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,” includ- ing 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 stud- ies 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. That ers on a plinth situated like Lille at the nexus of it is tactile space, an informational tectonic. Art- highway interchanges. Congrexpo (renamed the ists use billboards, facades, lcd and video screens. Palais) like Harrison’s Performing Arts Center is As building materials, digital light technology, il- called “The Egg.” SMLXL privileges none of these luminated glass and transparent plastics include allusions over the others and Koolhaas gives no refl ection and camoufl age strategies that simulate reading of the project. a seamless integration between screen and envi- ronment, becoming wall, window. facade. Writers Lille takes center stage in SMLXL as the manifes- such as Paul Virilio differentiate between screen tation of Bigness. Bigness is the connection be- technologies and earlier media that have a sepa- tween modernism’s one-sizefi ts-all universalism rate physical container, e.g., television, radio and and SMLXL. Koolhaas describes his notion as a telephone, to interrogate the meaning lost or al- concept of place that rectifi es the disappearance tered as the frame disappears. of community values in the contemporary city: Bigness “allowed us to explore new defi nitions of The work of OMA has optimistically attempted collectivity after the demise of the public realm- to reconcile different, everexpanding publics -public man--eroded by the onslaught of the through media and its representation. testifying media, pressures of the virtual, multiple privati- to the power of knowledge and information in the zations, the end of the street, the plaza, etc.”6 hands of enlightened institutions. This is its uto- Bigness was in fact already inscribed into Le Cor- pian dimension. Projects that use media to infl u- busier’s modernism: in the immense objects at ence and shape public space at the same time Chandigarh and the Ville Contemporaine, City for they testify to the power of institutions include Three Million Inhabitants; in the Marseilles block, ZKM, Wyly Theater in Dallas and Parc de la Villette vast for its time: more than 330 apartments, ho- in Paris. Take, for example, the two Paris library tel, shopping streets, community services and a competitions, exercises in modeling urban space. recreational landscape on the roof. In his book In the national library, the many rooms, functions Urbanisme, Le Corbusier strove to come to terms and interior spaces are suspended in one huge, with “la phénomène gigantesque de la grand ville semi-transparent, rectangular box full of books, and la sublimité de leurs dimensions” through between which public spaces fl oat like organs of statistics. Koolhaas, in his essay “Bigness or the the human body. “In this block,” Koolhaas notes, Problem of Large,” journalizes his concept rather “the major public spaces are defi ned as absences than formalizing it. He acknowledges the authori- of building, voids carved out of the information tarian as well as collective overtones of scale, the solid. Floating in memory, they are like multiple association of Bigness with authoritarian regimes, embryos, each with its own technological placen- OMA AND THE POWER OF PLACE 567

