Notes on Koolhaas and Modernization
Author(s): Jonathan Crary
Source: ANY: Architecture New York, 1994, No. 9, Urbanism vs Architecture: THE
BIGNESS OF REM KOOLHAAS (1994), pp. 14-15
Published by: Anyone Corporation
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45046309
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c
By now it is customary to engage the work of Rem Koolhaas in o
¦ wmm
terms of its active alignment with processes of cultural transfor-
its instabilities and flexible - an
mation, planned components
architecture designed as a dynamic ingredient of perpetual social "m
flux and reorganization. Delirious New York is frequently read as
N
processes of destruction and creation through which the city
a manifesto outlining how architecture (and by implication other ¦ mma
mutates according to the shifting requirements of capitalism.
But while some might want to position Koolhaas and Delirious
forms of cultural invention) could become immanent to a mutating
New York
in the context of the "melting" vision of modernity
s
field of rather (first sketched out by Marx) , he is in fact staking out a very
dif-
modernization than function as static or enduring
ferent relation to modernization and history. Baudelaire gave
monuments exterior to it. And certainly Koolhaas's antireformist paradigmatic expression to two reciprocal poles of response to
modernization that have had a curiously enduring half-life: on
urbanist thought proposes collaborating with, if not emulating, one hand, the exhilarating experience of new velocities, the a
apparent freedoms of sensations of new itineraries and percep- l
uncontrolled forces of development rather than formu-
tuai frontiers (exemplified by today's cyberspace cheerleaders);
-o
on the other, lament at the immense richness of what modern-
lating anything self-consciously remedial that would
ization had eradicated forever (e.g., rain forests, tradition-based
attempt to rationalize or "solve" social disorder. communities, epic poetry). Koolhaas's project is bound up in a o
deployment of historical memory that is neither paralyzed by
the weight of nostalgia and loss nor dissipated in a celebratory
abandonment to the kaleidoscopic momentum of technological
innovation. Baudelaire's swan, doomed by the spirit of gravity,
9.14 Jonathan Crary flapping its wings wretchedly in the dust of urban work sites
and demolitions, has as its flip side the false lightness of the
man of the crowd, surrendering to the latest rhythms and force
lines of capitalist reorganization.
Working outside of this polarity, one of Koolhaas's achieve- +
ments is allowing architecture to become involved in the practi-
cal elaboration of the composite lifeworlds of urban collectivi-
ties, letting his work operate as a medium between the volatile
But given this recognizable profile of Koolhaass work, it is also (/)
possibilities of modernization and a more enduring set of rou-
important to track the less conspicuous ways in which he is simulta-
tines, patterns, and desires. If Koolhaas's work incarnates a cer-
neously working "against the grain" of modernization. For his appar- tain cool-headed social optimism it is also anti-utopian and ra
ent immersion in strategies of pushing or riding the logic of develop-
JONATHAN relentlessly demystifying about notions of progress. An unflinch-
ment (and playing the role of "developer") coincides with a rich
ing engagement with the history of the 20th century, its layers of
understanding of the paradoxes and traps of modernization. In par- w
He savagery, stupidity, and intellectual failure, pervades his writing.
ticular, what animates the thought of Koolhaas is how the obvious
is
a CRARY It is possible to speak of Koolhaas's thinking as "untimely,"
recognition of the obsolescence of the modern (as a style, strategy,
recalling that for Nietzsche untimeliness was not about forget-
affect, hope) is inseparable from an understanding of thè overwhelm-
ting but rather about creating a new kind of historical vision,
the
teaches
founding ing persistence and continuity of modernization (and of neo-capital- invention of new eyes and senses with which to survey the past,
in
ism). In other words, for him the vicissitudes of the city, of architec- the difficult acquisition of new viewpoints on how to transform
the
editor ture, of experience in the past few decades are the sign not of a new
human experience and activity in "the perspective of life."
of art era in which modernity has somehow been exceeded, but rather a
"5
Clearly Koolhaas has no hesitation in exploiting new techno-
Zone phase characterized by a shifting and reorganization of ongoing cur-
history logical arrangements. Some of his projects, such as the Center for
rents of rationalization. These are processes that jettison and destroy o
Art and Media Technology at Karlsruhe, would be unthinkable
Books whatever obstructs flux and circulation, that transform the singular
without them. But his work, for all its impressive utilization of
and into the exchangeable, that incessantly create new domains of corn-
department cutting-edge technique, is not driven by the breathless "futur-
theat modification and consumption, that in Koolhaas's words transform
ism" exhibited by some of his contemporaries who believe, a pri-
identity into the generic. A few obvious contemporary examples
ori, that telecommunications and data manipulation will be the
author would be the continuing implantation of global communications and
of Columbia primarycomponents of new social environments. In his encounter
information networks and the steady dissolution of national bound-
with technological modernity he seems strongly opposed to the
aries -NAFTA, GATT, and EEC are merely acronyms for the reconfig- c
sedentary model of the individual and cellular model of the social
uring effects of modernization. But Koolhaas seems to understand that cyberspace modernization implies. For Koolhaas, though, it is
Techniques
University. that the drifts, uproo tings, and migrations caused by the opening up
of not a question of choosing the material over the dematerialized or
of new streams of "free" trade or of images and data are not only o
the the tectonic over the electronic. His pragmatic strategies allow him
indications of the emergence of an increasingly smooth planetary
to move fluidly between these options, based on local conditions
field of exchange but also of new distributions, demarcations, exclu-
and requirements, even if his priorities are, finally, to facilitate the
Observer. sions, and hierarchies, and, important for Koolhaas, new cultural
</)
creative activity of human collectivities within urban assemblages.
vacancies and derelict spaces.
