Rem Koolhaas - S, M, L, XL

their lives art and this lecture will definitely not be a lecture in a way it's very cool that at the moment that I published a book over 1400 pages asked to give a presentation because obviously the book is the presentation and in a two sense I feel that everything I have to say in now it's completely redundant and in the way everything I have to say is in the book so all I can say it's going to may be that every every project is both defined in terms of positive ambitions but also in terms of its series of issues and a series of obeisance to avoid in our work and also in this book the catalog of things to avoid has been at least as important as the canonical things to to include we wanted and maybe it's the most complex we wanted to do a book about architecture which both undermined and reinforced architecture a book which spoke openly about the megalomania of architecture but at the same which did so at a monument at a modest scale and so maybe in a certain way the main definition of the book is it's a kind of may be modesty at a megalomaniac scale but I think that the most interesting presentation I can give at this point is really a presentation a short presentation about the book and in that way I can also here and there indicate what the intentions were although in that sense in a way I feel also that I'm spoiling your fun because I will make certain things explicit that are deeply buried in the depth of the book so I'm exposing connections now that I would have what I have preferred to to remain hidden for you to discover or ignore and so the book is a series of fragments and it has the kind of attention over novel people are indicating that they've waited for it a long time I think that I've written it very quickly I started in 1992 and as for those of you who know delirious New York I named myself there a ghost writer the ghost writer who describes New York theory the wall of a ghost writer is still well I prefer but one of the issues that first of all my age and second of all the huge amount of work that we had undeniably produced imposed on me was the issue of publishing that kind of work at that point I would still have preferred to be the ghost writer and partly the book is still a ghost written book but at the same time I felt it was also inevitable to make some personal disclosures and one of the personal disclosures is that my father was a writer and that therefore I'm probably biologically programmed to also be interested in a writer and he will died one week before I started the book and maybe there's a connection between his death and the sudden unleashing of words and we wanted the book that changed character every 10 pages or sometimes even every page in other words a book that had not a single appearance a book that was the changing nature character identity and aesthetics at every possible moment I thought that was also very important to think to make a book that sort and provoked other people about thinking about architecture and about the conditions under which architecture is produced today therefore the book contains a series of informations about the economy of our office you see to the left the beginning of the office is somewhere in 81 and then you see an upward line and the moment that we started the book is actually when the mind line started to decline acutely and in that sense you could say that writing the book was also a critique of the office and also probably an act of aggression against the office and to some extent Kamikaze effort around the office the conditions under which architecture has to be produced today are strictly speaking insane these graphs give the corresponding frequency of travels of nights spent in hotels of the accumulated effort and so therefore there is a very blatant paradox that the more an architect is popular the less time he has to spend on architecture and I think we are all living with the consequences of that paradox and it is not a beautiful sight in most cases it is very difficult the more the work of not architects or offices disseminated in different areas I should say by the way that 70% of sense of our work is now not in the country where we have our officer that is in itself a logistical nightmare here you see for a number of different countries the up and down fluctuations of income so therefore running an office now is to try to even out a series of completely irrational mountain ranges and therefore is an almost impossible task I thought it was important to make those revelations because as I mentioned the book is in some extent a critique of the office it was written at a time of incredible dress financial difficulty the difficulties are simply given here I can say that our office almost died this summer but at the same time there is an interesting plot or an interesting twist to the scenario we started negotiations with an important major engineering firm in the Netherlands and we are now autonomous but completely viable and work in association with an enormous office 700 people people who build roads bridges and tunnels and who expect through the association to now cover the entire field from architecture to infrastructure we'll talk more about it later this is our new office it is in one of those completely neutral buildings that used to make some of the greatness of the Netherlands we have a real Lobby and a real secretary a reception this is our view our view to word The Hague this is our context and this is a view over the city of Rotterdam that is there between the towers you see the new bridge these are the the Menken become a complete inventory of all the successes and failures of the past 30 years and we have collaborators who are paid the work of the offices intensely is a collaboration to the column you see all the projects that our office did in the lower column you see all the names that were involved in the offices reducing all the connections so these are the credits and this allows to disentangle who worked on what the book itself is in a very important way collaboration between Bruce ma Canadian designer and designer is activities number and also a term that he finds really insulting he has conceived the magazine zone which you probably know and we have worked really from the very beginning on it in very intense for collaboration where he had an editorial role and where I was also involved in the design and it is edited by Jennifer Ziegler and it shows in terms of images the work of the photographer whose photograph most of her work on some element I will explain how the book works because it is in a way