Notes from the show 'Progress / OMA' @ Barbican

Desert

As a quasi-apocalyptic mood holds us, and the idea of a worldwide wave of 'saving' the environment shows signs of faltering - too expensive, politically unfeasible - we should rediscover the beauty of the desert: not only as a metaphor of our future, but perhaps as a state we could aspire to: present in unimaginable quantities, distributed over the entire globe, pure, often surprisingly habitable, (at least part of the year), they are also easier to "protect" than more demanding ecologies... A good way to begin our future...

Countryside

What did those billions who left the city leave behind? The countryside is now the front line of transformation. A world formerly dictated by the seasons and the organization of agriculture is now a toxic mix of genetic experiment, science, incidental inhabitation, tax incentives, investment, political turmoil, spill over development, terminal class warfare, in other words more volatile than the most accelerated city...

Generics

If 'bloated' is the word that best describes the outcome of many forms of contemporary exaggeration / excess - bloated sectors, bloated bills - can we make sobriety appealing? Generic medicines have been a noticeable success in the war against inflation. Can we achieve the same effect in architecture by introducing GENERICS, designs that focus on essentials, repeatable perhaps, prefabricated even? Projects for instance that would embody legal minimums, foreign worker accommodation, a resurrection of the modernists' existenziminimum*, a voluntary surrender of that is unnecessary, that could have a political potential...

*the minimum accommodation necessary for a dignified existence.

Notes from 'Junkspace' by Rem Koolhaas

Air-conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air-conditioning unites them. Air-conditioning has dictated mutant regimes of organisation and coexistence that leave architecture behind. A single shopping centre is now the work of generations of space planners, repairmen and fixers, like in the Middle Ages; air-conditioning sustains our cathedrals.

[...]

Junkspace is additive, layered, and lightweight, not articulated in different parts but subdivided, quartered the way a carcass is torn apart - individual chinks severed from a universal condition. There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently covered in mirror or gold. Structure groans invisibly underneath decoration, or worse, has become ornamental; small, shiny, space frames support normal loads or huge means deliver cyclopic burdens to unsuspecting destinations... The arch, once the workhorse of structures, has become the depleted emblem of "community", welcoming an infinity of virtual populations to nonexistent there.

[...]

Because it cannot be grasped, Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screen saver; its refusal to freeze ensures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest. Its geometries are unimaginable, only makable.

[...]

The aesthetic is Byzantine, gorgeous, and dark, splintered into thousands of shards, all visible at the same time: a quasi-panoptical universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split second around the dizzy eye of the beholder.

Notes from "Hans Ulrich Obrist, The conversation series - Rem Koolhaas"

Hans Ulrich Obrist - Can you tell me about Junkspace?

Gjon Mili, 1947

Rem Koolhaas - One of the consequences is that parts of the building are never in the same space, which inevitably means that certain parts of the building are dying while other parts are being reborn, others are being used while some are still being finished. So, where buildings used to exist in one single time, now each part has a different timeframe and we have become completely used to the fact (although it is an insane situation) that half of our building scheme is in the process of conversion. Now it only consists of taping, gluing, not even hammering. So therefore, what has become the prominent force (and it can only be related to the market economy) is this unbelievably shared exposure of every individual, form the most famous to the most normal. I think that Andy Warhol famously said - probably also in 1972 - that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes; I think reality is much more tragic, much closer to hell, in that everyone will be famous forever. We are condemned to be collectively famous!
So basically, to define the architecture that we are working in, the text which is called Junkspace, was based on a famous economic model that has fuelled that market economy over the last thirty years. As you may know, to various theories "space junk" is the debris that is created by different satellite and planetary ventures. In a way, all the world relies on has the same junk status - junk space. It is not a negative term, but just the kind of term that defines the expectations and the properties that architecture can have today.