Rem Koolhaas's Writing on Cities: Poetic Perception and Gnomic Fantasy

Author(s): William S. Saunders

Source: Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 51, No. 1 (Sep., 1997), pp. 61-71
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools of
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 Rem Koolhaas's Writing on Cities:
Poetic Perception and Gnomic Fantasy

WILLIAM S. SAUNDERS, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Rem Koolhaas's writing about cities attempts to communicate poetic REM KOOLHAAS, I
perceptions of underlying fundamental realities. When the "poetry" is cut much, and achiev
loose from the "perception," the writing degenerates into melodramatic,
romantic fantasy. When the emphasis is on perception, as it is particularly in give less. His a
the later essays on Atlanta, Singapore, and Generic Cities, the poetry-the perceptions of ur
depth and feeling-reinforces the astuteness of perceptive grasp. The
weakness of Koolhaas's writing on cities can be understood as resulting from
forced, melodr
his unfortunate conviction that creative freedom, which he values above all, contradictory, ex
does not need to be engaged with otherness--that it needs, in fact, to be all to maintain f
capricious, private fantasy ex nihilo, inscribed on a tabula rasa.
On the one hand
other wishful thi
fierce about his r
a world constr
supersede the na
K Tm i .iom yi -Y
the poetic realist
the fantast; thi
megalomania th
endemic to most
Koolhaas the
pseudopoet of f
Delirious New Y
*AN

and instructive K
161! a journalist (as h
history) and not
However, he is a
feeling and intu
1. "Luna Park atat his Coney
Night, unreducti
Island, N
to demonstrate and
convincingly "The Terrify
hints of the
extravagance of this
world. fantasy
(Cou
Press, from "Learning
Delirious New Japane
York, p. 40.)
and "Generic Cit
from specific exp
"Bigness" and "W
absolute, monoli
half of complexi
Koolhaas's poet
follow a line of r
William Blake's
and T.S. Eliot's W
of writing dema
one would expec
Disputing the d
other writers, w
willing to take p
perceptions are o
All this does n
Journal or should
ofArchitectural notpp
Education, b
? 1997 ACSA, following
Inc. Rolan

61 Saunders

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the vitality and interest of the vision or language, not its truthful-
ness, are all that matter (since knowing "truth" can only be a wish-
ful illusion). There is bad poetry as well as good in Blake, Dickens,
Eliot, and Koolhaas, and the quality of the poetry depends on its
responsibility to realities beyond the writer's psyche, even though
the best measure of this quality might be not "factuality" but rather
the presence or absence of the author's self-deception, his ability to
distinguish, among his own words, phony rhetoric from careful ar-
ticulation of genuine experiences. So much of surrealist art (which
has been highly influential on Koolhaas) is embarrassingly bad be-
cause it assumes that dreams are automatically profound.
Koolhaas overreads and romanticizes many of the urban
phenomena that he at the same time so sharply and originally
perceives: Coney Island, skyscrapers, Manhattan(ism), congestion,
Radio City Music Hall, the Berlin Wall, and so on. Koolhaas the
contrarian, determined to be unconventional, reverses expectations
that Europeans will view America condescendingly. Hating
European snobbery and effeteness, he goes, at times, to an opposite
extreme and becomes a gullible, bedazzled idealizer of the American
and associated phenomena: blankness, the ordinary, the unself-
conscious, the self-indulgent, the ugly, the crude, the banal. In "The
Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century," he calls edge-city
conditions "ridiculously beautiful" and speaks of "the arbitrary
delusions of order, taste, and integrity" (p. 206, S,M,L,XL).3 About
a late modernist development in Holland hated by many, he writes,
"The Bijlmer offers boredom on a heroic scale. In its monotony,
harshness, and even brutality, it is, ironically, refreshing" (p. 871,
S). Although one can understand becoming jaded with
postmodernist architecture and with the burden of European
tradition to the point of angry revolt, this last response has pushed
revolt into unreason.
As an iconoclast of pretensions, a despiser of moralism (from
his sense of what is more truly moral), and a Nietzschean who
prefers vital evil to conformist goodness, Koolhaas can be
devastating but salubrious. Who else has such a biting sense of how
architects can fool themselves into feeling heroic and powerful?
Who does not long feel an acute nostalgia for types who
could, no more than 15 years ago, condemn (or was it
liberate, after all?) whole areas of alleged urban desperation,
change entire destinies, speculate seriously on the future with
diagrams of untenable absurdity, leave entire auditoriums
panting over doodles left on the blackboard, manipulate
politicians with their savage statistics-bow ties the only
external sign of their madness? (p. 199, 5)
September 1997 JAE 51/1 62
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Who else resists knee-jerk negativism about figures like John
Portman and can therefore see complexity where others see only
stereotypes to scorn? But it is in the name of this worldly realism
that his romanticization, even sentimentalization of the banal is
justified, and the achievements, however localized, of recent
"highbrow" architecture and urban design (for instance that of
Rafael Moneo and the city of Barcelona) are neglected.
In Delirious New York, Koolhaas's basic romanticization is of
fantasy itself. Built form that plays out fantasies of wished-for states
of mind or lifestyles is glorified for its putative freedom, and in the
process, the deprivation of more reliable fulfillment than that self-
indulgent fantasy can provide is overlooked. In this way, Koolhaas
participates in a key weakness of poststructuralist thinking: Without
a belief in the knowability of otherness, desire becomes onanistic,
and inner life lacks imagination's grasping for fulfilling engagement
with the nonself. This confusion of freedom with caprice (the Ital-
ian capriccio perhaps conveys the sense of footloose fantasy better),
this linked assumption that a predetermined (designed) environ-
ment is a limitation, not an enablement or a vitalization, has skewed
and cramped Koolhaas's entire intellectual career. "Architecture is
monstrous in the way each choice leads to the reduction of possibil-
ity. It implies a regime of either/or decisions often claustrophobic,
even for the architect" (p. 344, 5).4 Quite the opposite might be
true: Each good architectural choice leads to the exhilarating sense
that the next choice has a measure of necessity to it, as the architec-
tural work suppresses the architect's mere capriciousness: the work
frees the architect from his or her determined, habitual, and merely
private self. This reflects a very different Nietzschean idea--Amor
fati-you are free when you love what fate provides you. "Private
meanings ... insulated against the corrosion of reality" (p. 104, D)
have romantic appeal for Koolhaas. He describes Theodore Starrett's
1911 proposal for a one-hundred-floor building: " each compart-
ment is equipped to pursue its private existential journey: the build-
ing has become a laboratory, the ultimate vehicle of emotional and
intellectual adventure" (p. 91, D). The equation of adventure with
private journeys is symptomatic.
Coney Island, like other amusement parks, appears in some
historical and novelistic accounts (like Maxim Gorky's) not only as
an amusing, dazzling fantasyland of "harmless" escape, but also as
a place of delusions exploiting, for handsome profits, the stupidity,
base desire, and gullibility of the lower and middle classes. But
Coney Island looks to Koolhaas like a great liberation from the
shackles of Western rationalism, a "revolution" (p. 76, D), and an
expression of "genius" (p. 70, D). Instead of appearing as humanly
grotesque and cruel as it must have been, Coney Island's Midget
 2. "A machine for metropolitan bachelors." "Eating oysters
with boxing gloves, naked, on the nth floor . . . the 20th
century in action." This is maximum creative living?
(Courtesy of The Monacelli Press, from Delirious New York,
?o ..

