Rem Koolhaas' Generic City

- and a modernist dilemma of 'urbanisation' vs. 'urbanity' in avantgarde architecture

Urbanism doesn't exist - it is only an ideology.....

Rem Koolhaas' is one of the more influential architects today. He is one of the leading European architects of the 1990s, currying out large city projects like the new Eurolink station district in Lille, city development in Asia, redesigning of the Universal Studios in Los Angeles, and the extension of the centre of the new town Almere in his native country, The Netherlands. He is also an estimated lecturer at architectural schools around the world.

To me Koolhaas is undermining the interest for 'urbanity' in the architectural world in a tricky way, through his own contribution to a further ideological mess about 'the urban'.

When Rem Koolhaas in the 1990s in a witty way defies urbanism as ideology, he echoes Castells two decades earlier, though without Castells' clear ambition of scientific precision:

"Urbanism doesn't exist. It is only an ideology in Marx's sense of the word. Architecture really exists, like Coca-Cola: Though coated with ideology, it is a real production, falsely satisfying a falsified need. Urbanism is comparable to the advertising propagated around Coca-Cola - pure spectacular ideology. Modern capitalism which organised the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than that of our own alienation. Its urbanistic dream is its masterpiece." (Koolhaas and Mau: S,M,L,XL, 1995)

Referring instead, not to urbanism but to architecture - which more directly can be seen, touched and 'consumed' - doesn't take you far, but Koolhas doesn't stop here. In texts like 'The contemporary city' (1988), 'What ever happened to urbanism' (1994) and 'The generic city' (1994) he put forward views on the late 20th c. city, that is simultaneously a diffusion of what meaning there might be left in the words 'the city' (in definite form, as he says), a praise of the present condition, and a dream of a more consequent 'urbanism' - the Koolhaas' way.

Generic city 

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Links:

OMA.nl

Krier and Kohl
Leon Krier (publications)