a machine sometimes the book is a book as it is here at all times there is a on the Left column of citations in alphabetical order what is interesting is that the sources of the citations are not given until the end so as you're reading you never know whether you are reading something important or unimportant whether it's Philip Johnson or a hand raiser and this is a this is one of the ways in which we are trying to destabilize the whole issue of expectation importance and importance because the thing that unfortunately there is an enormous confusion but architecture in those terms in the corner of contentions we said sometimes quote works of art so they are also in the left corner and sometimes the words fall away and we just have an insert that is a work of art that is not necessarily important in a particular project but that is important in terms of our own sources and our own inspirations otherwise the book consists of a series of very different writings and different styles of writing this is a for instance a little story about the relationship between my mother and miss van der Rohe it's a very indirect relationship in the sense that she once walked over the grass where Miss Monroe had once constructed one of his projects in the Netherlands one to one in canvas and where the client when she saw the building decided not to build it and basically I have a theory about this campus model that there is a person and I think it must be Miss meet you see that the building actually is a building of a very heavy handed stone classical building by theories that Mies was very young 24 at the time entered the campus building and that the experience of being in this canvas temple which in every sense was the contrary of what the building presumed to be I must have completely changed his architecture so therefore it was not the house that Miss built with the house that built me there is also in the book a poem about Japan learning Japanese which describes in verse the experience my first experience of working in Asia sometimes a particularly dramatic episode is given suppressed in terms of its emotion and simply record it in the form of cone ology sometimes there are s this one is called typical plan which good is about the fundamental and no ability of the city today sometimes there is a cartoon which again described particularly garish episode in the history of our offices in this case being humiliated by developers and the Sadducees frankly our revenge there are more theoretical moments that are probably dubious and open to criticism where again the sometimes the design or the graphic design simulates and sometimes it contradicts the content as you will notice and sometimes the book becomes a book within the book as in this case reconstruction and it's hundred pages I think on the history of the last 30 years of Singapore sometimes the book is very brutal and just describes in incredible brazen manner brutal projects that dealing with a kind of junk like conditions of today in certain cases sometimes the book is very delicate as in this case rather it is a description of an actual dream which equals a nightmare about our first involvement in architecture the book is designed in such a way that plants are also wet as text and that there is an absolute equivalence between word and drawings and so in this case a parking can also be a poem or a text the services in the building have the same intricacy maybe as words or the context is now not only something physical but also something that represents in incredible abstraction the forces that we live under the diagram is something in between a text and a project and therefore scenes again an equal status the building sometimes in diagram nevertheless aesthetic qualities and sometimes cartoons as in this case a Japanese cartoon indicate in a very clairvoyant way almost the condition of architecture today where you see inert containers on the two sides that open up to almost filled of scraped City can reduce the city of indeterminacy and I think that that in many ways is a very acute description of the city we live in and sometimes the project itself becomes almost a music musical partition where again it is not clear whether it's words or project sometimes the landscape has to be wet almost also as a text and the manipulations of landscape have a similar quality sometimes the skyline is a text and sometimes the context is fixed one of the elements that the book wants to do is to deal with the architectural object in a different way it is an almost repulsive focusing on things on objects or details in architecture some of the photography is really more about the experience such as in this case housing parents were my dream was to publish it in a way that the house was never shown but only the effect of the house on the context and also the views from the house would define its essential quality the book has also other architects sometimes architects I admire and still are related to a genre well in Leo Posen Park and Leo shin O'Hara and Leo it was important to break through the incredible pristine cleanest and singularity of architectural monograph I test my some of my history to the extent I thought it was relevant maybe the most development of all was the first major project I did this in this school study of the Berlin Wall this was in 69 there was then still obligation to do a summer survey where students would go to nice Tuscany Villa measure it and where I went to in a way still motivated by my formal journalistic instincts but also my emerging architectural instincts to document the Berlin Wall and we're in two cents I think for the first time my my tense relationship with architecture became clear to myself a kind of erosion of the heaviness of architecture you can the upper image you see the Berlin wall as goes in its initial phases just as a street wall cemented close then you see the street was taken down and the vogue actually becomes a zone it is dematerialized and what fascinated me in this case is the aesthetic beauty of the lower image and also how the lower image in its absence of mass still had an incredible architectural impact and emanation and so from that moment the absence of mass became an almost obsessive theme in our work then in 69 70 72 which was the Tamils in the school it was still encouraged to be politically completely incorrect and that was a Liberty many people were used I was one of them so there was this study which was basically inspired on a Berlin wall which showed the kind of Berlin walls side the like condition running through the middle of a lot of