rem+koolhaas+-+junkspace

Junkspace Logan Airport: A World-Class Upgrade for the Twenty-® rst Century OCTOBER 100, Spring 2002, pp. 175± 190. © 2002 Rem Koolhaas. Rabbit is the new beef . . . Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have con- demned ourselves to a lifelong immersion in the arbitrary . . . LAX: welcomingÐ possibly ¯ esh-eatingÐ orchids at the check-in counter . . . ªIdentityº is the new junk food for the dispossessed, globalization’s fodder for the disenfranchised . . . If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown . . . Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inven- tions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by in® nite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory . . . Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not reg- ister on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids. According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more Junkspace under construction in the twenty-® rst century than has survived from the twentieth . . . It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the twentieth century. Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century; we have been reading a footnote under a microscope hoping it would turn into a novel; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People’s Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing. . . the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, ® re shutter, hot-air curtain . . . It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo) . . . Junkspace is REM KOOLHAAS Ð Late-Twentieth Century Billboard sealed, held together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble. Gravity has remained constant , resisted by the same arsenal since the beginning of time; but air-conditioningÐ invisible medium, therefore unnoticedÐ has truly revolutionized architecture. Air-conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air-conditioning unites them. Air-conditioning has dictated mutant regimes of organization and coexistence that leave architecture behind. A single shopping center is now the work of generations of space planners, repair- men, and ® xers, like in the Middle Ages; air-conditioning sustains our cathedrals. (All architects may unwittingly be working on the same building, so far separate, but with hidden receptors that will eventually make it cohere.) Because it costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns into Junkspace . . . When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation with its oppo- site: substance and objects, i.e., architecture. Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mysti® cations. O.K., let’s talk about space then. The beauty of airports, especially after each upgrade. The luster of renovations. The subtlety of the shopping center. Let’s explore public space, dis- cover casinos, spend time in theme parks . . . Junkspace is the body double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness. Junkspace is a Bermuda Triangle of concepts, an abandoned petri dish: it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction . . . Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends . . . A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed. Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of building, possibly forever . . . Space was created by piling matter on top of mat- ter, cemented to form a solid new whole. Junkspace is additive, layered, and lightweight, not articulated in different parts but subdivided, quartered the way a carcass is torn apartÐ individual chunks severed from a universal condition. There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently covered in mirror or gold. Structure groans invisibly underneath decoration, or worse, has become ornamental; small, shiny, space frames support nominal loads, or huge beams deliver cyclopic burdens to unsuspect ing destinations . . . The arch, once the workhorse of structures, has become the depleted emblem of ªcommunity,º wel- coming an in® nity of virtual populations to nonexistent theres. Where it is absent, it is simply appliedÐ mostly in stucco Ð as ornamental afterthought on hurriedly erected superblocks. Junkspace’s iconography is 13 percent Roman, 8 percent Bauhaus and 7 percent Disney (neck and neck), 3 percent Art Nouveau, followed OCTOBER176 closely by Mayan . . . Like a substance that could have condensed in any other form, Junkspace is a domain of feigned, simulated order, a kingdom of morph- ing. Its specific configuration is as fortuitous as the geometry of a snowflake. Patterns imply repetition or ultimately decipherable rules; Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code . . . Because it cannot be grasped, Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is ¯ amboyant yet unmemorable, like a screen saver; its refusal to freeze ensures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest. Its geometries are unimaginable, only makable. Although strictly nonarchitectural, it tends to the vaulted, to the Dome. Some sections seem to be devoted to utter inertness, others in perpetual rhetorical turmoil: the deadest resides next to the most hysterical. Themes cast a pall of arrested development over interiors as big as the Pantheon, spawning stillbirths in every corner. The aesthetic is Byzantine, gorgeous, and dark, splintered into thousands of shards, all visible at the same time: a quasi-panoptical universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split seconds around the dizzy eye of the beholder. Murals used to show idols; Junkspace’s modules are dimensioned to carry brands; myths can be shared, brands husband aura at the mercy of focus groups. Brands in Junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: they are essences through which meaning disappears . . . The shiniest surfaces in the history of mankind re¯ ect humanity at its most casual. The more we inhabit the palatial, the more we seem to dress down. A stringent dress codeÐ last spasm of etiquette?