Bo Grönlund:
Rem Koolhaas' Generic City
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- and a modernist dilemma of 'urbanisation' vs. 'urbanity' in avantgarde architecture
- a recap of modernism's troublesome urbanism in the architectural sphere?
This text was written in 1997 and revised in June 1999 as part of the theses project 'The Informational City and the Street as Urban Form'. All the photographs were shot by Bo Grönlund in 1994 at the 'edge city' of Bellevue outside Seattle, USA. None of the persons mentioned are responsible for the architecture shown in the pictures, but they might illustrate parts of the problematic.
Of the subtitles below, the provoking ones are based on quotes from Koolhaas' own texts.
Content:
Urbanism doesn't exist - it is only an ideology.....
Let go of melancholic notions of loss of public space, loss of urbanity, loss of communication....
The post-modern planning of nostalgia, by architects like Leon Krier...........
Cities can no longer be made....we have only fragments of modernity...
The beginning af a critique of Koolhaas' modernism
Koolhaas' critique of the 'neo-rationalists' doesn't take us very far...
Social interests rejected in favour of pure architectural form?
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.
'The Generic City'
In Koolhaas' understanding, the contemporary city is 'the generic city'. The word 'generic', as it is denoted in standard dictionaries, has at least a double meaning: it is general for a whole group or class of phenomena or species, and it has no particularly distinctive quality or application. As I understand Koolhaas, he means that the urban is now so pervasive, that old ways of thinking about cities is not relevant any more. To Koolhaas The 'generic city', then, is an expression of general urbanisation. Some of its important aspects are listed below, including interesting, but highly generalised observations:
Koolhaas' 'generic city' is a displacement to the urban periphery, a territory that can no longer be called suburbia, distorted and stretched beyond precedent, big enough for all, and with a remarkable ingenuity in avoiding urbanistic rules. Density is on the decrease, moments spaced far apart, the calmer, the more 'pure' - in a way a voluntary house arrest. The skyscraper is the definitive typology, as towers can exist everywhere, spaced so not to interact. The generic city is the city without history, without layers, superficial like a film studio, in a process of never ending self-destruction and renewal. This city is liberated from the captivity of the centre and of identity. In this city you see homogenisation, endless repetitions of the same structural module, still more varied boredom, redundancy, and déjà vu, but also a city that is fractal, discontinuous, made up of enclaves, seemingly accidental and disorderly. Its most popular sites are associated with sex and misconduct. The generic city is also multiracial and multi-cultural, flexible diversity, aesthetic 'free style', and lots of mirrors. It may have mass tourism, but the streets are dead and the public realm has been evacuated in the favour of cars, highways and speed. In-transit condition has become universal. This city is made up of roads, buildings and nature. Supremely inorganic, its main carrier of identity is organic myth, where the vegetal is transformed into Edenic residue - at the same time refuge of the illegal, the uncontrollable, and subject to endless manipulation - its immoral lushness compensates for the generic city's other poverties. This city is everywhere. In America, Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa the city has come to the country. The 'generic city' is what is left over after large sections of urban life crossed over into cyberspace. Koolhaas also says: "According to Derrida we cannot be WHOLE, according to Baudrillard we cannot be REAL, according to Virilio we cannot be THERE" ( 'Whatever happen to urbanism', 1994).
According to Koolhaas this 'generic city' contain an unrecognised beauty worthy of further contemplation and he accepts the contemporary situation ('the generic city') as a starting point for architectural work. He also mentions the 'generic city' as a global liberation movement against definite character. In Wired (1996:7) he sums up: "People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything. More and more I think architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable. Architecture can't do anything that the culture doesn't. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living".
Let go of melancholic notions of loss of public space, loss of urbanity, loss of communication....
Globalisation will make us strangers everywhere, Koolhaas says, and the electronic onslaught tends to dissolve anything physical. He therefore thinks, that we maybe should stop looking for any kind of glue to hold cities together. His conclusion is that the only judgement that could be made, are judgements of taste and of aesthetics, and when architects recognise this, they can let go of melancholic notions of loss of public space, loss of urbanity, loss of communication, and so forth: "I think we are stuck with this idea of the street and the plaza as public domain, but the public domain is radically changing...with television and the media and a whole series of other inventions, you could say that the public domain is lost. But you could also say, that it's now so pervasive it does not need physical articulation any more. I think the truth is somewhere in between. But we as architects still look at it in terms of a nostalgic model, and in an incredibly moralistic sense, refuse signs of its being reinvented in other populist or more commercial terms.... you can go to these cities and bemoan the absence of a public realm, but as architects it is better for us to bemoan the utter incompetence of the buildings." (Koolhaas 'Conversations with students' 1996 p 45, also see p. 41, 61 and 64)
It is not quite clear, how much of Koolhaas' simplified but thought provoking views shall be taken for face value. In Wired 1996:7 Koolhaas says "There is an enormous, deliberate, and - I think - healthy discrepancy between what I write and what I do".
