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Agents of Transformation and the "Death" of Urbanism Preeminence of the Decorated Shed Staging Uncertainty |
[2L1] GENERIC CITY.
Ironically, this ultra-homogenization has occurred at same time that tourism has reached an unprecedented level; according to some sources it is the largest industry in the world. Like Italo Calvino’s description of Marco Polo’s perpetual visit to the city of Trude, the international traveler today harbors a slight disappointment. Cities, and especially heavily touristed sites, all seem uncannily similar. This quality is only exacerbated by the exploding tourist industry itself, which sells the same weekend excursions and souvenirs everywhere. Nowhere is this similarity more evident than in the exurban megalopolis, or the sprawling continuum of transportation corridors, office parks, and suburbs evolving outside of traditional city cores. Manuel Castells describes the familiar image of this post-industrial phenomenon, compared to the picture of the industrial-age city: There is an image of the nineteenth-century industrial economy, familiar from a hundred history textbooks: the coal mine and its neighboring iron foundry, belching forth black smoke into the sky, and illuminating the night heavens with its lurid red glare. There is a corresponding image for the new economy that has taken its place in the last years of the twentieth century, but it is only just imprinting itself on our consciousness. It consists of a series of low, discreet buildings, usually displaying a certain air of quiet good taste, and set amidst impeccable landscaping in that standard real-estate cliché, a campus-like atmosphere... Scenes like these are now legion on the periphery of virtually every dynamic urban area in the world. They appear so physically similar – outside Cambridge, England or Cambridge, Massachusetts; Mountain View, California or Munich, Germany – that the hapless traveler, dropped by parachute, would hardly guess the identity of the country, let alone the city.62
In his article "Cityscape and Landscape," Victor Gruen describes four species of cityscape which now prevail over the traditional notion of the city as "an orderly pattern of substantial buildings, avenues, boulevards, filled with hustling people."63 There is technoscape;an environment shaped nearly exclusively by the apparatus of technology in its respectable and less reputable forms. It is a cityscape dotted with oil wells, refineries, high voltage lines, derricks, chimneys, conveyors, dump heaps, auto cemeteries. There is transportationscape–featuring the tinny surfaces of miles of cars on the concrete deserts of highways, freeways, expressways, parking lots, clover leaves, tastefully trimmed with traffic signs, garlands of power lines, and other dangling wire. Transportationscape also includes vast arid lands of airplane runways and railroad yards. There is suburbscape–in all its manifestations from plush settlements of more or less historic mansions to the parade grounds of the anonymous mass housing industry where dingbats are lined up for inspection. Suburbia with phony respectability and genuine boredom effectively isolated from the world by traffic jams. And there is subcityscape–a category covering probably more acreage than all the others combined, a collection of the worst elements of cityscape, technoscape, and transportationscape–the ‘red and green light district’ of our major cities–the degrading facade of suburbia, the shameful introduction to our cities, the scourge of the metropolis... Subcityscape consists of elements which cling like leeches to all our roads, accompanying them far out to where there was, once upon a time, something called landscape; subcityscape–consisting of gas stations, shacks, shanties, car lots, posters, billboards, dump heaps, roadside stands, rubbish, dirt, and trash.64 Although ‘master planning’ has purportedly been battling this ‘subcityscape’, the realities of the impotence and homogeneity of master planning have only contributed to its growth. The ‘subcityscape’ is connecting all cities, and becoming all cities. In his article titled "The Generic City," from which this chapter gets its name, Rem Koolhaas addresses the homogenization of cities, asking "Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport – ‘all the same’? Is it possible to theorize this convergence? And if so, to what ultimate configuration is it aspiring?"65 Despite the fact that urban design as a profession has dissolved, cities have become ruthlessly standardized. The developer and city planner live and breathe the same economic language, which subsequently gives form to the same physical language. Ironically, however, this similarity exists despite the fact that no individual, developer or planner or politician, has total control over urban evolutionary processes. Thus, the challenge of urban design today is not to establish a ‘universal language’ which would accommodate similar global technologies and lifestyles, but to generate dissimilarities and disjunctions in the megalopolitan field, based on some remaining hint of cultural or geographical difference. Koolhaas declares, however, that "The Generic City presents the final death of planning. Why? Not because it is not planned – in fact, huge complementary universes of bureaucrats and developers funnel unimaginable flows of energy and money into its completion; for the same money, its plains can be fertilized by diamonds, its mud fields paved in gold bricks... But its most dangerous and most exhilarating discovery is that planning makes no difference whatsoever."66 His point is further justified in this description: Buildings may be placed well (a tower near a metro station) or badly (whole centers miles away from any road). They flourish/perish unpredictably. Networks become over-stretched, age, rot, become obsolescent; populations double, triple, quadruple, suddenly disappear. The surface of the city explodes, the economy accelerates, slows down, bursts, collapses. Like ancient mothers that still nourish titanic embryos, whole cities are built on colonial infrastructures of which the oppressors took the blueprints back home. Nobody knows where, how, since when the sewers run, the exact location of the telephone lines, what the reason was for the position of the center, where monumental axes end. All it proves is that there are infinite hidden margins, colossal reservoirs of slack, a perpetual, organic process of adjustment, standards, behavior; expectations change with the biological intelligence of the most alert animal. In this apotheosis of multiple choice it will never be possible again to reconstruct cause and effect. They work – that is all.67
62Castells, Manuel and Hall, Peter, Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes (London: Routledge Press, 1993) p. 1 63Gruen, Victor, "Cityscape and Landscape" in Architecture Culture: 1943-1968, Ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Rizzoli) p. 194 64Ibid., p. 194-195 65Koolhaas, Rem, "The Generic City" in S, M, L, XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996) p. 1248 66Ibid., p. 1255 67Ibid., p. 1255 Images: 1. Photograph by Jocko Weyland, 2 and 3. Alliance Development Corporation, Fort Worth, Texas, 3. Downtown Nagoya, Japan
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A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell. Copyright © 1998 by Blaine Brownell. All rights reserved. |