Ð governs access to Junkspace: shorts, sneakers, sandals, shell suit, ¯ eece, jeans, parka, backpack. As if the People suddenly accessed the private quarters of a dictator, Junkspace is best enjoyed in a state of postrevolutionar y gawking. Polarities have mergedÐ there is nothing left between desolation and frenzy. Neon signi® es both the old and the new; interiors refer to the Stone and Space Age at the same time. Like the deactivated virus in an inoculation, Modern archi- tecture remains essential, but only in its most sterile manifestation, High Tech (it seemed so dead only a decade ago!). It exposes what previous generations kept under wraps: structures emerge like springs from a mattress; exit stairs dangle in a didactic trapeze; probes thrust into space to deliver laboriously what is in fact omnipresent, free air; acres of glass hang from spidery cables, tautly stretched skins enclose ¯ accid nonevents. Transparency only reveals everything in which you cannot partake. At the stroke of midnight it all may revert to Taiwanese Gothic; in three years it may segue into Nigerian Sixties, Norwegian Chalet, or default Christian. Earthlings now live in a kindergarten grotesque . . . Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in Junkspace. There is no form, only proliferat ion . . . Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish, and embrace manipulation . . . Superstrings of graphics, transplanted emblems of franchise and sparkling infrastructures of light, LEDs, and video describe an authorless world beyond anyone’s claim, always unique, utterly unpredictable, yet intensely familiar. Junkspace is hot (or suddenly arctic); ¯ uorescent walls, folded like melting stained glass, generate additional heat to raise the temperature of Junkspace 177 Junkspace to levels at which you could cultivate orchids. Pretending histories left and right, its contents are dynamic yet stagnant, recycled or multiplied as in cloning: forms search for function like hermit crabs looking for a vacant shell . . . Junkspace sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins, is reborn every Monday morning. In previous building, materiality was based on a ® nal state that could only be modi® ed at the expense of partial destruction. At the exact moment that our culture has abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more and more modular, unitary, and standardized; substance now comes predigitized . . . As the module becomes smaller and smaller, its status become that of a crypto-pixel. With enormous difficultyÐ budget, argument, negotiation, deformationÐ irregularity and uniqueness are constructed from identical elements. Instead of trying to wrest order from chaos, the picturesque is now wrested from the homogenized, the singular liberated from the standardized . . . Architects thought of Junkspace ® rst and named it Megastructure, the ® nal solu- tion to transcend their huge impasse. Like multiple Babels, huge superstructures would last through eternity, teeming with impermanent subsystems that would mutate over time, beyond their control. In Junkspace, the tables are turned: it is subsystem only, without superstructure, orphaned particles in search of a frame- work or pattern. All materialization is provisional: cutt ing, bending, tearing, coating: construction has acquired a new softness, like tailoring . . . The joint is no longer a problem, an intellectual issue: transitional moments are defined by stapling and taping, wrinkly brown bands barely maintain the illusion of an unbroken surface; verbs unknown and unthinkable in architectural historyÐ clamp, stick, fold, dump, glue, shoot, double, fuse Ð have become indispensable. Each element performs its task in negotiated isolation. Where as detailing once suggested the coming together, possibly forever, of disparate materials, it is now a transient coupling, waiting to be undone, unscrewed, a temporary embrace with a high probability of separation; no longer the orchestrated encounter of difference, but the abrupt end of a system, a stalemate. Only the blind, reading its fault lines with their ® ngertips, will ever understand Junkspace’s histories . . . While whole millennia worked in favor of permanence, axialities, relationships, and proportion, the program of Junkspace is escalation. Instead of development, it offers entropy. Because it is endless, it always leaks somewhere in Junkspace; in the worst case, monumental ashtrays catch intermittent drops in a gray broth . . . When did time stop moving forward, begin to spool in every direction, like a tape spinning out of control? Since the introduction of Real Time™? Change has been divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture staggers endlessly sideways . . . The average contemporary lunch box is a micro- cosm of Junkspace: a fervent semantics of healthÐ slabs of eggplant, topped by thick layers of goat cheese Ð canceled by a colossal cookie at the bottom . . . Junkspace is draining and is drained in return. Everywhere in Junkspace there are seating arrangements, ranges of modular chairs, even couches, as if the experience Junkspace offers its consumers is signi® cantly more exhausting than any previous OCTOBER178 spatial sensation; in its most abandoned stretches, you ® nd buffets: utilitarian tables draped in white or black sheets, perfunctory assemblies of caffeine and caloriesÐ cottage cheese, muf® ns, unripe grapesÐ notional representations of plenty, without horn and without plenty. Each Junkspace is connected, sooner or later, to bodily functions: wedged between stainless-steel partitions sit rows of groaning Romans, denim togas bunched around their huge sneakers . . . Because it is so intensely consumed, Junkspace is fanatically maintained, the night shift undoing the damage of the day shift in an endless Sisyphean replay. As you recover from Junkspace, Junkspace recovers from you: between 2 and 5 A.M., yet another population, this one heartlessly casual and appreciably darker, is mopping, hovering, sweeping, toweling, resupplying . . . Junkspace does not inspire loyalty in its cleaners . . . Dedicated to instant grati® cation, Junkspace accommodates seeds of future perfection; a language of apology is woven through its texture of canned euphoria; ªpardon our appearanceº signs or miniature yellow ªsorryº billboards mark ongoing patches of wetness, announce momentary discomfort in return for imminent shine, the allure of improvement. Somewhere, workers sink on their knees to repair faded sections, as if in a prayer, or half-disappear in ceiling voids to negotiate elusive malfunctions, as if in confession. All surfaces are archaeological, superpositions of different ªperiodsº (what do you call the moment a particular type of wall-to-wall carpet was current?)