This is the case of Koolhaas’s approach to the city that incubated his first projects of the late 1960s and was eventually emblematized in his psychoanalytical, retrospective tale about New York. In this respect, the “imagination” represents not just a yearning for change, but also a controversial, powerful device with which to reveal something already embodied in the present situation.įirst page of the manuscript of Rem Koolhaas’s The Surface (1969) – (Click to enlarge) 6 Despite the reasonable aspirations of emancipation – or perhaps thanks to this – the zeitgeist of the late 1960s appears to have been that of a process whereby the bourgeoisie reaffirmed its power. Here the struggle was, in fact, mainly a generational conflict within the same class whereby the expectations were the result of the (unconscious) ambition of the young bourgeois of then taking power, simply following their fathers’ footsteps albeit in a much more radical way. The city that Koolhaas assumes to be the opposite, in fact, is a city inhabited by a society completely bourgeoisized, as Roland Barthes had already stated years before. For Koolhaas, dealing with architecture signifies giving a voice to this dimension of the city, one that is anything but utopian. Thus, in those peculiar historical circumstances, the Parisian streets revealed an unprecedented, and in some ways surreal, dimension of the city that was clearly readable in one of the most famous slogans painted on the walls of Paris: sous les pavés la plage. Beyond a question of ideology, it was in Paris that Koolhaas was seduced by the power of urban space in its extreme essentiality and artificiality: the street – the space of life where the forces that literally create the city unfold. 5Īmong the various stories narrating Koolhaas’s interest in architecture, in fact, one places him in Paris precisely during the famous events of May 1968, though as a quasi-tourist. 3 While he makes no secret of his suspicion about the extemporaneous culture of wishful thinking of the late 1960s – the very years of his education 4 – Koolhaas’s appearence in the realm of architecture seems to evoke the period’s famous motto: l’imagination au pouvoir. For Koolhaas, theory and narrative are two sides of the same coin. It is well know that Rem Koolhaas, one of the key figures in any discussion of modernity in architecture, has consistently cultivated a discursive, even literary approach to architecture. “Why do we have a mind if not to get our way?” “Has it not been accepted – ever since Kant – that there is an unbridgeable gulf between reality in itself and reality as it appears to us? That our possibilities of knowing have more to do with our own apparatus than with the nature of reality?” Elia Zenghelis 1 Originally appeared in San Rocco Magazine #8 – Winter 2013 under the title: “Modernity and myth: Rem Koolhaas in New York” Rem Koolhaas and the Bourgeois Myth of New York The article was originally published on San Rocco magazine #8, but the author wished to share it online on our website for the sake of debate. What is argued is that Koolhaas, pointing out that the City is a preexisting “condition before being a place ”, – the locus for endogenous forces to unfold -, perpetuates the “rhetoric of the bourgeoisie myth ”, the idea that “the norms of the bourgeoisie are experienced as undeniable or obvious laws of a natural order ” as stated by R.Barthes. Later on, Mastrigli follows Koolhaas through his years at the Architectural Association school in London and then through his intense activity as a collector of illustrated postcards in 1970’s NYC, while writing “Delirious New York”. The dense paper presents a pretty uncommon image of the architect and theorist, identifying the genesis of his thinking in his roamings across 1968 Parisian streets when they resonated utopian slogans such as “ Sous les pavés la plage!”. Now that the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale finally came to an end, we think it is the right time to publish this interesting short essay by Italian professor of architectural theory and writer Gabriele Mastrigli on the origins of Rem Koolhaas’ reading of the City, (which is in any way indissociable from his architectural production).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |