Piranesi, Koolhaas, and the Subversion of the Concept of Place
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Piranesi, Koolhaas, and the Subversion of the Concept of Place Jun-Yang Wang mong contemporary architec- century urban development: tabula cartoons, and newspaper ads, revealing i rural theoreticians, Rem Kool- rasa large-scale planning, and the con• not only the miscellaneous forms of m haas is certainly one of the sequent loss of characrer and identity Koolhaas' present practice as an archi• most intriguing. He persistently chal• of place. He has the ability to discern tect but also the imprint of his earlier lenges the modes of thinking architects the sublime in the vulgar, hope in the career as a journalist and screenwriter. and planners employ in the name of terrifying, reason in the schizophrenic The structure of the book is indicated human scale, historic values, and the condition of late twentieth century by its title: architectural materials are like. He denies that place and identity cities. He searches for hidden laws in organized by size, both in terms of the are necessarily dependent upon the past, an overwhelming urban wilderness in scope of building construction and the whether this necessity is argued in terms an attempt to subvert the foundations scope of the thinking involved - or of the Heideggerian sophistication or of post-war architectural and urban rather the magnitude of the subject popular consensus. He embraces with• discourse, to reverse its trajectory by matter in question. However, as the out reservation the forces that shape raising questions, and to explore the author suggests, the book has no con• twentieth century urban civilization, potential in the perpetual transforma• nective tissue binding one part to an• embracing thereby what many consider tion of the contemporary world. other. Many of the writings are embed• the dark side of global modernization - Koolhaas' latest book, S, M, L, XL, ded between projects as autonomous an aspect of development that grows unites his attempts to challenge assump• episodes rather than supportive mor• darker as the world approaches the next tions and provoke discussion with tar. Taken as a whole, Koolhaas declares, millennium. His strategy is to explore clearly outlined alternative strategies. the book is a free fall in the space of the the remaining possibilities by accepting The book is a conglomeration of es• topographic imagination, and as such and even applauding much of what says, fictions, diaries, travel logs, pro• its outcome can be read and interpreted 1 others tegatd as the failure of twentieth jects, drawings, models, photos, in an infinite variety of ways. JUN-YANG WANG: PIRANESI, KOOLHAAS, 7 Fig. 1: Rem Koolhaas and Ella Zenghelis, Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, entry for Casabella's competition "The City as Meaningful Environment", 1972. At this point one is necessarily Association in London, driven by "in• vided into a series of identical squares, reminded of the affirmative "nomad tuition, unhappiness with the accu• each with its own program, ranging thought" exercised by modern thinkers mulated innocence of the late sixties, from private allotments to communal from Friedrich Nietzsche to Gilles and simple journalistic interest," 4 facilities. Together these squares are to Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Nomad Koolhaas chose "The Berlin Wall as restore the debased ideals of the metro• thought operates in smooth, open- Architecture" as the theme for his final polis "to a sparkling intensity that ended, flowing spaces where one can thesis project. would tempt the inhabitants of the rise up from any point and move to One year later, in 1972, in an entry subconscious London to escape into any other. It is a striving for freedom for the Casabella competition on the the strip in an impulsive exodus - and 6 from codification, whether ideological, theme of "A City with a Significant to become its Voluntary Prisoners." institutional, or professional.2 Nomad Environment" on which he collabo• Depicting a "paradise" which is thought derives from the vagabond rated with Elia Zenghelis, the thread "good" enough to attract the inhabi• imagination of the savage heart on a of the Berlin Wall as Architecture tants of London and thus turn the constant inner and ourer voyage, aspi• reappeared, but this time took the physical structure of the old city into ring to rranscend the limits of experi• form of a fiction about the city of a pile of ruins, Exodus is certainly a ence and thought. London. Entitled "Exodus, or the Utopian vision. As Demetrios Porphy- Koolhaas' inner voyage parallels his Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture," rios observed early in the 1970s, though outer voyage: the book can be read as the tale begins with a direct allusion it is hardly the first urban utopia in a documentary of his tour of rhe world to the Berlin Wall: "Once, a city was history, Koolhaas' and Zenghelis' over the past decades, and of his inquiry divided in two parts. One part became Exodus does not aim to expose the ills inro the condition of twentieth