where people had to beg for admission so that they would then be involved in the rituals of another city and where they this is wishful thinking perhaps because I have never encountered it the voluntary prisoners of the architecture sang and out of gratitude to the architecture that forever and closed them I think that there was the fantasy of the architect of a grateful public some of the history of our own work on New York and then the book makes a number of revelations again about the difficulty or if not impossible 'ti and some occasional - a reality of architecture in the house in Paris there was one major issue that maybe took the longest of all this is the entrance from the street and visit the entrance of the house and how to design the path from one to the other random arbitrary or scientific and it was really something that took at least four years to finally establish the book has a number of hidden connections in the poem about Japan there is a description of Japanese forms of censorship the Japanese have beautiful and ingenious ways of censoring sexual activity either of which may be the most spectacular is one to suggest it by through its absence this is a Japanese image which then became the main inspiration of a project we did the photo will be attacked the Falls which is also based on the notion that the most important part of a building can be those parts where the building actually doesn't exist and is absent and the project the book is a way of showing a number of projects that we consider important in new light maybe the first one that I would still consider extremely alive is the project we did for in 83 for level 8 which was our first investigation of the importance of landscape and the potential of landscape to carry duties that architecture no longer can carry out and I still think that this issue of the shift from urbanism and architecture to landscape will be one which is the most threatening to architects and which will have the most drastic effect on the activity of the architect in the coming decade bit more maybe about it later so it was an early intuition of project widget in water lamb where maybe we was our first essay into sloping surfaces the large library the project jitka M in Kosova which was cancelled on the day that it was supposed to be the groundbreaking ceremony which we consider the crime and the project for is you see which may be resurrected in the imminent future because the French government is finally in difficulty it also talks about some of the moments of euphoria and one of the clear moment of euphoria was the building of the congressional building which in itself is an almost biblical effort in terms of manpower and labor in terms of scale and in terms of soil is tilted in terms of the simultaneous presence of five or six thousand people in one of the auditoriums the book so this is also talks in a very in an explicit way about the way in which architecture is more and more influenced by the direct collaboration with engineers in this case especially sense of moment of over app and the way the some projects really represent a merger of architecture and engineering and our intuition that from engineering may emerge a way of renewing certain aspects of architecture and here you see that kind of the book becomes a kind of shared book with left the notes of vomit and white smile on the white latex taking over by involvement and finally turning into a series of quick calculations of some of the more complicated and arcane elements of the the book is explicit about our discovery and fascination with infrastructure as something that can replace is more and more attention of ordering of urbanism the pretension of organizing of urbanism we see infrastructure more and more as an element and a device and a machine machinery that creates potential which is then exploited in more or less erratic ways and we see the strange leaps from innocent and childish diagrams to appalling interventions the again the the connection between an almost initial silliness of every architectural idea and to which then to the alchemy of the process of building which is really kind of wrestling with mud turns into actual urban form we try to have almost cinematic sequences which talk about the experience of a building because again our resistance to the building as an object is so strong and building our buildings and of designers object and more more as sequences in any case and in this sense I have to confess to an earlier life as a scriptwriter and which as always I think made me resistant to claim the world of movies as a source of inspiration and but I do think that the mechanics of making scripts and making films especially the element of montage play the critical role in the work so without saying a lot I will just show one of those sequences where as a test we superimposed a section of Waiting for Godot on the images which have become strangely effective and incredible what is also important is that the book is not it's resisting the the to intense involvement in architecture and the exclusion of everything else so at regular intervals there are invasions of the outside world in all its violence to reality these are the women were in charge of the telephones when the French franc fell I think 30 percent on one given day which I forget they're the incredible way in which our fate in the two cents are now in the hands of completely ignorant and almost brutal young men and women everywhere on the globe and how a day like this can have catastrophic or euphoric effects on the world of architecture still an event which is important in terms of our mythology the professor's the kind of viral architecture of Airport which is in itself becoming more and more pervasive and which I think very soon will turn every city into an appendix of an airport rather than the the other way want I think that cities are becoming a new downto approaches are no downturns the events in different the absurd consumerism of random variety the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel and then an other crucial element of the book is of course the city are tortured relation with the city the a simultaneous destructiveness and brutality but also constructiveness of making the city which is for me and most emblematic in this particular image where it becomes completely impossible to see whether this is actually a piece of infrastructure being erased or a piece of infrastructure erasing the city and this ambiguity I think is one thing that most of us still haven't settled on which side of this reading our sympathies lie and