Since the 19 th century a crucial dimension of the experience of aj
modernization has been what Manfredo Tafuri called the coming to
terms with "the anguish of urban dynamism" - the precarious psy-
chic and social accommodation to the relentless
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Delirious New Yorkwas published in 1978 just
when the Western city, as a theater of moderniza-
tion, began to cede its primacy to another more
pervasive and placeless arena of transformation and
rationalization: the digital circuitry of telematics and
informatics. Obviously the city, whether in the West
or the Third World, has not and will not cease to be a
space of instability and mutation. But as the physical
map of the city is being overlaid by another radically
different set of cognitive and sensory coordinates, the cultur-
al effects of the citys dynamism have atrophied and deterio-
rated in comparison with the fermentation of the first 70
years of the 20th century (for example, as the models of
theme park and movie set increasingly redefine key experi-
ences of turban texture) .
One of the many achievements of the Bibliothèque de France pro- Koolhaas s work inhabits this hybrid field in which diverse
and historically distinct forces of modernization both interact
ject is how it sustains a resonant coexistence of two incommensu-
rable realms - the atopic (and sublime) domain of data storage and, and operate autonomously, and his notion of the "culture of con-
nested in unmappable proximity, spaces that affirm the potency of gestion" comes into play here in crucial ways. For modernization
human aggregates and flows. The inclusions of features such as continues to generate many different and even incompatible
communal screening rooms could seem to some an antimoderniz- notions of congestion - some of which hold forth the possibility
of livable and workable human environments even as others are
ing archaism, but it is a willful repudiation of the contention that,
given a global film archive, the standard method of film viewing producing experiences of social segmentation and separation, such
will be isolated individuals ordering them over modems or cable as those Toni Negri has described in terms of the consequences of
systems for home consumption. Even simply the notion of a library Reaganism and Thatcherism in the last decade. At the same time,
with a great hall to accommodate 10,000 people is an indication of Koolhaas is not privileging the congestion of an image- and data-
how the "rationalizing" logic of miniaturization and dematerializa- saturated environment, which is also founded on the cellurization 9.15
tion is interpreted with a diagramming of the library-archive form and productive separation of human beings. One of the valuable fea-
as a powerful social and communal apparatus. tures of Emile Durkheim s analysis of anomie was the insistence that
The library, like his other public projects, allows a polyphony social cohesiveness depended on the richness and flexibility of the
of unforeseen zones and temporalities to emerge within the unsta- contacts between individuals in a given society, rather than the
ble mechanosphere we still call the city. They produce changing sheer number of contacts. The computer terminal seems to open
onto an abyss of potential points of contact and linkage but it is a
configurations and meetings. Collisions, not in the sense of shock
or defamiliarization but of a montage of openings of the imagina- site on which communication and sensation are reduced to a single
tion onto other possible social ecologies. To say that Koolhaas plane of affect and energy, to impoverished modalities of exchange
works against the sedentarization now being imposed by mod- and interface, and to anomic forms of redundancy. Koolhaas seeks
ernization (i.e., the remodeling of the body into an electronic to produce congestion in which a palpable heterogeneity of
social/ environmental contact, psychical and sensory feedback, and
consumer) implies that he is committed to a certain general
model of the human nervous system - the body as an integrating kinesthetic stimulation launch the individual out of the isolation
that is the lot of the modernized "interactive" and amnesiac inhabi-
spatio temporal system, whose perceptual and cognitive struc-
tures are decisively linked to motor patterns. In other words, an tant of the Generic City.
individual both shapes and is shaped by an environment in terms
of an evolving relation between memory and sensorimotor activ-
ity. (New forms like virtual reality pose a very different model of
the nervous system in which there is an indiscriminate mix of
sensory and the locomotor on a flattened-out surface of digital
information.) Some of Koolhaas s most provocative projects, like
Yokohama, Lille, and Zeebrugge, amplify the importance of a
locomotor experience of movements, trajectories, and intersec-
tions of many kinds. In spite of all we have heard about the anni-
hilation of distance and absolute speed, these projects (involving
harbors, train stations, highways, ferry boats) affirm the persis-
tence of "outmoded" vectors and vehicles, of other relations of
motion and stasis, acceleration and slowness, that coexist with
hyperspeeds and instantaneity. The 19th-century model of the
journey, as Paul Virilio well shows, has long been shattered, but
forKoolhaas the routines of everyday life are still composed of
unrepresentable transitive moments, of the enigmatic passages
that once linked arrivals and departures, which so fascinated
thinkers like de Chirico, Einstein, and Duchamp. But even if
some of Koolhaas s projects, like Zeebrugge, are "terminals,"
they are effectively intermediary elements of larger social
machines, defined by the adjacencies and intermixings that
occur through them, by their effective permeability.
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