century the Good Half, the other part the Bad of contemporary cities, as its historical architecture and cities under the impact Half. The inhabitants of the Bad Half predecessors did, nor does it propose 7 of politics, economics, and globaliza• began to flock to the good part of the solutions to cure or redeem those ills. tion. Koolhaas firsr became known as divided city, [their flight] rapidly The architectural aim of Exodus is to 5 the author of Delirious New York, how• swelling into an urban exodus." The awaken the sleepwalking metropolis ever, the starting point of his journey story describes an "artificial paradise," of London and to insert in its inarti• and thus OMA's place of origin is, as a strip of land that runs through the culate organism a social condenser of Fritz Neumeyer has suggested, "not center of London, "protected" from "totally desirable alternatives;" and yet New York, as one might assume, but the existing city by two walls along its the tale exposes the dark side of such Berlin."3 A student at the Architectural perimeter. Inside, the zone is subdi• social perfection - that architecture 8 NORDISK ARKITEKTURFORSKNING 1997:2 From the very beginning of his hundred years, is, as Tafuri acknow• architectural career, then, Koolhaas ledges, rather startling. What makes abandoned the intellectual founda• this historical analysis of the avant- tions of "polite" architecture. In its garde possible are the frequent refe• place one finds, in the words of the rences to the works of Piranesi in the late Italian criric and historian Man- writings of Sergei Eisenstein, one of fredo Tafuri, a "negative Utopia"8 the leading film makers of the moder- which eliminates the distance nist avant-garde. Tafuri cites Eisen• between imagination and annihila• steins exceptional study of Piranesi's tion, between totality and nothing• work Le Carceri as justification for ness, between Utopia and anti- establishing the birth of the avant-garde utopia. Only a few people through• with Piranesi. Piranesi was interested out history have approached archi• in theatrical scenery,10 and it is with tecture in such a way. One was the his imaginary theater of the Carceri, eighteenth century Italian architect Tafuri suggests, that the theme of and etcher Giovan Battista Piranesi, imagination, with all its ideological whose plan of Campo Marzio is, significance, enters into the history of significantly, one of only two pre- modem architecture. With Le Carceri rwentieth century architectural the historical avant-garde enters the Fig. 2: Giovan Battista Piranesi, Careen, images in the more than one thou• real world, and Tafuri logically cont• plate VII (first state), etching. sand pages of S, M, L, XL. inues his study with the theme "the stage as 'virtual city'" in which the field of the avant-garde expands from the can function as an instrument for Piranesi and the "Archaeo• cabaret to the metropolis. imprisoning. At the same time as its logical Reconstruction" of "architectural warfare" stems from the the Campo Marzio This kind of visual or theatrical "hedonistic science of designing collec• To my knowledge, Tafuri was the first affiliation between Piranesi and mo• tive facilities that fully accommodate to explore Piranesi's work in relation dern architecture leads finally to a individual desires," the tale presents to the modern architecture of the twen• "historicity of the avant-garde." How• scenarios as from a horror srory, from tieth century rather than the Roman• ever, Tafuri's introduction to the Car• the purgatory-like reception area to ticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth ceri is particularly interesting for his the totalitarian supervision of the allot• centuries. He did so because of Pira• assertion that "what must be made clear ments. Thus, unlike most urban nesi's "predilection for melodrama and from the start is that all this breaking Utopian thinking, the idealized metro• elemental fear, coupled wirh a taste up, distorting, multiplying, and politan prorotype, the "Good Half" for 'picturesque' ruins and rustic, disarranging, apart from the emotional of London, promises nothing but 9 bucolic landscape." In The Sphere reactions it can elicit, is nothing more relentless pictures from a doomed and the Labyrinth, a study of the avant- than a systematic criticism of the concept civilization, an apocalipsis cum figuris. garde and archirecture, Tafuri starts of place, carried out by using the instru• Instead of a utopia conceived on the 11 with a chapter entitled "'The Wicked ments of visual communication." traditional basis of "goodness," Exodus Architect:' G. B. Piranesi, Heterotopia, At first there seem to be no further is wrought with "dirty realism," revea• and the Voyage." To begin a detailed explorations of this "systematic ling in irs psychological confrontation analysis of the relationship between criticism" of the concept of place in with the Berlin Wall the delirium, the avant-garde and architecture with Tafuri's study - in fact, nowhere in miseries and duplicity of the twentieth Piranesi, who preceded the twentieth the book did he mention this issue century metropolis.