p. 159.)
, . . .: ;

*,.

City becomes an abstraction to Koolhaas, a springboard for

philosophizing: "'a miniature Midget City Fire Department
responding [every hour] to a false alarm'-effective reminder of
man's existential futility" (p. 49, D). The lake at Luna Park, at the
end of the Shoot-the-Chutes, according to Koolhaas's inflated
interpretation, "invites descent into the regions of collective
unconscious" (p. 39, D). When Koolhaas refers to "the arguments
respectable culture will mobilize to denigrate its probable
replacement: the potentially sublime is criticized for being cheap
and unreal" (p. 67, D), he has failed to demonstrate convincingly
that there are hints of the sublimeleast,
in theisextravagance
full of people" (p. fantasy
of this 205, S)-T
the
world. (The sublime, I would argue, two. A
entails anparticularly flagrant
extraordinary rom
degree
bigness
of felt contact with suprapsychic in Delirious
otherness.) reads,
What he "The Mon
has done is
the agonies
demonstrate the enchanting escapism ofthe
of these continuous
ingenious changes
inventions.
Writing about Manhattan and sis added).
the There
creation is little reason
of skyscrapers in to b
ers ever
Delirious New York, Koolhaas continues towere
presssignificantly
on his material mixed
a
highly unified vision that has both the power
humanly of myth and
dead transactions of the
the gr
distortion of melodrama. Like the figures
not, that resonate
as is obvious most Trade
in the World as
heroes (and sometimes also monsters)
whelming in his dreams-Wallace
activities. Rockefeller Cen
tainly.
Harrison, Hugh Ferriss, Raymond The John
Hood, Downtown Athletic
Portman, the C
governors of Singapore-Koolhaassections
is captivated by the
and mixed Promethean
programs, scene
gloves,
desire to remake reality and supersede naked,Manhattan's
nature. on the nth grid,
floor"as
(p.
"a conceptual speculation," "claims the
creative superiority
living? Certainlyof mental
not, unless y
man's hedonism.
construction over reality ... the subjugation, if not obliteration, of
The
nature its true ambition" (p. 20, D). weakening of is
"Manhattanism Koolhaas's
the onlyto
romantic
program where the efficiency intersects fantasy
with is evident
the sublime" in rep
(p. 174,
D). The reality is more surely mundane:
sentencesThe grid
form was paragraphs
whole chosen for to
its simplicity and efficiency; the meaning: "Coney Island
early skyscrapers is a fetal M
were motivated,
fiction of
in their program, their multiplication device for conveying
floorplates, and-mostim
"historical
important here-their more extravagant skins,present" verb
by business tense: "Ho
interests.
Architecturally, Manhattan putmidnight'-appears
an exciting, even exhilarating
frequently. Most
mystical/magical
flourish on the making of money; thinking,
the Great Gatsby the mo
flair served
mammon; ostentation dominatedalso
more than "The
appears: Nietzschean vitalism.
Carnarsie Indians,
Koolhaas, from Delirious Newpeninsula,
York to S,ML,XL, has the
have named no-
it Narrioch
early recognition
tion that multiple fluid programmatic that into
uses, compacted it is large
to be a
phenomena"
areas, create a condition of maximum potential(p. 30,
for D). And,
desirable fin
life.
generalizations:
However, this notion, like his concept "The
of freedom, sphere
is based on aapp
architectural
questionable assumption: that proximity history,
by itself generally co
creates significant
moments"
interaction, that some kind of precious (p. 71,
vitality isD).
automatically
obtained when working, shopping,One leisure,
of theand residing
weaker occur in
moments in S,
propinquity. The just as likely (if essay,
not more Koolhaas is at his
likely) scenario most
is that,
in any conditions of vast scale and great congestion,
megalomaniac, proclaiming the people
death
easily with
experience a life-inhibiting, demoralizing the forces
anonymity ofisolation;
and hyperdevel
rapacious),
they mill around each other unseeingly. making
He writes absolutistic
of statem
the edge-city
condition around La Defense that architecture"
it "mysteriously (p.works,
495) and "Big
or, at