because of that we are confronted with completely bizarre conditions that this is the city in of Rotterdam in the early 60s and this is the city and what a time at the early 80s just an interval of 20 years where basically any pretension of orthogonality clarity neutrality is ditched and making room for a complete avalanche of picturesque arbitrariness in doses which strangely enough the city survives I think that the the crucial and then we are can move into the Excel large foundation the crucial issue that we somehow still have not dealt with in architecture I think is the one the most poisonous inheritance of the moderns which is their willingness not to say evenness to start from scratch we are living and facing completely alarming demographics maybe not so much in Europe it's only in Asia and South America and Africa it is clear that for those demographics to be dealt with certain parts of what exists will have to disappear and replaced by other parts but somehow we are so completely fixated by the evil of this image and we have told themselves so unambiguously that this image is completely evil that we have somehow discredited to in our own profession the one action which is probably a crucial element of it namely how to start from scratch so in that sense the book is a meditation on the notion of starting from scratch and asks for instance in a computation for radicals for the extension of the default whether this tissue orientation simply because it is in Europe and simply because it exists deserves eternal life and the answer is clearly no and therefore there is the resurrection of the Keynesian notion but but of course in a very nervous and indirect way starting from scratch therefore the investigation of Atlanta as a city that has no context to siddhim has no contact anymore and which proliferate without some of the old condition center the investigation of the Asian situation where at first sight we are probably tempted to just see a completely laughable proliferation of built substance of a very garish kind usually ugly and incoherent but are in fact examples where that is undeniably - but I found it also very important to understand to have a kind of more subtle understanding or a more effective understanding in a way of how idea works and one of the things is the incredible coexistence in a way that we don't know here of every modern infrastructure with very viable traditions or on building there and the in that sense part of the book is meditation on the condition of Asia today and what Asian architecture means and here this is an image from Singapore and 1964 produced by Asian architects as an in situation of what the Asian city of tomorrow would look like so in that sense the agents themselves find from this image Asian already 20 years ago so the Asian modernity I think is developing now in spite of our own ambiguities about our own hesitations about modernity I think there is an Asian modernity which is authentically Asian but since it is manifest in the language of modernity curiously invisible to us as Asian or as authentic so I felt that theoretically the place where that no authenticity would be most visible is implies that as complete most drastically and transformed itself which is Singapore where in the space of 30 years its entire history has been extirpated and replaced by what looks at first sight about desk and decadent system of misunderstood Western aberrations that which a close inspection might be actually much more interesting and authentically ageing as this building certainly is built in 74 and also shopping at the scale that Singapore provided it certainly represents a quantum leap where in itself an activity which is still denigrated here acquires maybe another force and power of conviction then finally maybe the my as I mentioned before the incredible emergence of landscape as the field where intentions can be inscribed in a more is in much easier than in urbanism or architecture simply because we affect probably that it is simply that it is essentially two dimensional that I know three dimensional and that landscape is cheap and popular and so that more and more we see a shift that the urbanistic pretensions and ambitions are abandoned and replaced by a new care for landscape and new responsibilities that are assumed to by landscape I was in a conference for Asian architects two weeks ago and in Kuala Lumpur and one of the most fascinating thing was up the city that had just finished the two tallest last skyscrapers in the world that all the local architects were talking about the pavement and the ground and it seems therefore that the pavement and landscape are acquiring no importances that that certainly are related to our inability to devise a more modern urban condition and maybe they're also the the Japanese cartoon with the container buildings and ascribed condition are relevant may be landscape is what will fill proliferate in this script condition and landscape then produced as a correct form of no programmatic carpets that are more convenient in terms of organizing human life than architecture everyone can hope to be this is the images of Singapore in a cloud burst which shall inevitably the incredible domination of the vegetal over the architecture there and now this idea of landscape as a screen hiding architecture and urbanism becoming more and more realistic the book ends or maybe the most provocative section is called the generic city where after trying to describe the archetype American condition in Atlanta European condition was trying to describe the awesome condition of Singapore and then finally in a kind of nausea of specificity decided to reverse the question and see that I could write text which was two of every city now the open plane that all cities are becoming alike the thesis of the degress in this text poses is if they are becoming alike maybe that is not an accident with maybe that is in itself deliberate shedding of identity which somehow has a liberating effect and it should also be seen in connection that landscape the emergence of landscape so this is called the generic city because obviously if identity is taken away what remains is the dimeric and I think that more and more we are living a kind of shift from the specific to the generic which is which what can be explained in simple quantitative terms probably for instance the fact that the urban substance of China has to triple in the next 20 years or some other clearly demented statistic like that which clearly implied that no amount of imagination or specificity could ever help to animate such quantities