Proceedings Book 2.Indb

564 SEEKING THE CITY OMA and the Power of Place FRANCES HSU Georgia Institute of Technology INTRODUCTION place through the media industry. In this aspect This paper focuses on the centerpieces of Rem Koolhaas is prescient. Delirious New York presents Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, SMLXL, and Proj- Manhattan as a fi ction, a model of reality con- ect on the City, i.e., the Manhattan skyscraper, structed from an amalgam of historical fragments Lille, and CCTV, as constellations of the collective. set in new combinations. SMLXL comments on the Koolhaas’s work, spanning from the delirium of realization that media today increasingly blurs the Manhattan’s commodifi ed version of modern ar- boundaries of fact and fi ction: “We live in a world chitecture to later work in SMLXL, Project on the ruled by fi ctions of every kind—mass-merchandis- City and Content, shifts between being imageand ing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of program-driven, between text and mass media. advertising, the instant translation of science and Within this tension, projects such as the librar- technology into popular imagery, the increasing ies (Jussieux, TGB, Seattle), ZKM and Universal blurring and intermingling of identities within the Studios. The Dutch Embassy and European Union realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any Headquarters are further case studies in the con- free or original imaginative response to experi- fl uence of power and place. ence by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. The fi ction is already there. The Walter Benjamin described technology as a cata- writer’s task is to invent the reality.”1 Accordingly, lyst, actively transforming perception and partici- the subject of Shopping emerges from Passagen- pation in a consumerist urban realm comprised Werk, the 19thcentury Parisan galerie anticipat- of panorama and arcades.Today, public space ing the mall and consumer culture. Project on the as such is weakened by technological develop- City depicts architecture is the spatial register of ments at the same time that buildings are more market systems. Content demonstrates how ar- and more becoming media infrastructures. Within chitecture’s use of media to promote ideologies this confl uence of media and building, what has directed at manufactured market desires is com- emergedsince Benjamin’s attempt to positively plicit in both the production and refl ection of con- use mass culture and technology in the era of lib- temporary culture. eral capitalism, in our own time of late, or disorga- nized capitalism and fl exible accumulation, is the Koolhaas portrays architecture as caught in the reconfi guration of market and place through the web of globalization and swept by market forces. media industry. Not only through buildings that In his seemingly unqualifi ed embrace of consumer use media materials and technologies but also by conditions he sublimates his idealist utopian de- the cultural power of the media corporation, pri- sires and acts out Benjamin’s prediction for capi- vate or public, that is reconfi guring the city both talist society-- the culture’s need to compensate locally and globally. for the lost aura of art and artist with the ‘phony spell’ of the commodity and star. His work is part Emerging since Benjamin’s attempt to positively of the dream world of urban space and images use mass culture and technology in the era of lib- that colonize the everyday. eral capitalism is the reconfi guration of market and OMA AND THE POWER OF PLACE 565 URBAN SPACE AND ALLEGORY tan was City of the Captive Globe, containing all of the models and precedents important for Kool- Delirious New York portrays Manhattan as the haas--Leonidov, Ungers, Corbusier, El Lissitsky, scene of a ‘future’ rife with memories, capital of the Leonidov, Malevich, Dali, Superstudio. This city 20th-century, fulfi lling Benjamin’s perception of a of signifying objects, of forms with meanings and present time composed of ‘moments of revelation’ associations to be recombined and transformed, that transmuted the past.2 Koolhaas reread the would be populated by Benjamin’s fi gures of mo- pragmatic technical and typological developments dernity: the fl aneur, the poet, the rag picker, the of the skyscraper and the grid as avant-garde ve- pimp, the criminal and the litterateur found in the hicles for social and historical change. By adapting arcades and the poetry of Baudelaire. Today’s fi g- conceptual, textual and pictorial techniques from ures are perhaps the stockbroker, the drug dealer, Salvador Dali’s paranoid-critical method (pcm) he the offi ce worker. The question is, can architec- was able to place his work with the vernacular ture do more than invert contemporary culture’s architecture of Manhattan in the framework of the ironic reversals? Benjamin judged Surrealism was critical avant-garde. Dali’s method systematized inadequate for the purpose of social transforma- the irrational logic of desire with the production tion4 and Koolhaas declares