Koolhaas own large projects, like his competition entry for the district of Melun-Sénart outside of Paris preferably take landscape preservation and landscape architecture as a point of departure, not social relations or the city of built forms. He sees empty space and urban voids as principally important. They are easier to control, and they can draw general support from everyone. But, if you look for specific city qualities, in Koolhaas of the 1990s, as in Castells of the 1970s, not much of the urban is left at the end, I think, though there might be a gathering of diverse and partly contradictory forms and functions to create a deliberate 'congestion' and/or an interesting skyline.
The death of planning......
In Koolhaas opinion, the 'generic city' also means the death of planning, because planning no longer makes any difference. Paradoxically, he says, urbanism (as planning practice) disappears at the moment of general urbanisation. To Koolhaas this happens because urbanism has been unable to invent and implement at the scale demanded by urban growth and demographic change. We are therefore now left with a world without urbanism, only architecture, ever more architecture. As a consequence university departments are closed, offices bankrupted, bureaucracies fired or privatised, he says, and we have a crises for urban planning and urban planning education.
The last observations are simiklar to my own: Changes for the planning profession have been seen in many countries since the mid 1980s, including Scandinavia, as can be witnessed in different architectural an planning journals, difficulties in recruiting new students and the closing down, restructuring or privatisation of public planning and research agencies. Some of the one's I know about are: in England, e.g. The Centre for Environmental Studies and the London County Counsel was closed down, in Denmark the state planning agency was split up as well as and the Copenhagen metropolitan regional planning, the building research institute partly privatised, and planning and urban design departments closed in on of the two schools of architecture. In Sweden the state planning agencies were fused and de-centralised to a provincial town, The Stockholm metropolitan regional planning was partly privatised, and the building research institute dissolved.
The post-modern planning of nostalgia, by architects like Leon Krier...........
Not only the planning attempt of modernism has failed, but even more what Koolhaas calls the post-modern planning of nostalgia, by architects like Leon Krier.
Koolhaas' critique of Leon Krier et al seems to be built first of all on the claim, that the 1970s and 80s city building is based on a model of the premodern (Koolhaas calls it 'classical') European city that have not succeeded in getting very much done. The reasons for this, Koolhaas sees as the lack to recognise the determinants of what actually gets built (i.e. the contemporary conditions of economics, politics, technology, etc.). The Krier urbanism of perimeter blocks, walls, streets, plazas, images of order and continuity, etc. is therefore not credible. Attempts at pedestrianisation (e.g. Bofill's in Marne-la-Vallé), doesn't work either, according to Koolhaas. The post-modern urbanism builds on a nostalgic model, including simulated community and the illusion of involvement and control, that leads to irrelevance. Or as Koolhaas says: "For urbanists, the belated rediscovery of the virtues of the classical city at the moment of their definitive impossibility may have been the point of no return, the fatal moment of disconnection, disqualification. Dissatisfaction with the contemporary city has not lead to the development of a credible alternative. (See Koolhaas: The Contemporary city, 1989; 'Beyond Delirious' 1994; 'Whatever happened to urbanism' 1994) in Koolhaas & Mau 1995; Nesbitt 1996. Also see Koolhaas 'Conversation with students' 1996)
Cities can no longer be made....we have only fragments of modernity...
The profession persists in its fantasies, its ideology, its pretension, .... but will never re-establish control. Cities can no longer be made." According to Koolhaas, the chaos aesthetics of the 'Coop Himmelblau' kind doesn't work either, because chaos can't be fabricated.
Modern architecture by the soviet constructivist Leonidov, Mies van der Rohe, and the USA of the 1920s and 30s is the starting point for Koolhaas architectural ideas, but he is also critical of modernism. His comments on outdoor spatial issues of modernism are rather few, though. In the later texts I comment upon here, Koolhaas mentions the residual green of early modernism as "controlled neatness with a moralistic assertion of good intentions, discouraging association, use", but otherwise there is very little. According to Nesbitt, a significant part of Koolhaas' critique (of modernism) is the idea that while 'purity' (for example, the closure or definition of the autonomous object) may have been desirable in modern buildings, it caused disorienting problems at the urban scale. (Nesbitt 1996 p 326).