B3 Saunders

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architecture" (p. 516). The essay displays the "Paranoid-Critical
Method" that Koolhaas accuses Le Corbusier of using: "The reality
of the external world is used for illustration and proof... to serve
the reality of our mind" (p. 238, D). In his ideas about Bigness,
Generic Cities, and globalization, Koolhaas commits the logical fal-
lacy of presenting part of the truth as the whole, presenting certain
conditions-such as those in new Chinese cities-as the conditions.
Whereas it is possible to understand why certain aspects of archi-
tecture as traditionally understood-attention to detail, craftsman-
ship, and relatively small spatial and formal gestures-might
become irrelevant or impotent at huge scales, it is another thing to
assume that no architectural refinements or subtleties are possible at
that scale (consider Rockefeller Center), to neglect that interiors of
even the largest buildings still could contain refined architectural
detail, and to avoid considering that vast quantities of building will
be done at small scales for the foreseeable future.
Koolhaas believes that the blandness, blankness, and
"neutrality" of huge architecture is liberating because it is
programmatically indeterminate, whereas it can easily be seen as
oppressively dulling and depersonalizing. He would like to think
that the characterlessness of huge buildings dialectically
"exacerbates . . . specificity" (p. 511, S). Perhaps his most
prominent epigram is, "Where there is nothing, everything is
possible. Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible" (p.
199, 5). Again, this unfortunate confusion of freedom with caprice.
Koolhaas says of generic edge-city towers that "the least these things
represent is an enormous freedom: freedom from formal coherence,
freedom from having to simulate a community, freedom from
behavioral patterns."5 Freedom as freedom from, not freedom for;
freedom as arbitrariness, action without engagement.
Strong and distinctive architecture could be defined as that
which arouses and challenges us to meet it with an equal inner
strength. The best buildings do not dominate us; they enliven us.
But can any of us, turning our thoughts to examples of what
Koolhaas thinks of as huge, blank, and therefore less restricting
architecture, imagine any such structure or complex-Empire State
Plaza in Albany, the World Trade Center in New York, edge-city
office complexes-as anything but enervating, with little
spontaneous human interest or content?
In addition, it is important to ask whether, in fact, Bigness
does and will dominate new "urban substance" except in extreme
situations like those in China, where the population explosion forces
the rapid creation of new cities (conditions, admittedly, that are
expected to become more common in the developing world). In the
developed world, there has been a significant popular reaction
September 1997 JAE 51/1 64
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against large buildings; many developers want to create smaller,
more intimate scales in their attempts to meet market demand.
However nostalgic and fake, New Urbanist development, as
espoused by Andres Duany and others, and endless suburban
"colonial" tracts are what American consumers predominantly prefer
to any vibrantly congested megastructure.6 Finally, it is worth
seconding Richard Ingersoll's point7 that Bigness means surrender
to "bidness" (Texan for "business") more than, as Koolhaas says,
"surrender to technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers;
to politics; to others . .. a realignment with neutrality" (p. 514, 5).
Big bland structures communicate not "neutrality," but indifference
to anything but making money.
Before I turn to Koolhaas's enormous contributions to an
understanding of new urban conditions, "Bigness" brings me to one
last aspect of Koolhaas's writing: the general absence of people
except as abstractions, as atoms in a spectacle of larger, impersonal
forces. Koolhaas's view of people is as if from a great height, so that
they appear as ants, flowing in masses, engaged in generic
activities-shopping, working, recreating, and residing-mobs at
Coney Island, crowds moving on escalators and ramps. (Koolhaas
is moonstruck by circulation in itself.) When he confesses the
"primitive fact of simply liking asphalt, traffic, neon, crowds,
tension, the architecture of others, even" (p. 208, 5), the impersonal
dominates. Those individuals that do appear in his writing-for
example, Portman, Hood, and Ferriss-are dramatized,
mythologized, and made larger than life. Seldom is there a sense of
the daily experiences of ordinary people or the consciousness of
individuals-the only real locus, one might argue, of life-the kind
of sense one gets in Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great
American Cities. When Koolhaas describes the relocation of
hundreds of thousands of Singapore shantytown inhabitants into
high-rise apartments, there is only a generalized sense of the
violence of this act and of people's apparent adaptation to this
extreme change. He speaks with exhilaration elsewhere of "chickens
on the fortieth floor" of housing near Hong Kong, without seeming
to consider the nasty implications of this for health and happiness.8
A Sartrean nausea with the human and certainly the
humanistic appears in many of Koolhaas's essays. He associates
humanism with the soft, sentimental, and deluded. The Nietzsche
in him wants something much more fierce, even at some cost. This
side of Koolhaas likes and wants to play with the heartless Big Boys:
the developers, the mad Corbusier who would flatten all to create
endless sterile Villes Radieuses, John Portman trying to make Atlanta
a monument to his self-proclaimed genius, the governors of
Singapore wiping out hundreds of thousands of poor people's
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4. Film still: Luis Bufiuel and Salvador Dali, Un Chien And
1929. Koolhaas's fascination with the loathsome. (Museum
Modern Art, New York, Film Stills Archive. Reprinted in S,M
p. 235. Courtesy of The Monacelli Press.)