so therefore it's a investigation and careful initial manifesto for the qualities and abilities of the generic and in inventories all its qualities and so the generic city the city that could be anywhere if I want to end with a lesson that I learned from the client for which for whom we did Durrell you jump away at all I was when I was writing the book I was active in retrospect very astonished that this person had never said no in spite of our incredible incredible complexity of some of our ideas building skyscrapers over railroads exposing tunnels exploiting infrastructure etcetera etcetera this person had always sucked carefully in spite and said yes maybe and yes let's do that so I asked him why did you never say no and then he said well I can explain it to you because today to create something and to have a success there are three conditions that are necessary the first condition is that your enterprise is not Universal but specific not general but unique and that was certainly the case in the case of you earlier because it was an area that had a limit and it was only focused on the area inside this limit and it now maybe made no proclamations and no claims for anything outside those limits then he said the second ingredient that you ingredient that you need is a compelling motive and in this case we had a compelling motive because the city had to be finished together with the tunnel so that the first train which one and stopped in lieu at the same time and then so the third is four ingredients for a success is that somehow from these two earlier Givens you create with equal dynamic not fair adult lennick from hell where you intertwine and incorporate so many partners in the complexity of the project that they become like the prisoners of a chain gang where not a single person can escape the driving difficulty without bringing down the entire house and in retrospect I think that the the dynamic Don Fair was a very beautiful metaphor for the book where also we had no Universal pretensions and the book is in a way a kind of apotheosis of specificities and uniquenesses and also presented as such we had a compelling motive - and the motive was to finish this book even though we broke the thousands of deadlines and you can imagine the complexity that we generated with everyone involved in this production thank maybe by way of starting I just like to ask one question but maybe I just like to read a couple of short passages from the book one is the section on bigness it goes like this beyond the certain scale architecture acquires the properties of bigness the best reason to broach bigness is the one given by climates of Mount Everest because it's their bigness is ultimate architecture and then it goes on together all these breaks with scale with architectural composition with tradition with transparency with ethics imply the final most radical break bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue it exists at most it coexists its subjects is context now I'm just sort of curious in the context of this discussion of bigness where is how does landscape meet bigness in this in this particular project because it seems that when you're talking in the in the la galette project so much of the operations of that have to do with certain relational conditions on that surface in terms of the idea of the territory and the choreography of that territory now in the context of the euro lille when you actually want the the potential kind of mismatch or miss placement of some of the maybe of the largest scale projects in relation to each other what happens to this relational condition of the surface between buildings in other words how do you begin to introduce the notion of landscape in relation to the project of the babe when the big is from how is trying to do away with with context something I think that the Japanese cartoon was in a way may be the clearest statement of this condition I think that there are very certain parts of the world and for instance you can see them in Singapore or in Tokyo and and also certain parts viewer where you see that the there is a kinetic break and convert achill distinction between two conditions one is really inert large container like buildings as they were whether they're skyscrapers or sheds or whatever and the other is an landscape which would be which is not quite a landscape but which is also not quite a city and it's kind of a new condition now in between which sometimes can incorporate sections from landscape but which is in essence a kind of urbanized field where an enormous amount of activities takes place but those activities are no longer taking place in buildings because it is clearly the case that architecture is too and really and too clumsy in a way to to stimulate those activities or they are too ephemeral to even need that the kind of support of architecture and they can exist in much more ephemeral conditions so I think that it's a blatant animal schizophrenic condition where one part of the entire volume of society is almost imprisoned in two enormously solid and defensive complex complexes and the rest in almost formless shapes so instead of creating a kind of intermediate condition it seems as if it's more extreme the extremes of form consisting with extremes of shapelessness but that rather the relationships in terms of the project of the base should be like the project in Parliament or the proposal might wait at the level of the pavement and the sidewalk and so on is there a different kind of should it then go from the scale of the the large to the scale of there I think the one thing if you read between the lines of the book which I hope to avoid in the rest of my life is the word shoot because it is clear that the the whole ambition sheet is the kind of most misplaced ambition that anyone in an architecture school can have because we may think that they shoot but nobody else seems to think that we should and in in that sense I think we should be much more with corners and an observers rather than people who say similar things I'll go on should go on and in that sense it's important that the part of the book has been a kind of trailing to the debris of the whole information society and that that's why it was also important to include in the book disreputable materials and offensive materials because I think that there is a kind of intelligence which usually does not exist in our profession and which somehow is there to be deciphered and I think that this coexistence between shape and shape business is one of them one other question which I sort of interested about the