Koolhas himself says that the most visionary modern urban planing was Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City of the early 1930s, that to me did away with urbanity almost completely. On Mies, Le Corbusier and Leonidov, he remarks on the extraordinary incongruity between the perfection and instant completeness in their architectural plans, and the inflexible, nearly infantile simplicity of their urban projects on 'tabula rasa', imagined as if the complexity of daily life could be accommodated right away. To me, who think modernism dominates very large parts of our cities, it sound strange when Koolhaas claims: "Except in certain airport and a few patches of urban peripheries, the image of the modern city has nowhere been realised. We have only fragments of modernity. The urban program didn't come off." Thus Koolhaas insists on withholding judgement on modern urbanism's potential. As I understand Koolhaas, what didn't take off was modernism as an aesthetic program at the urban scale.
Koolhaas' new urbanism
Today Koolhaas says, he has become more critical of the aesthetic program of modernism, as the abstractions and repetitions of modernism seems both interesting and boring, and maybe more important, because modernism itself might be seen as nostalgia. Instead he seeks the openly experimental and new. In certain conditions it should e.g. be possible to build new like the Forbidden (and now destroyed) Chinese City in Hongkong - very dense, flexible and provisional. And concerning the suburbs, new towns, and edge cities in metropolitan areas like Paris, maybe Disneyland could be used as "an exaggerated metaphor for the potential of those towns - the entertainment, the freedom, the kind of life. ..In isolation, all those places are relatively underprivileged, but strung together, they could form an enormous battery of modern events, modern phenomena, modern conditions, that could be very attractive", although he doesn't give much clue to how it could be done.
Taken together, Koolhaas seems to propose a new urbanism as a kind of reformed or improved modernism, understood at the urban level first of all as a process, and not as a stable, recognisable architectural setting. Koolhaas' urban dream is about architectural uncertainty, freedom from formal coherence, complexity, densification, flexibility, potential, diversification, redistribution, change, vitality, emptiness and congestion, as well as montages of incredibly complex programs. As key words, they are clearly interesting to me from an urban point of view, but rather empty if not further specified.
The beginning af a critique of Koolhaas' modernism
Koolhaas ideas rotates around the contemporary city as a new condition, and he obviously points to some of its intriguing paradoxes. I have not yet seen any of Koolhaas major works at an urban scale in real life, only read about them and heard him lecture in the mid 1990s. It has happen before, that I have changed my opinion, after seeing architectural works at the site. But for now, his interests to me seems rather formal (like large scale, emptiness, etc.). The focus on form and voids is inevitable in architecture, as architects have to give form to space, but architecture is not a free art like music, painting, literary fiction or movie making. Architecture we have to live in and with in ways that are often given and collective, especially at the urban scale. The social implications of architectures therefore have to be taken into account, but time and again we see narrow formal issues attract architectural students and parts of the profession like siren calls. In this context, Koolhaas might he himself contribute to the problems of the profession. You might have to tie yourself firmly to the mast, like Odysseus, if you are going to come home to your beloved one. To me Koolhaas' analyses in many ways are superficial and too boldly generalising, and sometimes extremely one-sided. E.g. any thorough analyses would have to look into national, regional, and local differences, but they are obviously omitted in Koolhaas 'generic city', though as a concept, it can include a wide range of differences.
Koolhaas today wants to make the distinction, that he is modern (or contemporary) but not modernist, but to me his distinction does not seem very clear. The modern, modernity and modernism are not the same, though closely related. The modern is the industrial society of technological, economic, politic and social change, while modernity is the cultural spirit of the modern, and modernism different collective professional forms of cultural expressions and practices as reflections and interpretation of the modern and modernity. CIAM, including also Bauhaus, is the most widely recognised modernism in architecture and urban planning. Congrès Internationaux d´Architecture Moderne 1928-56, continued as Team X into the 1960s. It major urban program was codified as the Athens Charter of 1933, heavily influenced by Le Corbusier. (See e.g. Frampton 1980 on CIAM's history and Le Corbusier 1973, 'The Athens Charter'.)
Koolhaas words of acceptance of the situation 'as is' echoes 1930's modernism (compare e.g. 'Acceptera', Sweden, 1931).
