The Operative Criticism of Rem Koolhaas
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380 Re.Building The Operative Criticism of Rem Koolhaas FRANCES HSU Georgia Institute of Technology together set the parameters for criticality today. With these ongoing efforts, Koolhaas situates capitalism as today’s new and sometimes terrifying sublime. The relationship between the historian and the architect began in Manhattan at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies. It is personal, anecdotal, and historical, with evidence of subjects, citations, and images shared by their writings. Tafuri, who shaped the paradigm of criticality operating today, formulated his position by combining terms from art, language, and psychology. Koolhaas precisely and purposefully relied on those terms used by Tafuri to create Figure 1: From SMLXL, pp. 432-433 and implement retroaction—an ironic refutation of operative criticism negating Tafuri’s position that modern architecture could not be critical due to INTRODUCTION economic conditions for the production of buildings. The evolution of criticality in the work of Rem Koolhaas has in fact been precisely and strategically Koolhaas/OMA can be fruitfully viewed in relation engaged in an ongoing historical and ideological to Manfredo Tafuri’s article “Toward a Critique of project since the seventies. His introduction to the Architectural Ideology” (1969). This piece, revised discourse on architecture’s taste for power occurred and expanded in Architecture and Utopia, Design during his studies at Cornell University, when he and Capitalist Development speaks to the possibility “became friends” with Michel Foucault.1 A concern of an operative criticism that engages the ideology of with the ideological function of architecture rests at capitalism. Tafuri’s stated concerns with techniques the foundation of projects spanning from Exodus, of programming, analysis of defined economic or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (1972) sectors, and ideologies of consumption are shared and Study for the Renovation of a Panopticon Prison by Koolhaas’s work. The culture of congestion, (Netherlands, Arnhem, 1980) to CCTV Headquarters irrationality of the skyscraper, the strategy of (Beijing, 2002-2010). From the outset, Koolhaas the void; Bigness, the Generic City, Junkspace; demonstrates an ethic founded upon skepticism of shopping, Content and the projects for Asia, Africa, totalizing concepts and orthodox habits of mind. and the Middle East: These engagements with the Recently, he has taken the notion of criticality to an architectural and urban consequences of capitalist extreme by resisting critical resistance in a kind of ideology in OMA work have accumulated, and taken meta-criticality.2 THE OPERATIVE CRITICISM OF REM KOOLHAAS 381 The thesis is that the historian’s end point is for the OMA work is scene of a radical questioning of Dutch architect only the beginning. The objective modernism. The notion of “modern architecture” is to establish a framework for assessing the is distorted, pushed to its limits (much like the stakes in Koolhaas’s ”operative criticism” and in Baroque exaggeration of Renaissance convention the process to enable a reading of ongoing OMA and following Dali’s paranoid-critical deformations). work as a model for contemporary critical practice. Additionally, the examination of the contradictions A part of Koolhaas’s style is the ability to resist and tensions within modern architecture begun by any critical approach that does not take his Tafuri may be helpful for understanding the field persona into account as an avenue for approaching of global practice today. It is arguably essential in the work. (Authors easily find proof for the the context of the complex ethical issues raised trivialization of critical concerns in the neutral by technological developments and environmental position ascribed to and voiced by the architect.) concerns now globally accepted, part of architects’ The shift of emphasis away from the work onto the search for activities to reinforce their social act of its making and ultimately onto its maker had significance. political ramifications for Tafuri, who argued that any speculation by practitioners concerning what BEING CRITICAL architecture should be was merely a justification of their own work. Tafuri considered the building At the symposium held at the Museum of Modern itself as a symbolic, aesthetic act that, since the Art in New York in 2000 that revived pragmatist early modern movement, would always fail to philosophy for architecture, philosopher John resolve its contradictions. Koolhaas, instead, seeks Rajchman asked architects to rethink criticality. to enunciate the shifting parameters of what such a The question is “ how to see and to conceive new practice would entail