ironic contrast, among images of his a

Dall'Ava in Paris (p. 142, S). This Koo
Sade, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller,
the realm beyond morality, quickened
ing it as his diction on the erasing of
3. "Asian City of Tomorrow," of uprooting" (p. 1037, S, emphasi
Singapore Planning and Urban
Research (SPUR) Group, 65-67. Koolhaas's ideal of the "culture
of S,M,L,XL,
congestion." (SPUR. Reprinted in this Koolhaas
S,M,L,XL, includes
p. 1056. pict
Courtesy
of The Monacelli Press.) Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou film

sliced (pp. 233, 235, S) and seems sym

ideas of the "'sacred' animal world ba
dwellings. Koolhaas is cess"to
drawn (p. their
232, S) to which he
daring, refers ju
extremi
This Koolhaas loves the [Berlin] impersonality
clean wall suggested that architectu
of mac
in the Rockettes' lineportional
dance to its horror"
"an (p. 226, 5). T
exhilarating
what he loathes: He
individuality to . . . automatism" spends
(p. 214, many
D).hour
He
impersonal and anonymous lanta as
architectural
comforting,firms whose practic
a retrea
stress: "Bigness . . . offersKoolhaas's
degrees possible need to break .f
of serenity.
impersonal: the architect refinement might also
is no longer help explain t
condemned h
512-13, 5). This Koolhaasthe ugly, thein
includes banal-his wish to
the same exist
book
hand lowbrow guy.
(his, probably) imperiously (His S,M,L,XL
peeling dictionar
away blocks
urban fabric from a modeldream
(p. in life is
1108, to wear
S),' evensweats
afterand g
re
harshness, the shock, of theKoolhaas shares attitudes with Robe
obvious insanity" (p.
Corbusier's similar attempts. This Koolhaas
Brown of Learningfrom is
Las Vegas, with
pornography, the poststructuralists
subjugation of women who
inreject
male the hig
fant
Whitman-like,eager
Koolhaas is Faustian, Promethean, he celebrates "the sp
to create a
nature, to be God's rival.
masses" (p. 70, D). Most startlingly, we
"Sick unto death" with in
intellectual and
the essay "Last moral
Apples": conve
"When we
ity and 100%
self-righteousness, with
this these programmatic
Koolhaas en
might be sick
side of himself that is drastically
morally in the cultural
fastidious, and politi
overly se
cultured, an inheritor of wondered
the Dutchwhether-paradoxically
refinement repr by p
Vermeer picture of a Bigness,
woman even in a
playing Europe-it could be
harpsicord th