relationship between don't want to emphasize too much this thing of the dick that between the big and megastructures when you somewhere in the book I think you are saying that the whole tradition of megastructures is referring to the idea of the big but in a kind of safe way what do you mean by the traditional Megastore or somehow safe as opposed to the big which is not implying that it's not safe I think that the the idea I think that there are two issues the what one is an incredible momentum toward consolidation but you see in in almost every sector of the present society whether it's an economic various media whether it's real estate I mean everything or many forces move toward consolidation and therefore bigness and an architectural idea which is the mega 30 which is in effect the endless repetition of a single section the extrusion of a section in an intersection is claimed to organize indefinitely the right proportions of all the activities that could take place or ought to take place in in such an element in other words the mega structure is a section and therefore diagram endlessly repeated which does not allow for specific incident or difference and I think what is interesting in bigness is and our project for the bibliotheca puzzles one of them to see whether you could actually imagine within a single building extremely different conditions that had nothing to do with each other and also whether you could find an engineering concept that was not dependent on the repetition and or extrusion but that actually could accommodate those differences so I think that and in that sense the construction of bigness for me has been a polemic with frankly with deconstructivism or with whatever we call it the kind of tendency to a create fragment with sensitivity or fragment with delicacy or kind of fragment with a kind of openness to difference because I think that the differences that you could organize within a single container that could still claim to be whole and therefore with which would not abandon the project of wholeness while accommodating the specific is for me more interesting and more ambitious and also one where that apparently architect les buildings and I prefer the center seem to have succeeded in in generating design such a way never to form an overall pattern have you analyzed to see whether it does are using Tim Bilecki really up like a wreath refrain wallpaper and there is a kind do reoccurring structures that part second question is I don't understand how you use the word generic and not entail you also mean Universal because aren't you really discussing universal forces when you're talking about fortunately oh and although your client may have said success and specificity in a sense the aforethought we're talking about generic things to me I had to be talking about the universal Oh if I didn't would that make a big difference to you how many the universal is well I mean first of all the the book is clearly designed to to accommodate my eccentricities and inconsistencies and that was one of its more important devices but maybe I think that maybe the what is the difference between the universal and generic is for me that the generic is the universal this after it has been after its claims and its moralism and it's its ethics have been dismantled in other words the universal supposedly is an argument and it's a statement and it's something that you either aspire not aspire to and I find completely fascinating is that the generic is something nobody aspires to with which almost everyone converges to and and and and exactly this difference between the let's say the moral splendor of the universal with a former more splendor and the moral score of the generic is extremely ironic and because we are all actually drawn to the generic without ever admitting it and fall out from our way away from the universal I mean it was a no-no and I think that in that sense the book is really a statement and I don't I think that it's now and I don't understand it now in other words it's its statement and it has a certain intuitive power and a certain intellectual power but I've refrained from from the ultimate self-consciousness in at the moment so many possesses your generation some even yes um yeah I was actually struck by rock because wow it was really intriguing to me to see the images of of the cars overturned in Paris in the sixties however right and and that it seemed to me that with the the the Berlin project and the slide the images of Paris that you actually train your generation and its assault on the vertical and your voluntary prisoners of those of the the enclosure of the city my experience in working in Asia over the last decade has been that particularly in the last summer I'm going to Subic Bay in the Philippines a US Navy base which was evacuated three years ago is now maintained by thousands of volunteers who cut the grass with scissors that they are the the voluntary slaves of the horizontal and I think that there is a absolutely definitive break between an assault on the city that's something which is enclosing which is something which I feel that your generation has which um and I'll polarize it for the purposes of this discussion which is that which is that I think that now we have something else which is an assault on the horizontal how do you deal with the scraped landscapes of Gerhard Richter paintings of whatever the slashed painted the slashed canvases of lucha Fontana which are all assaults on flatness the flatness that we experience and I certainly experienced from my professional life flying thousands of miles every month around the world to go to different places always on the move is the experience of unrelenting horizontality and it is precisely the job in a way my mission is kind of the obverse of yours and is kind of the assault of the attack on the flat whereas I see in the six in that particularly in the images of the late 60s is there is how to deal with the road the point is let's say somebody has written of our generation that it's a quote in the collective narcissism of a demographic bubble because it's simply so big that it will always be the majority wherever it moves in the spectrum of age and therefore so therefore my answer is perfectly representative of it we do both and and kind of if you have seen and and I think that the book is in that sense both an investigation of the horizontal being described condition the lavallette condition the building war Commission the Yokohama condition and all these amorphous the Melanson air condition all these amorphous things that are between landscape