally) within a metaphoric vision of a living, lived-in, hell. Running Room contextualizes it via a series of social science concepts, attempting to make the overwhelming weight of Koolhaas' bulldozing horror digestible to a western educated palate. Simply stunning.

    Book preview

    Junkspace with Running Room - Rem Koolhaas

    Hal Foster

    – Preface –

    Junkspace first appeared in The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2001), a vast compendium of texts, images, and data concerning the consumerist transformation of city and suburb from the first department store to the latest mega-mall. This was the second installment of an extended project on contemporary urbanism undertaken by graduate students in architecture at Harvard overseen by Rem Koolhaas and the research team in his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Junkspace was reprinted in the hundredth issue of October magazine, a special volume on obsolescence, where a first version of Running Room was also published. This essay appears here too, but in revised form so that it might serve as a partial response to Junkspace as well.

    What genre of writing is Junkspace? In his first major publication, Delirious New York (1978), Koolhaas demonstrated his mastery of the manifesto form; in fact, he invented his own variety—‘retroactive manifesto’—as this celebration of the sheer density of Manhattan allowed by its famous grid was subtitled. Intermittently, over the next twenty years, Koolhaas continued in this polemical vein; S,M,L,XL (1995), a huge survey of OMA buildings and projects, included key interventions in ongoing debates about architecture and urbanism from the recessionary period of the 1970s to the boom years of the 1990s. Now the manifesto is essentially a modernist mode, one that looks to the future; often it aims to bend all posterity to its visionary will. Junkspace makes no such claim: ‘Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century,’ Koolhaas states matter-of-factly. In a sense, Junkspace does a harder thing: it ‘foretells’ the present, which is to say that it calls on us to recognize what is already everywhere around us. With engrained optimism, which is often fueled by technological enthusiasm, the Left has always bet heavily on posterity. In a recent text in New Left Review titled ‘For a Left with No Future’, T. J. Clark has urged us to give up on this fata morgana. Implicitly, Koolhaas sounds a similar note of desperate critique in Junkspace.

    Yet it is this desperation that lends such energy to the text, which, generically, is more jeremiad than manifesto—a lamentation that veers into denunciation and back again almost sentence by sentence. As a jeremiad, the force of Junkspace is more ethical than political, which might be seen as a limitation if it were not that this posture makes for such biting insights, especially since Koolhaas does not presume to stand apart from ‘the kindergarten grotesque’ he surveys. In fact he takes it right into his prose; his language picks over capitalist clichés of all sorts—advertising jingles and commercial lingos, corporate logos and brand names—and retools this jumble of verbal junk for its own purposes. It is a brilliant performance that calls to mind other critical mimicries of corrupted tongues of the marketplace from James Joyce, through William Gaddis and Don DeLillo, to David Foster Wallace.

    As Running Room suggests, Koolhaas and OMA were among the architectural beneficiaries of the post-Wall boom after 1989. That moment appeared to usher in not only a New Europe but an entire New World Order, one that would require innovative building and infrastructure. In this order China quickly emerged as a dominant player, and its Market-Leninism soon made it the largest client of architects the world has ever seen. S,M,L,XL documents many of the possibilities and the pitfalls of this period (it begins with small projects but jumps to large and extra-large sizes), so why does the tone change so radically in Junkspace only twelve years on from 1989 (and just six years after S,M,L,XL)? In some measure, this shift has to do with the specific context of its first publication, an analysis of the effects of shopping on city, suburb, and institutions of various sorts (e.g., museums, airports), whereby the parasite of the store somehow becomes the host that supports other forms of life (which are somewhat zombified as a result). In great part, however, this change reflects a souring on the triumphalism of 1989: far from the end of all ideology, as neoconservatives imagined at the time, 1989 marked the era of neoliberalism regnant, a form of capitalism that operates by deregulation at all levels, a deregulation that produces, as its primary effect in the built environment, not grands projets so much as Junkspace. In one way Koolhaas does subscribe to the neocon thesis of the end of history in the post-Communist world, only in his view, ‘like a crab on LSD, culture staggers endlessly sideways’.

    Junkspace appeared twelve years after 1989, and now it is another twelve years later. What has this time brought with it? What transformations might alter our reading of this text? As presented by Koolhaas, Junkspace knows no limits, no outside, yet very quickly the events of 9/11 occurred, and new walls—and not just brick and barbed-wire ones—immediately appeared. In 2001 there were still borders of various sorts, many more arrived after 9/11, and today there might well be more walls than there were in 1989. Plus ça change on that score. So, too, some of us thought the attacks of 9/11 would put in question, if not in crisis, the media-ready type of spectacular architecture known as

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