65 Saunders

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nocent about architecture, to use architecture to articulate the new,
to imagine-no longer paralyzed by knowledge, experience, cor-
rectness-the end of the Potemkin world" (p. 668, 5). This confes-
sion of a momentary wish to be free of responsibility, to be swept
away by larger forces, contains an underlying sadness at the impos-
sibility of being spontaneous, childlike, ignorant, American.'o
This brings us to the need to see the other sides of Koolhaas:
the European, the refined, the highbrow, the man revolted by
crudity, cruelty, and power. He is-and this explains his lasting
interest-a man of many selves.
Koolhaas participates to some extent in a mode of contempo-
rary historical/cultural thinking that seems to predominate in recent
"cultural studies" of cities-writing of unrelenting negativism and
cynicism, one that stares down and exposes the worst in the harshest
possible light, that sees corruption, greed, and callousness as perva-
sive in the recent development of cities. These writers include Mike
Davis on Los Angeles (City of Quartz, 1990), David Harvey on Bal-
timore and Thatcher's London (in Architectural Practices in the Nine-
ties, 1996), and Neil Smith and Christine Boyer on New York (in
Michael Sorkin's Variations on a Theme Park, 1992). On the surface,
the tone of this writing is cool and factual, but the conditions being
presented are quite disturbing. There are heavy black ironies in just
"stating the facts." Beneath the surface are shock, disgust, rage, and
despair. Overall, the attitude is one of radical political toughness.
The strength of this writing is its determination to see the
underbelly of misleading appearances, no matter how unpleasant
the experience. (Its weaknesses are two: It has no lightness-it
lugubriously neglects whole realms of positive experience, such as
the harmless pleasure one can take in Disneyland-and it offers no
hope, no constructive, realistic resistances or alternatives.) Koolhaas
shares this determination; he presents historical narratives (such as
the story of John Portman building in Atlanta) that are neutral on
the surface and caustic just beneath. But unlike these writers,
Koolhaas's responses are often multiple, including awareness of
whatever might be impressive, heroic, and creative in what is also
grotesque (like Singapore's tabula rasa). He espouses "lite
urbanism" (p. 971, 5) and is, as a writer, often playful and
humorous" ; self-important seriousness is what he thinks we should
have learned, from the heroic modernists, to avoid. And Koolhaas
is not merely cynically detached; he dares to hope that one can
participate meaningfully, if modestly, in the forces of contemporary
urban development. For that very reason, he is attacked by the
bleaker urbanists for being opportunistic or naive: How can one
expect to "inflect"--to use Sanford Kwinter's word--the course of
a tidal wave? Why surf it at all?12
September 1997 JAE 51/1 66
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Koolhaas's writing is multivocal. The same sentence can seem
caustic, celebratory, and factual: "This is hideous ... this is exciting
... this is simply the way things are." Since Koolhaas more often
embraces "both/and" than chooses "either/or," single perspective
responses to his ideas are off the mark; simple approval or disapproval
of his "positions" will usually neglect that there are conflicting sides
to his thinking. Yet there can be slipperiness in this complexity, a
defensive maneuvering to stand on no one spot for very long, a
compulsion to be "free" even if that forces self-contradiction.
To string out some of his many contradictions: Koolhaas
wants to be (or is) both American and European, practical and
theoretical, lowbrow and highbrow, yielding and controlling, meek
and powerful, innocent and worldly, personal and impersonal,
individualistic and anonymous, hedonistically or rebelliously
amoral and puritanically moral.'3 "A foolish consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds" (Emerson). Koolhaas, speaking of the
Generic City, writes, "Strangely, nobody has thought that
cumulatively the endless contradictions of these interpretations
prove the richness of the Generic City" (p. 1256, S)-or of
Koolhaas's perceptions.
"Sometimes it is important to find out what the city is-
instead of what it was, or what is should be" (p. 832, 5). This, the
first sentence of the Atlanta essay, encapsulates what Koolhaas does
best. I will try to demonstrate below that many, if not most, of his
perceptions of new urban conditions and productions are
exceptionally clear and convincing: one has that "I knew that was
true, but never could put it into words" feeling. His attitude is more
one of fascination than of evaluation. Koolhaas's "poem," "Learning
Japanese" (pp. 88-110, S)-a series of detailed anecdotes and so-
ciological observations from his first trip to Japan, boldly uncen-
sored-illustrates how Koolhaas, when he focuses, as poets usually
do, on immediate experience, writes more vividly and allows the
violation of (or indifference to) any totalizing polemical ideas.
Similarly, "The Generic City" is a playfully messy soup of
astute observations presented in an unpredictable diversity of tones.
Koolhaas's primary motivation seems to be provocation and the
subversion of conventional perceptions. Although he hardly
mentions any specific places-as a social scientist interested in proof
would-we know full well what he is talking about and when he is
on or off the mark. He is mainly on. The nature of the
overwhelming similarities of cities worldwide is his focus. His hard-
nosed (or nose-thumbing) main point is that these similarities
express current authentic articulations of life and that any individual
identities of cities-derived from cliches and artificial resuscitation
of their histories--are relatively inauthentic. The reality is not now
the historical identity but the packaging and selling of that identity:
"Paris can only become more Parisian-it is already on its way to
becoming hyper-Paris, a polished caricature" (p. 1248, 5). More
"authentic" urban activities now occur at Paris's periphery.
He begins with the argument that I have criticized above:
"The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists
expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction" (p. 1248, 5). The
alternative that Koolhaas does not consider-that strong identities
can and should provoke strong responses and the lack of identity
provokes mere caprice-leads him into celebrating the Generic City
as, in principle, the stage for freedom. However, by the third page
of the essay, Koolhaas has begun forgetting this principle and de-
scribing the Generic City for what it is, not only refreshingly authen-
tic, but also hideously dead. "It is a place of weak and distended
sensations, few and far between emotions.... The Generic City is
sedated.... The serenity of the Generic City is achieved by evacua-
tion of the public realm. . . . Its main attraction is its anomie" (pp.
1250-5 1 , S). This helps us realize that for Koolhaas, the city of effi-
ciency, dedicated only to business, is nothing like his Manhattan of
the teens, twenties, and thirties or like Fumihiko Maki's metabolist
city of the sixties, places of fertile chaos, maximum interaction, and
existential intensity.
The remainder of the essay, aside from a few moments of
melodramatic exaggeration, is witty, sharp, and often original
diagnosis. Consider these observations: 1) The Generic City (I will
abbreviate it GC) is unified by "controlled neatness, a moralistic
assertion of good intentions" (p. 1253). Surely we are familiar with
the demoralizing "Stay offl" hygiene of litter-free and overmanicured
lawns surrounding corporate towers. (2) (Bad) public art is prevalent
in the GC as a feeble attempt to revive streets. (3) "Decks, bridges,
tunnels, and motorways-a huge proliferation of the paraphernalia
of connection--[are] frequently draped with ferns and flowers as if
to ward off original sin" (p. 1254). Planting and landscaping are the
GC's pathetic attempt to "beautify" by returning the natural/real to
the city-with the laughable effect of making nature seem fake. (4)
Each GC has a quarter called "Lipservice," which turns the city's
history into a consumer commodity-an observation that pervades
Variations on a Theme Park as well, but without Koolhaas's biting
humor: "History returns not as farce here, but as service: costumed
merchants (funny hats, bare midriffs, veils) voluntarily enact the
conditions (slavery, tyranny, disease, poverty, colony)-that their
nation once went to war to abolish" (p. 1257). (5) "Each Generic
City has a waterfront, not necessarily with water. .. . Here tourists
congregate in droves around a cluster of stalls" (p. 1257). (6) Ho-
