Generic City - Rem Koolhaas S, M, L, XL

Interview: Rem Koolhaas on OMA's preoccupations from Dezeen on Vimeo.

1.2  To the extent that identity is derived from physical substance, from the historical, from context, from the real, we somehow cannot imagine that anything contemporary - made by us - contributes to it. But the fact that human growth is exponential implies that the past will at some point become too "small" to be inhabited and shared b those alive. We ourselves exhaust it. To the extend that history finds its deposit in architecture, present human quantities will inevitably burst and deplete previous substance. Identity conceived as this form of sharing the past is a losing proposition: not only is there - in a stable model of continuous population expansion - proportionally less to share, but history also has invidious half-life - as it is more abused, it becomes less significant - to the point where its diminishing hand-outs become insulting. This thinning is exacerbated by the constantly increasing mass of tourists, an avalanche that, in a perpetual quest for "character", grinds successful identities down to meaningless dust.

1.4 Identity centralizes; it insists on an essence, a point. Its tragedy is given in simple geometric terms. As the sphere of influence expands, the area characterized by the center becomes larger and larger, hopelessly diluting both the strength and the authority of the core; inevitably the distance between center and circumference increases to the broken point. In this perspective, the recent, belated discovery of the periphery as a zone of potential value - a kind of pre-historical condition that might finally be worthy of architectural attention - is only a disguised insistence on the priority of dependency on the center: without center, no periphery; the interest of the first persumably compensates for the emptiness of the latter. Conceptually orphaned, the condition of the periphery is made worse by the fact that its mother is still alive, stealing the show, emphasizing its offspring's inadequacies. The last vibes emanating from the exhausted center preclude the reading of the periphery as a critical mass. Not only the center is by definition too small to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the real center but an overblown mirage on its way to implosion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest of the city its legitimacy. (Manhattan denigrates as "bridge-and-tunnel people" those who need infrastructural support to enter the city, and makes them pay for it.) The persistence of the present concentric obsession makes us all bridge-and-tunnel people, second-class citizens in our own civilization, disenfranchised by the dumb coincidence of our collective exile from the center.

1.6 The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket of identity. The Generic City breaks with this destructive cycle of dependency: it is nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability. It is the city without history. It is big enough for everybody. It is easy. It does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews. It is equally exciting - or unexciting - everywhere. It is "superficial" - like a Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Monday morning. 

3.1 The Generic City is what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace. It is a place of weak and distended sensations, few and far between emotions, discreet and mysterious like a large space lit by a bed lamp. Compared to the classical city, the Generic City is sedated, usually perceived from a sedentary position. Instead of concentration - simultaneous presence - in the Generic City individual "moments" are spaced far apart to create a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences: the color variations in the fluorescent lighting of an office building just before sunset, the subtleties of the slightly different whites of an illuminated sign at night. Like Japanese food, the sensations can be reconstituted and intensified in the mind, or not - they may simply be ignored. (There's a choice.) This pervasive lack of urgency and insistence acts like a potent drug; it induces a hallucination of the normal.  

3.3 The Generic City is fractal, an endless repetition of the same simple structural module; it is possible to reconstruct it from its smallest entity, a desktop computer, maybe even a diskette.

4.1 Once manifestations of ultimate neutrality, airports now are among the most singular, characteristic elements of the Generic City, its strongest vehicle of differentiation. They have to be, being all the average person tends to experience of a particular city. Like a drastic perfume demonstration, photomurals, vegetation, local costumes give a first concentrated blast of local identity (sometimes it is also the last). Far away, comfortable, exotic, polar, regional, Eastern, rustic, new, even "undiscovered": those are the emotional registers invoked. Thus conceptually charged, airports become emblematic signs imprinted on the global collective unconscious in savage manipulations of their non-aviatic attractors-tax-free shopping, spectacular spatial qualities, the frequency and reliability of their connections to other airports. In terms of iconography/performance, the airport is a concentrate of both the hyper-local and the hyper-global in the sense you can get goods there that are not available even in the city, hyper-local in the sense you can get things there that you get nowhere else.