www.quondam.com/58/5800b.htm

oma

2000

1 b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace

Junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities not of shared interest or free association, but of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an opportunistic weave of vested interests. Each man, woman and child is individually targeted, tracked, split off from the rest.... Fragments come together at 'security' only, where a grid of video screens disappointingly reassembles individual frames into a banalized, utilitarian cubism that reveals Junkspace's overall coherence to the dispassionate glare of barely trained guards: videoethnography in its brute form. Just as Junkspace is unstable, its actual ownership is forever being passed on in parallel disloyalty. Junkspace happens spontaneously through natural corporate exuberance - the unfettered play of the market - or is generated through the combined actions of temporary 'czars' with long records of three-dimensional philanthropy, bureaucrats (often former leftists) that optimistically sell off vast tracks of waterfront, former hippodromes, military bases and abandoned airfields to developers or real estate moguls that can accommodate any deficit in futuristic balances, or through Default Preservation™ (the maintenance of historical complexes that nobody wants but the Zeitgeist has declared sacrosanct). As its scale mushrooms - rivals and even exceeds that of the Public - its economy becomes more inscrutable. Its financing is a deliberate haze, clouding opaque deals, dubious tax breaks, unusual incentives, exemptions, tenuous legalities, transferred air rights, joined properties, special zoning districts, public-private complicities. Funded by bonds, lottery, subsidy, charity, grant: an erratic flow of yen, euros and dollars (Ą€$) creates financial envelopes that are as fragile as their contents. Because of a structural shortfall, a fundamental deficit, a contingent bankruptcy, each square inch becomes a grasping, needy surface dependent on covert or overt support, discount, compensation and fundraising. For culture, 'engraved donor bricks'; for everything else: cash, rentals, leases, franchises, the underpinning of brands. Junkspace expands with the economy but its footprint cannot contract... when it is no longer needed, it thins. Because of its tenuous viability, Junkspace has to swallow more and more program to survive; soon, we will be able to do anything anywhere. We will have conquered place. At the end of Junkspace, the Universal? Through Junkspace old aura is transfused with new luster to spawn sudden commercial viability: Barcelona amalgamated with the Olympics, Bilbao with Guggenheim, 42nd with Disney. God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing... an insulting evolutionary joke.... A shortage of masters has not stopped a proliferation of masterpieces. 'Masterpiece' has become a definitive sanction, a semantic space that saves the object from criticism, leaves its qualities unproven, its performance untested, its motives unquestioned. Masterpiece is no longer an inexplicable fluke, a roll of the dice, but a consistent typology: its mission to intimidate, most of its exterior surfaces bent, huge percentages of its square footage dysfunctional, its centrifugal components barely held together by the pull of the atrium, dreading the imminent arrival of forensic accounting.... The more indeterminate the city, the more specific its Junkspace; all Junkspace's prototypes are urban - the Roman Forum, the Metropolis; it is only their reverse synergy that makes them suburban, simultaneously swollen and shrunk. Junkspace reduces what is urban to urbanity....