tels and airports are becoming cities unto themselves, now provid-
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ing places for business and leisure activities, as well as shopping. (It's
a sign of flexibility that Koolhaas's feeling here is that this "implies
imprisonment" [p. 1260], in contrast to his glorification of huge
mixed-use structures in "Bigness.") (7) The typical colors and
shoddy postmodern design and construction techniques of building
in GCs are presented in satirical detail; for example, new building
depends more than ever "on the curtain wall industry, on ever more
effective adhesives and sealants that turn each building into a
mixture of straitjacket and oxygen tent . . . a triumph of glue over
the integrity of materials" (p. 1261). (8) Atria-big empty spaces-
are used as substitutes for impressive architectural substance.
This list of sharp observations could continue for another page.
They have their inherent revelatory value, but they also help dispel the
common critique of Koolhaas that he yields to contemporary urban
conditions uncritically. The key distinction, of course, is between
accepting as real and accepting as desirable. It is Koolhaas's driven,
often solitary pursuit of an awareness of what is newly real in cities
and his insistence on opposing our need not to see these realities that
leads to the mistaken sense that he likes all of what he sees.
Nothing could prove this as well as the final paragraph of
"Generic Cities," in which Koolhaas imagines the production of the
GC as the playing in reverse of a Hollywood Bible story movie-
from a wild, teeming, diverse, chaotic bazaar to that scene evacuated,
barren and lifeless. For Koolhaas, the city as it should be is the first;
as it is, painfully, the second. In a public conversation with George
Baird, Koolhaas tried to clarify this key issue: "Alignment doesn't
mean, for me, that we take an uncritical position toward the phe-
nomena that interest us. It's possible to want to respond to a ten-
dency that seems triumphant, without necessarily being euphoric
about it. In our work, we try to combine criticism of a phenomenon
with an ability to work within and parallel to it."'4 Reasonable
people certainly can and do disagree with Koolhaas about how help-
less design professionals are to influence the dominant modes of
development and about how significant exceptions to those modes
are, but it is also possible to see reason in Koolhaas's assertion that
unless you accept most of the terms the world presents you, you can-
not hope to have any effects at all.
"Atlanta," presented as a talk in 1987 and revised in 1994,
seems to be the seed of the 1994 "Generic Cities" essay; Atlanta is
a prime example of a Generic City. In the halls of Harvard's
Graduate School of Design (GSD), discussions of this essay center
on whether Koolhaas likes or dislikes Atlanta: Some are unsure,
others sure but with opposite conclusions. The reality, I think, is
that the terms like and dislike are not pertinent in this case;
Koolhaas is, rather, intensely interested in Atlanta, feels mainly
wonder about it, and whatever evaluations he has change subtly
from sentence to sentence. Certainly, there is plenty of sarcasm:
"Atlanta has culture, or at least it has a Richard Meier museum" (p.
835). "In a book on John Portman by John Portman, John
Portman writes, 'I consider architecture frozen music"' (p. 839).
But in presenting most details on the city, his tone is, "That's just
the way it is; it's what we have to work with." The realization that
Koolhaas loves his cities congested and chaotic like Piranesi's Rome
we bring in largely from outside this essay's context.
Again, astute observations proliferate: "[Atlanta's] strongest
contextual givens are vegetal and infrastructural: forests and roads.
Atlanta is not a city; it is a landscape" (p. 835). "Atlanta has nature,
both original and improved-a sparkling, perfect nature where no
leaf is ever out of place. Its artificiality sometimes makes it hard to tell
whether you are outside or inside: somehow, you're always in nature"
(p. 836). "The vegetal is replacing the urban: a panorama of seamless
artificiality, so organized, lush, welcoming, that it sometimes seems
like another interior, a fluid collective domain, glimpsed through
tinted glass, venetian blinds, and the other distancing devices of the
alienated architecture-almost accessible, like a seductive fairy tale"
(p. 855). Koolhaas's sensibility here surely deserves to be called poetic,
catching telling complexities of experience ("glimpsed through tinted
glass"), of feeling ("you're always in nature"-metaphorically), or of
attitude ("seamless artificiality, so organized, lush, welcoming"). "No
leaf is ever out of place," however, conveys the undertone of stewing
emotions: hatred, amusement, chagrin, horror, disgust, and so on.
Other cutting observations: Portman's reinvention of the atrium is "a
container of artificiality that allows its occupants to avoid daylight
forever-a hermetic interior, sealed against the real" (p. 841); design-
ers of the new downtown towers don't care about the towers being a
complementary group-they want them to compete; postmodern
architecture, dominant because it can be made quickly and cheaply,
makes inspiration an outdated concept.
Perhaps the most interesting and complex of Koolhaas's
responses in "Atlanta" is to the new breed of architects he
encountered on a tour of Atlanta firms. These are the architects of
postmodernism,
a new form of professionalism, of architectural education, not
one that creates knowledge or culture, but a technical training
that creates a new unquestioning, a new efficacy in applying
new, streamlined dogma .... [These architects] no longer
create order, resist chaos, imagine coherence, fabricate
entities. From form givers they have become facilitators. In
Atlanta, architects have aligned themselves with the uncon-
September 1997 JAE 51/1 68
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trollable, have become its official agents, instruments of the
unpredictable: from imposing to yielding in one generation.
Working on the emergence of new urban conditions, they
have discovered a vast new realm of potential and freedom to
go rigorously with the flow, architecture/urbanism as a form
of letting go. (pp. 847-49)
These comments are amazingly multivocal. "Technical train-
ing ... unquestioning ... dogma ... facilitators"-clearly these are
caustic words. But what about that last sentence? Doesn't it show
admiration and a touch of envy? One must here articulate and cri-
tique Koolhaas's "position" carefully: Yes, there is some envy and
ironic admiration for architects who have the chance to create huge
swatches of urban substance. Yes, these architects are the "realists"
who have no illusions about where "the flow" is and the possibili-
ties of resisting it. Yet when one looks back at Koolhaas's descrip-
tion of the work they are doing, it is unequivocally negative: "The
model was a complete inversion of metropolis as we know it-not
the systematic assembly of a critical mass but its systematic dis-
mantlement, a seemingly absurd dispersion of concentration.
Alarmingly, it suggested that the elements that had once made the
city would now cease to work if they got too close together
[congested]" (p. 848). Then when Koolhaas refers to their "vast new
realm of potential and freedom" (that misguiding word again)-
unquestionably, the market and the developers, not the architects,
are calling the shots-his realism turns mushy. (A truer statement
of his belief appears in "Whatever Happened to Urbanism?": "The
only legitimate relationship that architects can have with the subject
of chaos is to take their rightful place in the army of those devoted
to resist it, and fail" [p. 969, S].) He is multivocal.
Not content with convincing us that new urban conditions
exist, Koolhaas, despiser of nostalgia, wants us to be excited by their
potential, to engage us. So he sometimes romanticizes: "Each site
in Atlanta is exposed to a theoretical carpet bombardment of'cen-
ters,' possibilities hovering somewhere, waiting to be activated by a
mysterious process-only vaguely related to money" (p. 852), but
the not-so-mysterious show runs for the maximization of profits-
what else? Of Portman's renderings for a new exurb: "Is this the
reappearance of the sublime?. . . A post-cataclysmic new beginning
that elaborates revolutionary forms in liberated relationships, justi-
fied, finally, by no other reason than their appeal to our senses?" (p.
856). Koolhaas's inclusion of question marks here connotes his
awareness that his speculations have turned footloose. We have seen
this melodramatic streak in Koolhaas's other writing, and it is not
absent from even his best essays."15
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69 Saunders