Ð as you note when they’ re torn . . . Traditionally, typology implies demarcation, the de® nition of a singular model that excludes other arrangements. Junkspace represents a reverse typology of cumulative, approximative identity, less about kind than about quantity. But form- lessness is st ill form, the formless also a typology . . . Take the dump, where successive trucks discharge their loads to form a heap, whole in spite of the randomness of its contents and its fundamental shapelessness, or that of the tent- envelope that assumes different shapes to accommodate variable interior volumes. Or the vague crotches of the new generation. Junkspace can either be absolutely chaot ic or fr ighteningly asept ic Ð like a best- seller Ð overdetermined and indeterminate at the same time. There is something strange about ballrooms, for instance: huge wastelands kept column-free for ultimate ¯ exibility. Because you’ve never been invited to that kind of event, you have never seen them in use; you’ve only seen them being prepared with chilling precision: a relentless grid of circular tables, extending toward a dist ant hor izon, their diameters preempt ing communication; a dais big enough for the politburo of a totalitarian state, wings announcing as yet unimagined surprisesÐ acres of organization to support future drunkenness, disarray, and disorder. Or car shows . . . Junkspace is often described as a space of ¯ ows, but that is a misnomer; ¯ ows depend on disciplined movement, bodies that cohere. Junkspace is a web without a spider; although it is an architecture of the masses, each trajectory is strictly unique. Its anarchy is one of the last tangible ways in which we experience freedom. It is a space of collision, a container of atoms, busy, not dense . . . There is a special way of moving in Junkspace, at the same time aimless and purposeful. It is an acquired culture. Junkspace 179 Junkspace features the tyranny of the oblivious: sometimes an entire Junkspace comes unstuck through the nonconformity of one of its members; a single citizen of an another cultureÐ a refugee, a motherÐ can destabilize an entire Junkspace, hold it to a rustic’s ransom, leaving an invisible swath of obstruction in his/her wake, a deregulation eventually communicated to its furthest extremities. Where movement becomes synchronized, it curdles: on escalators, near exits, parking machines, automated tellers. Sometimes, under duress, individuals are channeled in a ¯ ow, pushed through a single door or forced to negotiate the gap between two temporary obstacles (an invalid’s bleeping chariot and a Christmas tree): the manifest ill will such narrowing provokes mocks the notion of ¯ ows. Flows in Junkspace lead to disaster : department stores at the beginning of sales; the stampedes triggered by warring compartments of soccer fans; dead bodies piling up in front of the locked emergency doors of a disco Ð evidence of the awkward ® t between the portals of Junkspace and the narrow calibrations of the old world. The young instinctively avoid the Dante-esque manipulations/containers to which Junkspace has condemned their elders in perpetuity. Within the meta-playground of Junkspace exist smaller playgrounds, Junkspace for children (usually in the least desirable square footage): sections of sudden miniaturizationÐ often underneath staircases, always near dead endsÐ and assemblies of underdimensioned plastic structuresÐ slides, seesaws, swingsÐ shunned by their intended audience are turned into a Junkniche for the old, the lost, the forgotten, the insane . . . the last hiccup of humanism . . . Traf® c is Junkspace, from airspace to the subway; the entire highway system is Junkspace, a vast potential utopia clogged by its users, as you notice when they’ve ® nally disappeared on vacation . . . Like radioactive waste, Junkspace has an insidious half-life. Aging in Junkspace is nonexistent or cata- strophic; sometimes an entire Junkspace Ð a department store, a nightclub, a bachelor padÐ turns into a slum overnight without warning: wattage diminishes imperceptibly, letters drop out of signs, air-condit ioning units start dripping, cracks appear as if from otherwise unregistered earthquakes; sections rot, are no longer viable, but remain joined to the ¯ esh of the main body via gangrenous passages. Judging the built presumed a static condition; now each architecture embodies opposite conditions simultaneously: old and new, permanent and tempo- rar y, f lour ishing and at r isk . . . Sect ions undergo an Alzheimer’ s -l ike deterioration as others are upgraded. Because Junkspace is endless, it is never closed . . . Renovation and restoration were procedures that took place in your absence; now you’re a witness, a reluctant participant . . . Seeing Junkspace in conversion is like inspecting an unmade bed, someone else’s. Say an airport needs more space. In the past, new terminals were added, each more or less characteristic of its own age, leaving the old ones as a readable record, evidence of progress. Since passengers have de® nitively demonstrated their in® nite malleability, the idea of rebuilding on the spot has gained currency. Travelators are thrown into reverse, signs taped, potted palms (or very large corpses) covered in body bags. Screens of taped Sheetrock segregate two populations: one wet, one dry, one OCTOBER180 hard, one ¯ abby, one col