and and and few vertical elements that remain standing on it so the interesting thing about scraped canvas is a razor for instance is that there is the wave that they have they are serve a certain ghosts and it seems that that the issue is how to reconstruct how to rethink a memory in okay okay now yeah well that's another interesting issue that we had to have talked about before I think the and that that is kind of really for me much much more kind of related to the question with tabula rasa I discover an incredible sense of anxiety about dealing with nakedness frankly and I think that the the whole condition where actually there are no ghosts or there are no traces or whether it nothing and and there are many areas where there is really nothing simply seem to generate little something that could on one hand be seen as courageous on the other hand as nostalgic on the other hand may be as visionary of in spite of this absence create you know or or manipulate and exaggerate and inflate you know whatever this slightest spore of a contextual remnant into something that then could give character and I think that the Singapore is a very beautiful case in point where instead of real memory they have fake memory and instead of a real wedding I'd district they have a got a mechanical red-light district which is a perfect reproduction and it is also highly efficient and which is a completely tourist machine but exactly those kind of ghosts which are strictly contemporary ghosts are probably disdained by our profession in an almost universal method the there's a long tradition of the novel that relationship game novel is the attempt in making things come with the information and the business regiments that this book it's in many ways to be equivalent the foramen ovale and of your interpretation of New York ingenuity New York and that's what we're doing the killing to lead into the novel something of the equivalent experience you have described are you saying it's it's an analog to to New York or to to any urban condition yeah but this is exactly one of those thesis which I'm the last one to want to confirm or deny I mean I hope that there will be an incredible proliferation of these kind of theories and some of them roll and deny ibly be illuminating even to me and abstraction the abstract rationality of alcohol addiction if it is not dissimilar to the idea of the no it's it's okay and so basically the book is one way of wrestling with the whole idea of organization and even though it looks extremely free or hopefully free it clearly is a very an infinitely calculated product in the sort of way also right the other sensation is is this some fascination with whether you're enjoying the but I think that the the book is both is an incredibly elaborate attempt to avoid that issue I think or or and to reveal my position in its recently and so therefore I really would not want to say yes I have a position because I sometimes I have a position or have a position vis-a-vis some junk but I think there again what can I possibly say that that makes life more exciting for any of you Oh any object publishes a book which is right on fish books but we have other ways to get more fur I think that then this is not one of them and also we haven't always been successful in getting more work but I think that I mean as I said the word there was a comic aspect about the work and about the book and also an intuition that the office needed to be reborn and I don't want to say that our our crisis was built or engineered but I must say that in retrospect it is also clear that it allowed us to shed an enormous baggage baggage in any way are you know the heavy part of our so-called traditional so-called position or and the in that sense was necessary also as a kind of rebirth well one more thing and so I think that what I find interesting is that for instance if I present this idea did the book hear people talk about junk if I present a book in Singapore people talk about how strange it is that somebody like me is disinterested in Singapore so for what what it's worth in my question is about the place of the architect in the context of modernism or rather modernity I'm very struck by the difference of occasion between today and when you launch Denarius New York some 15 years ago in a rather dark basement of the a and whether we're a few students and you were signing copies of the book now it seems to me that in Denarius New York so was some kind of you hinted at the possibility that the architect could actually do a retroactive manifesto in turn you said sir about modernity which at outlined quite a clear role for the architect I wouldn't speak of this book which I haven't read us yet but it seems to me that in your recent work you take the positions at the intervention of the architect is rather less for example you actually describe or you suggest that's a way for architecture to renew itself is to find inspiration in urbanism and in your talk today you have also hinted at the fact that engineers we're taking a much bigger role in the construction of architecture and of cities so what I would like to ask you is what do you think is going to be the future role of the architect where are we heading to well I think that the what I would find interesting is now what I would find interesting is to think of architecture not as a profession but as a form of intelligence and as a form of thinking about simulations and in that sense I think not fundamentally and will underneath it all is but this may be very private interpretation is that it is a way of thinking about the program and about what we do and so in that sense once you consider it as a form of intelligence any ally or annexation or yielding or transforming that is necessary to come closer to that aim seems to be relevant so I think that it's not and so for instance one of them might be that we all become landscape architects or become kind of pavement experts or or overcome and so I have no real preoccupation with what the future of our profession is with more perforation in terms of warning that it is important to shed a number of responsibilities to explore a number of residual and neglected fields of of possible intervention doesn't that sort of contradict them the kind of images of kuala lumpur that you saw or these large-scale modern projects where the whole nature of the intervention is there such a sort of massive scale and and the way those projects come about then the relationship of capital to those projects and and so on seems quite distant from the from the kind of subtleties of landscape that you