ta.” The compositional idea of a series of fi elds, exercised with enough strength to channel the intersecting patterns and movements, refers to possibilities for urban experience, and to choose the simultaneity of a neural network. The building which urban traditions to preserve.”9 In this situ- is like a large city of books through and between ation, OMA’s ambition was to work with the orga- which to saunter. The library at the University nization of the program to turn the building and of Paris (Jussieu) was conceived as a folded ur- the broadcasting company into a media machine ban void, rooted in the ground, connected to the that is not structured hierarchically but rather sets Metro. Areas of the library were conceptualised up direct interaction between public and media. as different types of landscape (vineyard, desert, This is manifest in the two circulation loops, one forest, etc.). The building developed as an urban for production, which is private, and another for street, the ramped fl oor envisioned as a new kind emission (consumption), which is public. The loop of public realm, a social magic carpet on which the is literal, like an electrical circuit; symbolic and visitor “becomes a Baudelariean fl âneur inspect- conceptual, because there is no hierarchy; and ing and being seduced by a world of books and structural, based on a system diagonal bracing. information and the urban scenario.”7 The loop is the genetics and the genesis of the building concept, like a DNA helix. The libraries are early “big” buildings. Bigness was a concept that rectifi ed the disappearance of com- Structurally, CCTV was conceived as a continu- munity values in the contemporary city, that “al- ous tube, with concrete fl oor plates, columns and lowed [us] to explore new defi nitions of collectivity edge beams held by a diagrid exoskeleton, a sys- after the demise of the public realm--public man- tem of patterned diagonal bracing is the principal -eroded by the onslaught of the media, pressures supporting element that resists gravity and lateral of the virtual, multiple privatizations, the end of forces. The CCTV surface is a register expressing the street, the plaza, etc.”8 He later acknowledged the uneven forces at work in the form. In areas the authoritarian as well as collective overtones of of greatest stress, the density of the triangulated scale, the association of Bigness with authoritar- members was increased and/or members were ian regimes in “Palace of the Soviets,” a fi ctional deformed to respond more precisely to the lateral account of the competition held in the 1930s. The and dead loads. The cantilever overhang requires Chinese State Television network (CCTV) tower additional support in the form of a two-story-deep in Beijing is the epitome of a modernist political4 truss at the lower level of the overhang, which project, confl ating media, the market and power transfers its load to the perimeter tube and to the in one statement embodying the values and as- foundation level. The building’s form has prec- pirations of the government. (Two other recent edents such as Peter Eisenman’s Max Reinhardt projects, the Dutch Embassy (also in Berlin) and Haus in Berlin and Otto Spreckelson’s Grande the European Union Headquarters in Brussels are Arche in Paris-La Defense. further case studies for Koolhaas’s understanding of power.) The CCTV skin made of glass and steel attached to the surface of the diagonal bracing is both trans- CCTV parent and opaque, metaphorically and literally. The surface is literally a glass skin like Semper’s CCTV may be the part of the most Chinese of en- tablecloth draped over the structure, unlike the deavors, the revisioning of the urban landscape. Seattle Library, whose skin stabilizes the building China has historically been driven by absolute structurally. That the building’s skin will be em- forms of power, its urban and architectural de- bedded with images representing a kind of inter- velopment occurring in three historical patterns: national sign language of the media age, a hand- large-scale destruction and replacement of urban shake, a computer, and other iconic images and fabrics to inaugurate changes of emperors or dy- text, only further reinforces the surface effect of nasties; massive relocations of populations; and the skin. A contrast to the European enlightened highly planned urban confi gurations enabled by model can be seen in the ideologically dissimilar centralized and unchallenged forms of authority. project for Denmark National Public Broadcast- “Power today may not exist in the singular form of ing by Atelier Jean Nouvel. Nouvel uses screen an Emperor or a Chairman, but it is managed and technology in the facade to embody the “new 568 SEEKING THE CITY

multimedia house” akin to OMA’s project for the ZKM. He follows the practice, not uncommon to- day, of using the facade to “spell out the nature of a building that is fundamentally a mere con- tainer, but superfi cially registers an indices of its contents.”10

In his seemingly unqualifi ed embrace of consumer conditions, Koolhaas’s idealist, utopian desires are further sublimated. Despite an opaque design and building process with regard to the government and the local architecture fi rm ECADI (East China Architecture & Design Institute Shanghai), with the many questions being posed by the Chinese and architecture community and the publication of Volume, co-founded in 2005 by Koolhaas, Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman, new Director of the Neth- erlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam as a “global idea platform...dedicated to experimenta- tion and the production of new forms of architec- tural discourse,” the building has itself become an event. The building that is a locus of media pro- duction is itself a media construct.

ENDNOTES

1. Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau and OMA, SMLXL, p. 492. 2. I am referring to Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (1969). America must have seemed surreal to Koolhaas, who had dreamt of New York as a child and observed it from afar. Arriving in Manhattan at the age of 29, he was like a Baudelariean fl aneur seduced by the urban scenario. It was as if he experienced the “interpretive delirium [which] begins only when man, ill-prepared, 5 is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols.” (Breton) 3. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the Intellegentsia” (1929), in Refl ections (New York: Shocken Books, 1978), p. 189. 4. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). 5. Wired, Issue 11.06, June 2003. 6. Rem Koolhaas, “Thinking Big,” Artforum 1994, p. 51. 7. From an unpublished competition booklet made for the offi ce 8. Rem Koolhaas, SMLXL, “Bigness, or the Problem of Large.” 9. Sze Tsung Leong, History Images. 10. Kurt W. Forster, “Surface Tension in Modern Archi- tecture,” 2005.