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inhabitants, cut off from connective networks of family relation-
ships, tradition, habits, are abruptly forced into another civilization"
(p. 1021). Koolhaas's vision might never be more clear and bal-
anced than here: "The entire operation ambiguously combines the
fulfillment of some basic human needs with the systematic erosion
of others-tradition, fixity, continuity-a perpetuum mobile where
what is given is taken away in a convulsion of uprooting, a state of
permanent disorientation" (pp. 1035, 1037). "Tradition, fixity,
continuity"-there is no sarcasm about these words this time.
When Koolhaas writes of a leftover remnant of old Singapore, he
does so with respect for its "authentic subversiveness... against the
overwhelming quantity of hygienic newness around it.... It seems
'tropical' in the sense of dirty, lazy, corrupt, drugged-absolutely
other" (p. 1039). There can be no doubt toward which end of the
continuum from hygiene to dirtiness the romanticizer of Coney Is-
land prefers. He bemoans the city's having "adopted only the
mechanistic, rationalistic program and developed it to an unprec-
edented perfection . . . by shedding modernism's artistic, irrational,
uncontrollable, subversive ambitions-revolution without agony"
(p. 1041). Koolhaas is an existentialist. He values authenticity and
the gritty mess of spontaneous life even as he sees those values be-
coming more and more inevitably out of reach.
When Koolhaas writes, in the Singapore essay, about the
ideas and work of Fumihiko Maki and the other Japanese
metabolists in the sixties, he finally clarifies for us what ideal he has
been implicitly holding all along: an architecture/urban planning
that accepts the need, at least in Asia, for radically large-scale,
efficient, low-cost new building (to house the exploding
population) but without sacrificing spontaneity, community, and
heterogeneity-all that "the culture of congestion" meant in
Delirious New York. There is no criticism or ambiguity in the
paragraphs on Maki's Koolhaas-like ideas.'6 And when Koolhaas
looks at some of Singapore's large-scale mixed-use projects built
after its housing need had been addressed, he sees actual built form
that approximates his realistic ideal of "a modern-movement
Chinatown" (p. 1067), built in a now authentic way and fostering
maximum urban vitality. Beauty, form, detail, durability-all these
are outdated and irrelevant in this program-driven, ever-in-revision
architecture. I doubt if one could find a passage in Koolhaas of such
unmitigated approbation as this:
In the late sixties, Singapore architects ... crystallized, defined,
and built ambitious examples of vast modern socles teeming
with the most traditional forms of Asian street life, extensively
connected by multiple linkages, fed by modern infrastructures
September 1997 JAE 51/1 70
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and sometimes Babel-like multilevel car parks, penetrated by
proto-atriums, supporting mixed-use towers: they are
containers of urban multiplicity, heroic captures and
intensifications of urban life in architecture, rare demonstrations
of the kind of performance that could and should be the norm
in architecture but rarely is, giving an alarming degree of
plausibility to the myths of the multilevel city and the
megastructure that "we," in infinitely more affluent
circumstances, have discredited and discarded. (p. 1073)
Only the ingenuous "alarming" and "myths" hedge this
approbation; "we" are clearly fools to have dismissed this model. It
seems likely that Koolhaas's experiences of Maki's book and these
projects were prime influences in his intellectual career. The
questions provoked by his sarcasm about "we" who have rejected
these models remains unanswered: Do "circumstances" elsewhere
allow this sort of project to work? (And does this sort of project
really work? Has that been carefully studied?)
No sooner has Koolhaas suggested that Singapore has provided
ideal models for urban megastructures than he draws back,
determinedly realistic, to see once again what is lost in the larger
context of these isolated gains. "The resistance of these assembled
buildings to forming a recognizable ensemble creates, Asian or not, a
condition where the exterior-the classic domain of the urban-
appears residual, leftover, overcharged with commercial effluence from
hermetic interiors, hyper-densities of trivial commandments, public
art, the reconstructed tropicality of landscaping" (p. 1075). Koolhaas
supports designing interiors as if they were exterior public realms, but
he is unwilling to shut his eyes to what the outside then becomes.17
But more; eyes opened wider:
Singapore reveals a cruel contradiction: huge increases in
matter, the overall effect increasingly unreal . .. doomed to
remain a Potemkin metropolis. . ... That is not a local
problem. We can make things, but not necessarily make them
real. Singapore represents the point where the volume of the
new overwhelms the volume of the old, has become too big
to be animated by it, has not yet developed its own vitality.
Mathematically, the third millennium will be an experiment
in this form of soullessness (unless we wake up from our 30-
year sleep of self-hatred). (p. 1077)
Is this a stunning reversal? A call for history's revival in the
present? A waffling? No, I think it is, rather, Koolhaas as poet of
perception winning the struggle with his other selves. Creation ex
nihilo, the putative freedom of the tabula rasa, a constantly mislead-
ing idea during Koolhaas's career, is now seen to end as well as start