that New York is “de- of images that registered states of consciousness. lirious no more.”5 It enabled Koolhaas to ‘discover’ the other side of the modern movement in the opposing tenden- THE PUBLIC SPACE OF INDIFFERENCE cies of Dali and Le Corbusier (rational/irrational, canonical/popular). The conjunction between the “The Cosmopolis of the Future: The world in later times, incessantly crowding the possibilities of Surrealist’s revolutionary project and the move- aerial and inter-terrestrial construction, when the ment identifi ed with the architect who declared wonders of 1908 will be far out-done, and the 1000 “architecture or revolution” had already been foot structure realized; now nearly a million people voiced by Benjamin: “To win the energies of in- do business here each day, by 1930 it is estimated the number will be doubled, necessitating tiers of toxication for the revolution--this is the project sidewalks, with elevated lines and new creations to about which Surrealism circles in all its books and supplement subway and surface cars, with bridges enterprises... But are they successful in welding between the structural heights.” -- Delirious New this experience to the other revolutionary experi- York ence we have to acknowledge because it has been “Lille will be at the center of a virtual, theoretical ours, the constructive, dictatorial side of revolu- community of 60 million people...” --SMLXL tion? In short, have they bound revolt to revolu- 13 years ago, in 1994, the exhibition held at MoMA tion? How are we to imagine an existence oriented entitled “Rem Koolhaas and the Place of Public Ar- solely toward Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, in rooms chitecture” showed OMA work of the early nine- by Le Corbusier and Oud?”3 ties. The exhibit highlighted the master plan for Euralille, the hub for Europe’s high-speed trains at Delirious New York is the city “of two dimensional that time nearing completion. discipline and three-dimensional anarchy,” including Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth’s building, an “auto- Euralille spoke to the organization of social space monument to the anti-monumental”; the Empire and perception/representation. The mini-city State Building, “ a building with no other program around the TGV station, including buildings by than to make a fi nancial abstraction concrete;” Christian de Portzamparc, Jean Nouvel and Kool- Raymond Hood’s Rockefeller Center and Wallace haas, has a complexity connected not so much Harrison’s Trylon and Perisphere, icons of Man- with typology and narrative (like the Manhattan hattanism. Koolhaas found “a practical Luna Park” skyscraper) but with speed. With people moving in the technological infrastructure of the sky- through convention halls and shopping areas and scraper and places like Coney Island, Rockefeller from one mode of transport to another, speed su- Center and Radio City. Dali asks, “What Piranesi percedes space. Koolhaas’s construction at the invented the ornamental of your Roxy Theater? scale of infrastructure sits adjacent to Lille’s old And what Gustave Moreau, apoplectic with Pro- city; it could be located anywhere (or nowhere). metheus lighted the venomous colors that fl utter This is the nonspace of Marc Auge, of Koolhaas’s at the summit of the Chrysler Building?” Manhat- generic city. If postmodern architecture was the 566 SEEKING THE CITY space of difference (taking on the notion in cultur- Albert Speer’s Nazi Germany and Communism, in al theory that was theorized as the “thirdspace” of “Palace of the Soviets,” a fi ctional account of the Edward Soja via Henri Lefebvre, the third meaning competition held in the thirties. of Roland Barthes’ signifi er without a signifi ed and the différance of Derrida’s ever-shifting deferral of MEDIA, THE MARKET AND POWER IN THE meaning), then Lille is the space of indifference. AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Yet in this indifferent non-place of globalization, “Today’s architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideolo- Koolhaas still attempts to embed identity. Lille gy. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has contains a multiplicity of paranoid-critical corre- to package itself and no longer has signifi cance as spondences linking it to both Manhattanism and anything but a landmark.” --Koolhaas, interview Modernism. These references are tools that gave meaning to the design of the project that was no- Koolhaas seems to be saying that the reality to- table for Koolhaas’s role and participation in the day is that public space is not negotiable. In this governmental planning phase. The sketch of Lille’s scenario, how does OMA create the space for a Piranesean space echoes the postcard image of critical architecture? “The Cosmopolis of the Future.” Compare studies and images of Lille with photographs of Wal- It has been proposed that digital and global space lace Harrison’s Albany Mall, a skyline of skyscrap- is life on the screen as well as life in the city.

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