in various contexts today. His forces that exceed and problematize assumptions buildings concretize specific moments in time and that normally function as transcendental. It place, rather than one singular position in a period becomes a question of how, in the sense of a priori when modernism’s unity of thought is replaced by or transcendental conditions...we may yet ‘invent postmodern subjectivity. ourselves’ and our worlds.”3 Rajchman recalls writing on the sublime work in modern art and CRITICAL CAPITAL literature that transgresses the limits of discourse. For Jean-François Lyotard, writing on the pictorial For Tafuri, influenced by Marxism and the political avant-garde of the sixties, the sublime is that which climate of the 1960s and 1970s, architecture since breaches limits in order to probe the assumptions the Enlightenment was an ideological instrument of and conditions of art. Its formula is “to represent social, political, and economic realities contradicting the unrepresentable” of modern experience.4 This the utopian aims of the architect. Spanning sublime was neither nostalgic nor romantic; it from Piranesi to the neo-avant-gardes, history belonged not to the (politically-engaged) hero but demonstrated the futility of architects’ aspirations to the artist. As such, the sublime is a counter- to shape the future or change social conditions: concept to affirmative culture. “It is hardly worth mentioning here that, in a Koolhaas inhabits and fosters discourse on the capitalistic system, there is no break between contradictions, limits, and extremes of architectural production, distribution and consumption. All practice. (His sometimes-bizarre intellectual the intellectual anti-consumer utopias that itineraries owe much to Surrealism.) As builder seek to redress the ethical ‘distortions’ of the and thinker, designer and developer (in Lille), cult technological world by modifying the system figure and avant-garde academic researcher (at of production or the channels of distribution Harvard), he explores the ability of the architect to only reveal the complete inadequacy of their affect change. Koolhaas articulates his perceptions theories in the face of the actual structure of of the profession and his place in it. Clearly, he the capital economic cycle.”5 feels the weight of professional limits. In reacting to them he buys into the model of architecture as That is, architecture can only exist within the critique and reiterates those limits in other forms. “natural” order of capitalist development. Architects’ 382 Re.Building contribution to making space could occur only The resolutions are necessarily failures, be- within political and economic systems. From this cause they remain in an aesthetic realm that diagnosis, Tafuri suggests critical engagement with is disjoined from the social one from which architecture in terms of its production: ”Once the such contradictions spring; and also because social or systemic change would have to be true unity of the production cycle has been identified total rather than piecemeal. So Tafuri’s anal- in the city, the only task the architect can have is yses tend to be a litany of failures, and the 6 to organize that cycle.” The possibility for critique ‘imaginary resolutions’ are often described at is twofold, necessitating first the demystification of a high level of abstraction, giving the picture the systems supporting the discipline: ”Reflection of an interplay of ‘isms’ or disembodied styles, of architecture, as a critique of the concrete which it left to the reader to restore to con- ideology ‘realized’ by architecture itself, can only crete perception.”12 push further, and strive for a specifically concrete dimension in which the systematic destruction of For Jameson, Tafuri’s analysis is abstract. He states the mythologies sustaining its development is only that Koolhaas’s activity concretizes Tafuri’s abstract one of the objectives.“7 (Koolhaas actively engages thought. That is, Koolhaas takes up where Tafuri in the destruction of mythologies by taking on left off.13 OMA work integrates the formal with subjects that are rejected or overlooked, including the social through the expansion of the modernist shopping and urbanism in Africa, and seeking to doctrine of function not through form but through identify their potentials.8) program. Koolhaas discovered the potential of program to shape the social realm early in his Tafuri continues, career. Manhattan’s skyscraper and grid, believed to have evolved from the optimization of land, “From the criticism of ideology it is necessary building process, and cost, were actually sites of to pass on to the analysis of techniques of pro- programmatic invention and fantasy that fostered gramming and of the ways in which these tech- complexity and difference. City of the Captive