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Agents of Transformation and the "Death" of Urbanism Preeminence of the Decorated Shed Staging Uncertainty |
[3L1] STAGING UNCERTAINTY.
It is now time for us to reinsert design
into the urban milieu. We are faced with exploding urban populations, most of which are in
third world countries, and can forecast threatening levels of congestion, environmental
destruction, and geographic dispersal (sprawl). In the next twenty years, we will see the
populations of Bombay, Lagos, Jakarta, and Shanghai double, from ten or fifteen million to
twenty or thirty million people. Koolhaas asks a significant question: "How to
explain the paradox that urbanism, as a profession, has disappeared at the moment when
urbanization everywhere - after decades of constant acceleration - is on its way to
establishing a definitive, global ‘triumph’ of the urban condition?"112
Given the failures of Modernist urban planning, he suggests this future for urban design:
If there is to be a ‘new urbanism’ it will not be based on the
twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no
longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the
irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations
but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be
crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the
imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about
separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no
longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure113
for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions - the
reinvention of psychological space.114
In the end, Koolhaas warns, "Our systematic self-doubt is suicidal: at the moment when issues of quantity are engulfing us like an avalanche, it is essential to define a positive relationship with quantity."115 I believe that it is also essential that we reinsert ourselves (architects) into the greater processes of development and transformation which have been taking place without us. 112Koolhaas, Rem, "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" in S, M, L, XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 961 113my italics 114Koolhaas, Rem, "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" in S, M, L, XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 969 115Koolhaas, Rem, "Fishing in Troubled Waters" in Anywise, Ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996) p. 161 Images: 1. Port of Nagoya |
A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell. Copyright © 1998 by Blaine Brownell. All rights reserved. |