Instead of public life, Public Space™: what remains of the city once the unpredictable has been removed.... Space for 'honoring,' 'sharing,' 'caring,' 'grieving' and 'healing'... civility imposed by an overdose of serif.... In the third Millennium, Junkspace will assume responsibility for pleasure and religion, exposure and intimacy, public life and privacy. Inevitably, the death of God (and the author) has spawned orphaned space; Junkspace is authorless, yet surprisingly authoritarian.... At the moment of its greatest emancipation, humankind is subjected to the most dictatorial scripts: from the pushy oration of the waiter, to the answering gulags on the other end of the telephone, the safety instructions on the airplane, more and more insistent perfumes, mankind is browbeaten to submit to the most harshly engineered plotline.... The chosen theater of megalomania - the dictatorial - is no longer politics, but entertainment. Through Junkspace, entertainment organizes hermetic regimes of ultimate exclusion and concentration: concentration gambling, concentration golf, concentration convention, concentration movie, concentration culture, concentration holiday. Entertainment is like watching a once hot planet cool off; its major inventions are ancient: the moving image, the roller coaster, sound, cartoons, clowns, dinosaurs, news, war. Except celebrities – of which there is a dramatic shortage - we have added nothing, just reconfigured. Corpotainment is a galaxy in contraction, forced to go through the motions by ruthless Copernican laws. The secret of corporate aesthetics was the power of elimination, the celebration of the efficient, the eradication of excess: abstraction as camouflage, the search for a Corporate Sublime. On popular demand, organized beauty has become warm, humanist, inclusivist, arbitrary, poetic and unthreatening: water is pressurized through very small holes, then forced into rigorous hoops; straight palms are bent into grotesque poses, air is burdened with added oxygen - as if only forcing malleable substances into the most drastic contortions maintains control, satisfies the drive to get rid of surprise. Not canned laughter, but canned euphoria.... Color has disappeared to dampen the resulting cacophony, is used only as cue: relax, enjoy, be well, we're united in sedation.... Why can't we tolerate stronger sensations? Dissonance? Awkwardness? Genius? Anarchy?....
Junkspace heals, or at least that is the assumption of many hospitals. We thought the hospital was unique - a universe identified by its smell - but now that we are used to universal conditioning we recognize it was merely a prototype; all Junkspace is defined by its smell. Often heroic in size, planned with the last adrenaline of modernism's grand inspiration, we have made them (too) human; life or death decisions are taken in spaces that are relentlessly friendly, littered with fading bouquets, empty coffee cups and yesterday's papers. You used to face death in appropriate cells, now your nearest are huddled together in atriums. A bold datum line is established on every vertical surface, dividing the infirmary in two: above an endless humanist scroll of 'color,' loved ones, children's sunsets, signage and art... below a utilitarian zone for defacement and disinfectant, anticipated collision, scratch, spill and smudge.... Junkspace is space as vacation; there once was a relationship between leisure and work, a biblical dictate that divided our weeks, organized public life. Now we work harder, marooned in a never-ending casual Friday.... The office is the next frontier of Junkspace. Since you can work at home, the office aspires to the domestic; because you still need a life, it simulates the city. Junkspace features the office as the urban home, a meeting-boudoir: desks become sculptures, the workfloor is lit by intimate downlights. Monumental partitions, kiosks, mini-Starbucks on interior plazas: a Post-it universe: 'team memory,' 'information persistence'; futile hedges against the universal forgetting of the unmemorable, the oxymoron as mission statement. Witness corporate agit-prop: the CEO's suite becomes 'leadership collective,' wired to all the world's other Junkspace, real or imagined. Espace becomes e-space. The 21st century will bring 'intelligent' Junkspace: on a big digital 'dashboard': sales, CNNNYSENASDAQC-SPAN, anything that goes up or down, from good to bad, presented in real time like the automotive theory course that complements driving lessons.... Globalization turns language into Junkspace. We are stuck in a speech-doldrums. The ubiquity of English is Pyrrhic: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. The collective bastardization of English is our most impressive achievement; we have broken its back with ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism and multitasking... we can make it say anything we want, like a speech dummy.... Through the streamlining of language, there are too few plausible words left; our most creative hypotheses will never be formulated, discoveries remain unmade, concepts unlaunched, philosophies muffled.... We inhabit sumptuous Potemkin suburbs of weasel terminologies. Aberrant linguistic ecologies sustain virtual subjects in their claim to legitimacy, help them survive.... Language is no longer used to explore, define, express, or to confront but to fudge, blur, obfuscate, apologize and comfort... it stakes claims, assigns victimhood, preempts debate, admits guilt, fosters consensus. Entire professions impose a descent into the linguistic equivalent of hell: condemned to a word-limbo, inmates wrestle with words in ever-descending spirals of pleading, lying, flattening, bargaining... a Satanic orchestration of the meaningless.... Intended for the interior, Junkspace can easily engulf a whole city. First, it escapes from its containers - semantic orchids that needed hothouse protection emerging with surprising robustness - then the outdoors itself is converted: the street is paved more luxuriously, shelters proliferate carrying increasingly dictatorial messages, traffic is calmed, crime eliminated. Then Junkspace spreads like a forest fire in LA.... The global progress of Junkspace represents a final Manifest Destiny: the World as public space.... All the resurrected emblems and recycled ambers of the formerly public need new pastures. A new vegetal is corralled for its thematic efficiency. The outing of Junkspace has triggered the professionalization of denaturing, a benign eco-fascism that positions a rare surviving Siberian tiger in a forest of slot machines, near Armani, amidst a twisted arboreal Baroque.... Outside, between the casinos, fountains project entire Stalinist buildings of liquid, ejaculated in a split-second, hovering momentarily, then withdrawn with an amnesiac competency.... Air, water, wood: all are enhanced to produce Hyperecology™, a parallel Walden, a new rainforest. Landscape has become Junkspace, foliage as spoilage: trees are tortured, lawns cover human manipulations like thick pelts or even toupees, sprinklers water according to mathematical timetables.... Seemingly at the opposite end of Junkspace, the golf course is in fact its conceptual double; empty, serene, free of commercial debris. The relative evacuation of the golf course is achieved by the further charging of Junkspace. The methods of their design and realization are similar: erasure, tabula rasa, reconfiguration. Junkspace turns into biojunk; ecology into ecospace. Ecology and economy have bonded in Junkspace as ecolomy. The economy has become Faustian; hyperdevelopment depends on artificial underdevelopment; a huge global bureaucracy is in the making to settle, in a colossal yin/yang, the balance between Junkspace and golf, between the scraped and the scaped, trading the right to despoil for the obligation to create steroid rainforests in Costa Rica. Oxygen banks, Fort Knoxes of chlorophyll, eco-reserves as a blank check for further pollution. Junkspace is rewriting the apocalypse; we may die of oxygen poisoning.... In the past, the complexities of Junkspace were compensated by the stark rawness of its adjunct infrastructures: parking garages, filling stations, distribution centers that routinely displayed a monumental purity that was the original aim of modernism. Now, massive injections of lyricism have enabled infrastructure - the one domain previously immune to design, taste or the marketplace - to join the world of Junkspace, and for Junkspace to extend its manifestations under the sky. Railway stations unfold like iron butterflies, airports glisten like cyclopic dewdrops, bridges span often negligible banks like grotesquely enlarged versions of the harp. To each rivulet its own Calatrava. (Sometimes when there is a strong wind, this new generation of instruments shakes as if being played by a giant, or maybe a God, and mankind shudders....) Junkspace can be airborne, bring malaria to Sussex; 300 anopheline mosquitoes arrive each day at GDG and GTW with the theoretical ability to infect 8 to 20 locals in a 3 mile radius, a hazard exacerbated by the average passenger's reluctance, in a misplaced gasp of quasi-autonomy, to be disinfected once he or she has buckled up for the return journey from the dead end of the tourist destination. Airports, provisional accommodation for those going elsewhere, inhabited by assemblies united only by the imminence of their dissolution, have turned into consumption gulags, democratically distributed across the globe to give every citizen an equal chance of admission....