remember - I mean you sort of landscape becomes this kind of metaphor for sensibility no I don't know no because I mean here you can see you can read it I mean it's an in that sense it's very important to distinguish two separate what I would do or what we would do when we work or folder that a certain issue from a general observation and the condition I think that basically what you see is that equal didn't new archetype of the city is big operations that may or may not be beautiful and so my private conviction is that if we would do them they would be beautiful but if X or Y would do them they may be less successful that are implanted in the ER that are implanted in fields that again if we would do them would be sublime and if others would do them would be tacky and so or primitive and and so I think that the the model the model does not kind of make it make a value judgment for that's a question about the way you use the word arbitrary you prove deliberate arbitrariness what a very nice phrase that rotted down we should be Americans to our slides he said they've been an avalanche picturesque arbitrariness I wonder what do you mean by that that it's deliberate in the sense that anything could happen but a decision had to be made to allow anything to happen or using it a different it's a B is the word accidental do you think actually that you can be deliberately arbitrary in any sense I mean didn't what happened was they actually deliberate there were reasons it wasn't after at all and you could make that good point about most things that happen it isn't active mikrotik I wonder therefore whether this this idea of arbitrariness that you're using in a rather sort of double-edged way or in fact in an arbitrary way yeah now I'm sure you're right but but I think it's a maybe in endure still images in water them you should look for the other two issues there there is the political condition and so therefore a city that imbalance the claim to our ordering to be ordering and that encourages a system which is ostensibly freer even though it probably doesn't mean anything more profound than abandoning the 90 degree angle and a series or an architecture inscribed in either one of those systems which can be nothing with our Batory I mean I think that the latter the first slide shot undeniably boring commission but at least the condition where the architecture the architect know to maneuver with a certain system and to create significance but I think that what is interesting in the other image is that there is a new legalistic and kind of urban istic and political framework where the architecture can no longer contribute to that kind of significance and it therefore is doomed to really project simple kind of profound craziness which in his part are quite a bit which on the political level are of course far from arbitrary and the deliberate pursuit of a policy of relaxation or formalist variety or whatever you want to call it what not they want to live their life is it the developing shocking even detailing in our work I would like there are days that I would like to think that the world is finally understanding our attitude to detail which is that first of all there is an obsession with detail which I mean method if you look at detail now there is one kind of architecture which fetishizes detail and which makes out of even the most innocent encounter and an incredible pretext for extreme intricacy and so that is a form of detail that we don't find interesting on the other hand we have a tendency to pretend that extremely actually extremely complicated encounters are extremely simple and I can know hence I happen almost on their own and spontaneously or don't we don't make an issue out of it so so I think that I have encountered critics who now understand that actually some of our buildings are very intricately detailed although we don't want to show the effort that went into it and we find it more liberating for everyone concerned if there is a certain smoothness or abstraction mm detail so that that is one which I can tweak in our work the other last week is partly the other aspect is partly imposed such as buildings like Congress poll the building immediately where simply the scale of the building so enormous Lee extends the financial means or exceeds the financial means that it is necessary to invent another language languages which is more provisional or and that's why we call it realistic rather than architecture where we treat the building as if it is a piece of city itself which is than accommodating certain problems rather than an architecture which is detailed around certain things so I think that there's an issue of economy and the decisions that economy provokes and on the other hand another kind of more metaphysical issue of why create anxiety in abundance while we don't suffer a lack of anxiety in general some sort of what oh yeah you mentioned that in a headrest seriously which one is more than that is done now that is the whole point I mean it is it is disconcerting and it was disconcerting to ourselves that if you don't know who has made this in a statement that you read it in a completely different way you read it in a kind of highly alarmed manner because we have selected it and put it there we give it a set importance but it may not be evident until the end of the statement what the importance is and so therefore there is a kind of worry but do they mean because I don't get it so so do they really take this seriously so it's more and and I think that is in itself an analogue of course to the larger ambition of the book to take every event which is urban or kind of built seriously and to try to find relationships between certain non professional or an important part of the built world and the build part and the part we do we Googlers and I was great you're fine that sort of the but I would like to deny that the building is a joke and and and and of course I mean ok can you just leave it as a statement because then I don't have to answer it and color it baby we can all share it and appreciate it yeah but I have no nothing to say about it yeah I mean and that is kind of basically in the context that I'm extremely happy of course if you think so but I don't think that I can add anything to which makes makes it which either pair fires or denies it

Channel: AA School of Architecture

Views: 28,119

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Keywords: Architectural Association, Public Programme, 1995, Rem Koolhaas, XL

Id: YEGmhjouAeM

Length: 79min 9sec (4749 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2015