As far as I can see Koolhaas promotes to an important extent a recap of CIAM modernism (with changes), that since the 1920s in several ways has contributed to a disaster for everyday life urbanity (though far from being the only reason). I also think that Koolhaas have a very special point of view, when he thinks modernism has had so little effect. I mean streets actually were abolished, as was also to a large extent a human interface at ground level. Mono-functional zoning was implemented, as well as abstract floor area ratios, etc. Buildings as free standing objects became dogma, the difference been fronts and backs done away with, ornaments discarded, construction industrialised, etc.
Koolhaas' critique of the 'neo-rationalists' doesn't take us very far...
As far as I have seen, Koolhaas rejects without any real analyses the urbanism of 'neo-rationalists' like Leon and Rob Krier, Aldo Rossi and others, who has influenced urban projects in the 1980s, like some of the ones I will study in this dissertation. To me Krier et al were especially interesting because they wanted to build cities with streets and squares and because they focused on architectural typologies and city building's relation to historic experiences. Koolhaas' critique, I think, is far too easy and unfocused. It is true that Leon Krier himself haven't got much built and that his ideas lend themselves easily to criticism. It is also true, that city building with streets, squares and urban blocks has been pushed aside by deconstructivism and neo-modernism. To me, this might have more to do with the architectural profession's need for a rather quick succession of styles, as a part of the competition within the trade - it does not necessarily have to do with success or failure of built areas or architectural and planning ideas as such.
Part of the Leon Krier dilemma is the extent to which the city of his dreams is clothed in architectural forms of classicism. This means Krier's urbanism is more one of symbolic form, than one of spatial use. Actually, neither Koolhaas nor Krier is really interested in the people who is going to use their architecture. What happens with urban life at street level becomes less interesting then, including the question of the structure of the street network, and the ground level permeability/visibility through the facades. Krier's own house in Seaside, Florida is a practical example of this. Leon Krier's work also implies ideas of neighbourhoods, that isn't far from the ones applied in many modern suburbs and new towns since World War II (pedestrian radii and all), although hopefully with a bit better continuity of the built urban fabric. And maybe most important, Leon Krier's work, unlike his brother Rob's, seems so demanding in form and scale, that you imagine his city proposals having to be carried out or firmly controlled by just one architect. Anyhow something actually got built, inspired partly by Leon Krier and other post-modern urbanists, and this have to be studied and evaluated thoroughly, before there can be any valid conclusions.
It is also necessary, conceptually, to distinguish the 'classical' European city from the pre-modern city more generally. As I see it, the 'classical' European city is part of the history of the strictly planned city, which is not a general form of the pre-modern city, neither in Europe nor anywhere else. In European history parts of the cities of antiquity and the renaissance, baroque axiality, and later recurrent neo-classical waves of architecture can be referred to as classicist, but to me, urbanity often works better in the less strictly planned parts of pre-modern European cities. This issue of urbanity's relation to less geometrically strict planning have been with us in various ways at least since Camillo Sitte's 'City Planning according to Artistic Principles' of 1889. So when Koolhaas says, that cities can no longer be made, you may wonder whether urbanity ever could be 'made', i.e. as I understand Koolhaas, designed and established at once and, maybe also, for ever. By not making the proper distinctions, Koolhaas short-circuits classicism, urbanity and the issues of control. If You combine this with Koolhaas view that "the more emphasis there is on the pedestrian, the more vacant an area becomes", you get a dangerous cocktail blurring urban questions. (Koolhaas 'Conversations with students' 1996, p 42).
Social interests rejected in favour of pure architectural form?
Koolhaas' statement that the chaos aesthetics of the 'Coop Himmelblau' kind doesn't work either is also very general and contains at least three further complications, I think: a) here even less have been built at an urban scale, which makes evaluations difficult, and what have been built, like parts of Skejbygård, in Århus, Denmark, by Hansen & Knudsen, show little understanding of how different kinds of pedestrian spatial structure works; b) what is interesting in cities is not chaos, which by definition is completely unstructured, but complexity - as nobody, literally, can live with a complete chaos for more than a few seconds; c) complexity can actually be promoted, e.g. like Koolhaas himself does it, by letting several architects add to his 'dynamic from hell' at the new railway station area in Lille.
When You start to look into it, it doesn't seem that Koolhaas has much idea of social life in cities, or he doesn't care, and sociology has no clear answers anyhow. As Nesbitt says, he is without social ambitions. (See Nesbitt 1996) p 322-23.)