MXP looks as if all the leftovers of East Germany's reconstruction - whatever was needed to undo the deprivations of Communism - have been hurriedly bulldozed together according to a vaguely rectangular blueprint to form a botched sequence of deformed, inadequate spaces, apparently willed into being by the current rulers of Europe, extorting limitless euros from the community's regional funds, now causing endless delays for its duped taxpayers too busy on cell phones to notice. DFW is composed of three elements only, repeated ad infinitum, nothing else: one kind of beam, one kind of brick, one kind of tile, all coated in the same color - is it teale? Rust? Tobacco? Its symmetries scaled beyond any recognition, the endless curve of its terminals forces its users to enact relativity theory in their quest for the gate. Its drop-off is the seemingly harmless beginning of a journey to the heart of unmitigated nothingness, beyond animation by Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen.... Valley cultures were thought to be the most resistant to Junkspace: at GVZ you can still see a universe of rules, order, hierarchy, neatness, coordination, poised moments before its implosion, but at ZHR huge 'timepieces' hover in front of interior waterfalls as an essay in Regionaljunk. Duty-free is Junkspace, Junkspace is duty-free space. Where culture was thinnest, will it be the first to run out? Is emptiness local? Do wide open spaces demand wide open Junkspace? Sunbelt: huge populations where there was nothing; PHX: warpaint on every terminal, dead Indian outlines on every surface - carpet, wallpaper, napkins - like frogs flattened by car tires. Public Art distributed across LAX: the fish that have disappeared from our rivers return as public art in the concourse; only what is dead can be resurrected. Memory itself may have turned into Junkspace; only those murdered will be remembered.... Deprivation can be caused by overdose or shortage; both conditions happen in Junkspace (often at the same time). Minimum is the ultimate ornament, a self-righteous crime, the contemporary Baroque. It does not signify beauty, but guilt. Its demonstrative earnestness drives whole civilizations into the welcoming arms of camp and kitsch. Ostensibly a relief from constant sensorial onslaught, minimum is maximum in drag, a stealth laundering of luxury: the stricter the lines, the more irresistible the seductions. Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimize the shame of consumption, drain embarrassment, to lower the higher. Minimum now exists in a state of parasitic co-dependency with overdose: to have and not to have, craving and owning, finally collapsed in a single signifier.... Museums are sanctimonious Junkspace; no sturdier aura than holiness. To accommodate the converts they have attracted by default, museums massively turn 'bad' space into 'good' space; the more untreated the oak, the larger the profit center. Monasteries inflated to the scale of department stores: expansion is the third millennium's entropy, dilute or die. Dedicated to respect mostly the dead, no cemetery would dare to reshuffle corpses as casually in the name of current expediency; curators plot hangings and unexpected encounters in a donor-plate labyrinth with the finesse of the retailer: lingerie becomes 'Nude, Action, Body,' cosmetics 'History, Memory, Society.' All paintings based on black grids are herded together in a single white room. Large spiders in the humongous conversion offer delirium for the masses.... Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us: we cannot stop noticing: no sequence too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting....

