interview

Koolhaas on shopping
Transatlantic transactions
In this conversation with Rem Koolhaas,
arq probes some of the issues raised by
his research into shopping, the subject
of his latest book, The Harvard Design
School Guide to Shopping. He argues
that architects have largely ignored this
dominant form of urban activity, which
has prohibited us from having an effect
on its quality. Maintaining a critical but
open-minded position, he offers
insights of value to every architect.
arq: How might your research into
shopping affect what we do as
architects?
Koolhaas: It is my hope that our
investigation into shopping space
and how it differs from traditional
space can liberate us as architects.
For example, a completely bare and
strict architecture might reacquire
interest for us because we would
not be faced with this onslaught of
intentionality that characterizes
shopping environments. A freedom
could emanate from our re-looking
at architecture that now seems
incredibly boring. Too many
architects have been simulating an
atmosphere of frenzy in their work,
perhaps because of a subconscious
sense that anything that is not as
equally frenzied as shopping space
will not seem intentional.
arq: So its not the shopping spaces
themselves, but the residual spaces the
spaces outside of or between shopping
environments that we should pay more
attention to?
Koolhaas: Exactly. Those residual
spaces present incredible
opportunities for freedom,
freedom that previously didnt
exist. Yet Im reluctant to apply an
instrumentality to those spaces
because that has been one of the

weaknesses of architecture recently

to look to domains other than
architecture to give us tools, without
understanding or even having an
interest in those other domains.
arq: How has your being at Harvard
helped your research?
Koolhaas: Harvard wants people
committed to practice, yet it still
wants to connect them to the
institution, and theyve established
what they call professors in
practice. Its very intelligent
because it gives the advantage of
security without the certainty of
staleness. Your practice is supposed
to be energized to the point where
you remain interested and fresh as
long as you are there. I was initially
reluctant to be involved in teaching
because of the commitment of
time, but I eventually recognized
that it was a tremendous
opportunity; partly because the
diverse student body at Harvard
presents a unique opportunity to
look at issues of globalization. That
was a strong incentive. The other
was if I did only research, with the
complete absence of any design
teaching, it would give me a double
life as an architect and as a
researcher.
arq: How did your research into
shopping begin?
Koolhaas: The initial notion was to
have four consecutive projects,
each dealing with a different issue,
but ultimately to see what
connections there would be among
them. For example, I wanted to
investigate the Roman city, to see
how it is possible that the Romans,
with so few means, were able to
sustain cities and civilization in
which so much was public and so
little private, without resorting to

the systematic shift from public to

quasi-public that we are witnessing
in our own time. How is it that we,
in this moment of maximum
richness, are unable to support
public life, even though the
Romans dedicated 40% of their
cities to public life?
arq: But arent cities starting to devote
more space to public, pedestrian
activity?
Koolhaas: It is astonishing that we
tolerate a condition where, for
instance, 42nd Street in New York is
not surreptiously, but openly taken
away from the public realm and
given over to private interests, to
copyrighted design. That city
fundamentally offers an unlimited
number of choices, from the good
to the bad, but this creates a
situation where that unlimited
condition is reduced and turned
into an entirely predictable one.
In the 1960s and 70s, some of the
most significant thinkers about the
city, such as Jane Jacobs or Jacque
Robertson, based on an idealistic
assessment of the importance of
the street, had a paranoid and
slightly nostalgic sense of duty to
protect the street. They advocated
pedestrianization and other
specific measures to control
seemingly inevitable conditions in
the city, such as traffic and
congestion, and they were the first
of what would ultimately turn into
a much more ominous army of
people who take the city away. 42nd
Street reveals the interesting
connection between Disney and
pedestrianization, which creates in
the city an anti-urban, anti-modern
condition. But thinkers about the
city, from Mumford to Jacobs to
Huxtable, provided all of the
formal models and arguments for
this hijacking of urban surface.

interview

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arq . vol 5 . no 3 . 2001

interview

an incentive to continue suffering.

Market realism has the same effect.
arq: What can we do about this, as
architects?