In 'The Generic City' (1994) Koolhaas under the heading 'sociology' refers to the endless contradictions of sociological findings, which to him proves the richness of 'the generic city' and gives him the freedom not to have to live up to specific social demands. His major interest at the urban scale seems to be very large buildings and their internal complexity, and not as my colleague Jan Gehl would say, 'life between buildings' or other lifeworld issues for the people who is going to use his architecture. And as there is no interest in the social, the relation of the social and the spatial becomes uninteresting too. It is true, that the question of public space today is radically different from e.g. a hundred years ago, at least outside a few privileged city centre areas. But shall we really give up attempts to create public spaces outside the city centres? And if not, how shall we handle this difficult issue?
It seems most of all to be formal aesthetic issues that concerns Koolhaas, though. Consequently, the questions of streets and the ground level of buildings are not dealt with - CIAM also wanted to do away with these - and the question of functional mix seems to bother Koolhaas only inside large buildings. When Nesbitt mentions Koolhaas interest for questions of orientation in urban space, streets are not talked about either, in spite of the fact that Koolhaas' first book was about Manhattan. (Koolhaas 1978, 'Delirious New York')
When Koolhaas himself compares his urban process vision to the urban surgery in Haussmann's 19th c. Paris - as opposite to modernist tabula rasa - he forgets to mention, that this surgery was about streets, which makes it a completely different world from Koolhaas' new urbanism. His comments on Bofill in Marne-la-Vallé also clearly shows a rejection of pedestrian issues. Contemporary, high-tech architects doesn't need to have this kind of square views though, e.g. sir Norman Foster does instead hire Bill Hillier and his research team to make thorough spatial syntax and pedestrian movement analyses as part of the preparation for his designs.
Although he tries to escape, Koolhaas to me seems to be trapped in a dilemma of architectural formal control.
Provisional conclusion
It seems as Koolhaas think, that if the planner or architect can't have complete control at the urban scale, he can as well give it up and jump to the opposite position. He can underplay the role of urban planning, and join forces with the political deregulators instead of taking the struggle, intellectually and practically, about what aspects, including social ones, that should be promoted (including what kind of urban development incentives and constraints should be established at different levels of planning and urban design).
If urbanism is about form separated form its social aspects and implications at an urban scale, or - what we also has seen lots of in this century - an 'urbanism', that at its core is 'anti-urban', urbanism of course will fail. The garden city movement, the CIAM-modernism, as well as different variations of neighbourhoods ideals (Perry, Mumford, etc.) were all called 'urban', 'city' or 'town' planning, but to me they all had anti-urban implications.
An 'urban planning' that does not know what 'the urban' is, does not of course have a chance as urban planning. If Koolhaas can be interpreted in this way, then I agree at a very general level of argument, but I doubt whether he is really interested in urbanity.
Anyhow, Koolhaas', leaves a lot to work on, and many of his views can be turned around. E.g. the statement that globalisation makes us strangers everywhere, might also be interpreted the opposite way, i.e. that globalisation will make us feel at home in many places, which I think is true as well. If you exchange the word globalisation by urbanisation, though, we are back to an issue of alienation that has been with us at least since the 19th century.
So what is my overall evaluation of Koolhaas' views of the city and urbanism after this? His critique of urbanism and the urban issue seems thin. His only excuse, really, is that the humanities and the social sciences make it easy for him to get away with it, as they have contributed with so little comprehensive, accessible knowledge of real value to architects and planners on the issue of urbanity. To me, Koolhaas most of all trigger resistance and opposition - and in the end this probably is part of what he wants. But maybe Koolhaas also, as many modernists and neo-modernists, does not have a distinction sharp enough of the possible difference between 'urbanisation' on the one hand and 'being urban' at the other, where urbanisation means the growth of settlement aggregates and possibly the simultaneous transformation of society from agrarian to developed industrial (i.e. modern), while 'being urban' means something else. This becomes more clear, I think, if we move the discussion to 'the informational city'.
Here Koolhaas and Castells intersect again. While Koolhaas, as mentioned, sees the 'generic city' as 'what is left over after large sections of urban life has crossed over into cyberspace', Castells in 'The Rise of the Network Society' mentions Koolhaas' work as a possible architectural expression of the 'space of flows' in the information age. (Castells (1996), p.421
Literature: (to be edited)