Through our ancient evolutionary equipment, our irrepressible attention span, we helplessly register, provide insight, squeeze meaning, read intention; we cannot stop making sense out of the utterly senseless.... On its triumphal march as content provider, art extends far beyond the museum's ever-increasing boundaries. Outside, in the real world, the 'art planner' spreads Junkspace's fundamental incoherence by assigning defunct mythologies to residual surfaces and plotting three-dimensional works in leftover emptiness. Scouting for authenticity, their touch seals the fate of what was real, taps it for incorporation in Junkspace. Art galleries move en masse to where it is 'edgy,' then convert raw space into white cubes....
The only legitimate discourse is loss; art replenishes Junkspace in direct proportion to its own morbidity. We used to renew what was depleted, now we try to resurrect what is gone.... Outside, the architect's footbridge is rocked to the breaking point by a stampede of enthusiastic pedestrians; the designers' initial audacity now awaits the engineer's application of dampers. Junkspace is a look-no-hands world.... The constant threat of virtuality in Junkspace is no longer exorcized by petrochemical products, plastic, vinyl or rubber; the synthetic cheapens. Junkspace has to exaggerate its claims to the authentic. Junkspace is like a womb that organizes the transition of endless quantities of the Real - stone, trees, goods, daylight, people - into the unreal. Entire mountains are dismembered to provide ever-greater quantities of authenticity, suspended on precarious brackets, polished to a blinding state of flash that renders the intended earnestness instantly elusive. Stone only comes in light yellow, flesh, a violent beige, a soap-like green, the colors of Communist plastics in the 1950s. Forests are felled, their wood is all pale: maybe the origins of Junkspace go back to the Kindergarten....
('Origins' is a mint shampoo that stings the anal region). Color in the real world looks increasingly unreal, drained. Color in virtual space is luminous, therefore irresistible. A surfeit of reality TV has made us into amateur guards monitoring a Junkuniverse.... From the lively breasts of the classical violinist, to the designer stubble of the Big Brother outcast, the contextual pedophilia of the former revolutionary, the routine addictions of the stars, the runny makeup of the evangelist, the robotic body language of the conductor, the dubious benefits of the fundraising marathon, the futile explanations of the politician: the swooping movement of the TV camera suspended from its boom - an eagle without beak or claws, just an optical stomach - swallows images and confessions indiscriminately, like a trash bag, to propel them as cyber-vomit in space. TV studio sets - garishly monumental - are both the culmination and the end of perspectival space as we've known it: angular geometric remnants invading starry infinities; real space edited for smooth transmission in virtual space, crucial hinge in an infernal feedback loop... the vastness of Junkspace extended to the edges of the Big Bang. Because we spend our life indoors - like animals in a zoo - we are obsessed with the weather: 40% of all TV consists of presenters of lesser attractiveness gesturing helplessly in front of windswept formations, through which you recognize, sometimes, your own destination/current position. Conceptually, each monitor, each TV screen is a substitute for a window; real life is inside, cyberspace has become the great outdoors.... Mankind is always going on about architecture. What if space started looking at mankind? Will Junkspace invade the body? Through the vibes of the cell phone? Has it already? Botox injections? Collagen? Silicone implants? Liposuction? Penis enlargements? Does gene therapy announce a total reengineering according to Junkspace? Is each of us a mini-construction site? Mankind the sum of 3 to 5 billion individual upgrades? Is it a repertoire of reconfiguration that facilitates the intromission of a new species into its self-made Junksphere? The cosmetic is the new cosmic...

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