Mall = City Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota

Also in America there is this

political correctness that is more
and more censorious vis--vis
certain activities, which has made
intellectuals complicit in the
laundry of the city. Antipornography campaigns have been
sponsored by some of the best
American thinkers, who may not
realize that they are actually
promoting Disneyfication. The
private and the public are shifting
into a condition of either being
controlled or abandoned.
arq: Has the city been taken away or
have we given it away?
Koolhaas: Exactly. It is all part of the
intellectual foreplay to this event.
arq: How does this laundering of the city
separate different classes of people, and
why have cities allowed this privatizing
of public space to occur?
Koolhaas: What always bothers me
about the Marxist analysis of class
is that it always talks about other
people and never incorporates the
person doing the analysis into
whatever scheme of things we are
talking about.
If we look at most cities in
America or Europe, they do not
have the means at their disposal to
do what needs to be done. Most are
poor or on the verge of bankruptcy,
and so are condemned to making
deals, selling off what they own,
namely land, to private interests,
who take the burden off their
hands. In some cases, they do this
quite sincerely, but it then forces
cities to institute fees on
commercial activity. It ultimately
comes down to the fact that nobody
wants to pay taxes, including
architects, and therefore we are the
ones who have abandoned any
sense of direct connection to what
is civic and our own enterprise as
architects.

arq: Andres Duany has talked about

how real estate investment seems to
push the production of commercial
space, whether or not a market even
exists for it. Why is this happening?
Koolhaas: This is one of the
absolutely interesting aspects of
this moment. We live under the
triumph of the mark economy, but
if we look at how things really work,
at the adjustment between supply
and demand, it is a unidirectional
system and the adjustment of two
things is never even remotely
present. We have seemingly
surrendered to a system of mood
swings and have entrusted our
entire well-being to the most
frivolous goal of profit, with 23-yearold people making these decisions.
This is an interesting
generational question. I had a
conversation with some designers
in New York, the oldest around 43
and the youngest 33. I asked them if
they thought the current economic
condition would continue the rest
of their lives, and they said yes.
When I asked them why, they said
that growth was the essence of the
market economy and that it will
never end; it is a terminal
condition. The situation is so
logical that there is no space to
change anything. That is the
brilliance of this system: in spite of
its patent insanity, it has
established itself as the ultimate
reality principle.
arq: Didnt communists say the same
thing?
Koolhaas: Thats why, in our
Chinese research, we had to
introduce the term market
realism, which is related to the
idea of socialist realism, where
socialism was extremely ingenious
in exploiting the gap between the
ultimate ideal and the present
discontent, and using that gap as

Koolhaas: I have an intuitive

confidence that things will change.
Everything changes about every 10
years, particularly everything that
seems permanent. But knowing
what to do about it is definitely an
area of weakness. In my life, as a
result, Ive always been interested in
being inside a condition and
criticizing it, rather than being on
the outside, but that gives the
impression of my complicity. I have
an extremely bad reputation as
someone who accepts everything.
For me that is very strange, because
I consider myself to be very critical.
arq: What is the relationship between
theatre and shopping? In both cases,
dont we give ourselves over to the
control of others?
Koolhaas: The whole notion of
shopping being thought of as a
theatrical experience has been
suggested by architects like Jon
Jerde, who have been involved in
creating these shopping
environments, and it is a very
distorted way of looking at them. It
is a kind of alibi. Jerde would like to
think he is an organizer of theatre,
but actually it is wishful thinking.
And by calling it theatre, shopping
is made to seem harmless,
harmlessness it doesnt deserve.
arq: Some have seen a conspiratorial
sense in your work on shopping.
Koolhaas: I have to take issue with
the idea that this work has a
conspiratorial thrust. The most
liberating part of this whole
enterprise is that it enables us to
look at qualities without being
obliged to point fingers. We deny
the sheer built volume of
commercial space in America, but
it is an important issue, regardless
of who is guilty for it.
arq: What effect do you see big-box
retailing having on the shopping mall?
Koolhaas: The real tendency is to
bypass the mall. On one side, there
is a completely strict outlet
condition of big-box stores, and on
other side, there are museumbrand stores that dont really sell
much. MOMA is a museum, but the
MOMA store disseminates the
museum in commercial space.
arq: You have talked about Singapore as
a city as a theme park? Is that an
outgrowth of that particular city itself or