with emptiness. Places fabricated out of whole cloth to support
some predetermined pattern of activity seem unreal. Much that is
uncontrolled must enter in, organically, or the creation has no oth-
erness, is forced and phony. Now that the delirium of "building-
out" is over, Singapore is trying to remake its image as place of fun
and leisure, adding beaches to its shoreline, making its landscape
"stand for" "the tropical," adding Chinese ornamentation to its
high rises. In such imposed identities, Koolhaas now finds no iden-
tity at all: "Singapore is a city without qualities " (p. 1077). The ca-
pricious Barthesian sign isn't enough; Chinatown and the
megaprojects must somehow be integrated.
So what would it mean for "us" to "wake up from our 30-year
sleep of self-hatred"? It would mean, above all, being able to think
as Koolhaas has done in this essay-rigorously looking to find the
world as it newly is, perceiving it freshly, without wishful illusions.
It would mean learning to make do with what is or what is about
to be, such as the creation of "countless" Chinese cities based on the
model of Singapore. And in making do, Koolhaas would like to
think that one might enable some degree of making real, or else he
would have given up making architecture and doing urban
planning. In a talk he gave at Harvard in the fall of 1995, he said,
"We are increasingly confronted with utterly irrational problems,
problems that we no longer have the luxury of refusing. . . . We
should be able, when given the impossibly difficult problem of
designing in two weeks a city for three million people, to respond
with vigor and skill.""8 He is very skeptical, but not hopeless, that
architects and urbanists can avoid making Potemkin villages.
Notes
1. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1994; originally published by Oxford University Press, 1978); Office
for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, Jennifer
Sigler, photography by Hans Werlemann (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).
2. In a conversation with George Baird published in the summer 1996 GSD
News, Koolhaas remarks that it would be pedantic to include footnotes in much of
his writing because it is more like dreams than history.
3. For the remainder of this essay, S following a page number refers to
S,M,L,XL, and D refers to Delirious New York.
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4. A colleague has suggested that claustrophobia might be evident in much
of Koolhaas's thinking.
5. Sanford Kwinter, ed., Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students, (Hous-
ton: Rice University School of Architecture; New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1996), pp. 40-41.
6. Koolhaas shares, without qualification, the diagnosis of the essayists in
Variations ofa Theme Park (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) and cultural theorists
like Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord, that authenticity is increasingly elusive in
an environment of more and more simulacra. But Koolhaas retains more hope than
these thinkers in the possibility of honestly expressing, in built form, the conditions
of modernity, however blank the architectural results might be.
7. Richard Ingersoll, "Bidness," ANY 10: 5.
8. Rem Koolhaas, "Understanding the New Urban Condition: The Project
on the City," GSD News (Winter-Spring 1996), 14.
9. Several pictures of hands holding models in S,M,L,XL are quite similar
to iconic images of Le Corbusier's hands doing the same. Koolhaas also imperiously
appropriates quotations as if they were part of his own writing, with no
identification of writers or sources except in footnotes, and he italicizes others'
words without saying "my italics."
10. Cynics will read this as a rationalization for wanting to chase the big
bucks of developers.
11. See especially the exuberant sarcasm of sections 9 and 11 of "The
Generic City" in S,M,L,XL.
12. Sanford Kwinter, "The Building, the Book, and the New Pastoralism,"
ANY -9 22. It is worth noting that Koolhaas has said, "We have been careful to
approach . . . new alignments with powerful forces in moral terms. . . . We are in-
volved in operations that we think deserve support .... We have no projects in
China, because so far I haven't discovered a single project I would like to be in-
volved in personally." Nancy Levinson, "The Future City: A Conversation with
Rem Koolhaas," Graphis 304 (July-Aug. 1996):75.
13. George Baird has set forth his own set of four "paradoxes" in Koolhaas's
work. See "Rem Koolhaas in Conversation with George Baird," GSD NEWS
(Summer 1996): 49.
14. Ibid., p. 50.
15. See also, in "Atlanta," his forced comparison of Portman's atria with
panopticons: "Everyone becomes everyone else's guard-architectural equivalent of
Sartre's No Exit, 'Hell is other people"' (p. 841, S). No, if anything, the atrium
spectacle is a kick even to traveling salesmen, at least more so than its alternative.
16. There is also, in the words of Maki that Koolhaas quotes, a level of
abstraction that matches Koolhaas's in "Bigness," a vision of the city as "a dynamic
field of interrelated forces," "'a pattern of events' more than ... a composition of
objects," in which people are seen from a regrettable distance, "'pumping through
like life blood"' (pp. 1044, 1049, S).
17. Koolhaas's characterization is yet more harsh in a talk he gave at
Harvard in the spring of 1993: "Singapore was ... a petri dish of Chinese Stalinist
modernism followed by Chinese postmodernism." Rem Koolhaas, "Architecture
and Globalization," GSD News, Winter-Spring 1994):48.
18. Koolhaas, "Understanding the New Urban Condition," 13.