interview

part of the internationalization of cities

generally?
Koolhaas: In my book S,M,L,XL, I
wrote about Singapore and tried to
reconstruct the last 40 years of its
existence. What fascinated me is
that Singapore is a city nation, with
a scale of operation that, in the
next century, will be more
convenient and relevant than scale
of a nation. The economic unit will
increasingly be defined by
metropolitan areas rather than by
cities or nations. That is where
Singapore is fortunate, and almost
a prototype.
The leaders of Singapore have
also distrusted traditional forms of
planning, and from the very
beginning, they have looked
systematically at alternatives. The
whole concept of a masterplan is a
displaced colonial device to impose
order on basically what is not to be
ordered or impossible to order. The
Singapore regime has always had a
strong instinct that it would
benefit from less order rather than
more order, or a more diffuse
condition rather than a condition
that is crystal clear and completely
established. From the very
beginning, there has been an
interest in promoting a kind of
vagueness of physical structure and
legal system, and in that vagueness,
the city becomes a series of blobs
rather than a sea of streets. That is a
very significant mutation, and that
will certainly be a prototype of the
future. That will never work on the
scale of entire countries. Where
regions differ among them in a
country, it will be exacerbated over
time and will be ever harder to hold
together under a single national
administration. In China, for
example, the differences and
tensions between the sea coast and
inland areas will make it
increasingly difficult.
arq: What effect will television shopping
have on the shopping experience?
Koolhaas: This is one of the things
that panics shopping centres, and
you begin to see an interesting
phenomenon in Europe, which is
more critical of shopping and tries
to control shopping in a way that is
much more rigorous and political
than in America. They control
shopping by controlling its sheer
volume or where shopping can go
in the city. Shopping is directed
away from the periphery to in or
near the city centre, but shopping
also disrupts the city because it
often is too big, so the city has to be
converted in a whole process of
falsification. But the country where
shopping is most controlled

City = Theme New York New York Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada

Germany is also where mail order

shopping is biggest. Therefore you
can theorize that the more
shopping actually exists, the fewer
the invisible means of shopping,
and the more it is controlled the
more people will have to rely on
other systems to shop, like
television.
arq: What about shopping centres that
fail?
Koolhaas: Thats an interesting
design issue. I want to look at the
question of a university moving
into a shopping centre, which is
very possible. Shopping centres are
built in ways that make them easy
to raze. And maybe they dont
deserve a whole question of what to
do with them except to abandon
them, demolish them, and start
from scratch. One of the important
things architectural culture has
eliminated from its repertoire is
the idea of beginning from scratch.
The idea that everything that has
ever existed has a right, almost by
definition, to exist for ever has put
us into a position where we cant
say that this should grow, that can
go, this is interesting, that isnt so
get rid of it. As a result, we are, as a
culture, incredibly burdened by
vast amounts of totally redundant
uninteresting space that weighs
heavily on our conceptual
maintenance bill and that would be
much better if just gone.
arq: But isnt that just an alibi for
developers who want to tear things
down all the time?
Koolhaas: Im involved in research,
but that doesnt make me an expert
in television or anything else. The
virtue of what we are doing is that
it is extremely limited and doesnt
put us in a position of condoning
interpretations of our work. We
offer it to you, but we are not the

people to tell you that one reading

of it is good and another is bad.
arq: Dont gigantic shopping
environments, though, represent a
concentration of money and power such
as that of Disney? And isnt that
concentration a threat to public life?
Koolhaas: Unfortunately we as
architects have never investigated
those concentrations as a creative
act. Large-scale shopping
environments are an evident
development where we prefer to
take a position of abstinence,
because of their presumed
undemocratic aspects. But by
maintaining that abstinence we
disqualify ourselves for any
participation, so we are in the
difficult situation where our
judgment before investigation has
now put us in a position that makes
it hard to judge ever again.
Its probably nonsense to say that
all concentrations are
undemocratic. Then every
skyscraper would be so. New York
City is an example of how
accumulation can be given a
framework that is still public and
democratic, so I dont think is
particularly ominous. When we are
involved in large-scale projects, we
must make judgments on an
individual basis about whether
they are good or bad.
The book:
Based on research by Harvard students
in 199798, the Harvard Design
School Guide to Shopping is edited
by Rem Koolhaas, Chuihua Judy Ching,
Jeffrey Inaba and Sze Tsung Leong and
published by TASCHEN America, 800pp,
paperback $49.99. The Guide explores
the spaces, people, techniques, ideologies
and inventions by which shopping has so
dramatically refashioned the city. The
illustrations (by Sze Tsung Leong)
accompanying this interview are taken
from the book.

arq . vol 5 . no 3 . 2001

203

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11/2001