Bigness in Context

8/12/2019 Bigness in Context

1/11

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/00/030379-40 2000 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI:10.1080/1360481002001661 1

CITY, VOL. 4, NO. 3, 2000

Debates

Bigness in context: someregressive tendencies in RemKoolhaas urban theory

Jorge Otero-Pailos

Rem Koolhaas views on urbanismhave been taken up as a renewedcommitment to the American city.

However, read against the history of theAmerican metropolis Koolhaas theoriesreveal their regressive implications. His

claim in relation to his theory of Bignessof autonomy from the city at once con-tinues the American tradition of insertingnon-urban spaces in urban contexts, andliquidates its democratic component. Inarguing for an evaluation of Koolhaascontributions in the light of their sim-ilarity to 19th century principles of urbanplanning, and of their indebtedness to1960s attitudes towards the city and

towards collectivity, I am going against thegrain of those who see in them a radicaldeparture from previous attitudes towardsthe city. Far from opening the door to thenew, Koolhaas helps entrench the already.

Koolhaas speaks of urban planning as athing of the past. Since buildings have a lifespan of about twenty years, to think ofurban planning in terms of formal relation-

ships articulated architecturally in space isobsolete. Context is also seen as a thing ofthe past. To insist on the right of certainbuildings to exist, to insist on the relevanceof context, is to apply outdated conceptualstructures that increase the rift between thediscipline of urbanism and the real forces

shaping the present. Moreover, old theoriesof urbanism, in so far as they are the wrongtools for looking at the present, are repres-sive veils keeping us from an authenticexperience of the real. History, context, andspecificity are all seen as concealing reality.1

In calling for a fresh look at the realKoolhaas appeals to models of 19th centuryobjectivity.2 The reality, he claims, is thatwhat we call cities today are really a series ofcity islands grafted onto the larger field ofthe un-city. Koolhaas proposes the theoryof Bigness as a response to the need todevelop new taxonomies and models thatwill help us understand and operate in thecontemporary metropolis.

Koolhaas does not provide a systematicand comprehensive theory of urbanism,nor does he explicitly describe the researchmethodology that led him to the conclu-sions he draws from Bigness. This factoraccounts in part for his failure to influencethe urban planning profession. It alsomakes the synthesis of his views into asimple summary difficult. His reflections

are purposefully impressionistic and frag-mentary. He alludes to the forces he con-siders central to urban transformation, buthe does not deal with them in any sig-nificant depth. For example the familiarfactors of exploding demographics and ofthe late-capitalist economy are deployed


2/11

380 CITYVOL. 4 NO. 3

but without any scientific evidence to mapthe specific channels of interaction betweenthese factors and urban tissue. However,these developments, Koolhaas argues, chal-lenge the disciplines of Architecture andUrbanism and point towards a new kind ofsynthetic practice guided by the generaltheory of Bigness.

The city as island: resurrecting a defunctmodel

In modern times our understanding of

urbanism was probably first articulated byIldefonso Cerda, who, in 1867, coined thenow common word Urbanizacion [urbani-zation]. Cerda argued that the extension ofinfrastructural services associated with cityliving (such as sewage, gas lighting, and thetelegraph) to the country gave rise to newbureaucracies and professionals whose com-petencies extended well beyond urban cen-

tres. Cerdas process of urbanizacionaccounted for the increasing physical, social,and political homogenization of the rural andthe urban.3

The loss of the classical, closed city to thecontemporary metropolis has fascinatedKoolhaas since his school days. In a rathershort but telling essay entitled ImaginingNothingness Koolhaas credits his teacherO.M. Ungers as the author of a description

of the present in which the notion of atraditional city could be resurrected. Ungersrealization that most European historic cen-tres float in larger metropolitan contexts,gave Koolhaas the insight that:

In such a model of urban solid andmetropolitan void, the desire for stabilityand the need for instability are no longerincompatible. They can be pursued as two

separate enterprises with invisibleconnections. Through the parallel actions ofreconstruction and destruction, such a citybecomes an archipelago of architecturalislands floating in a post-architecturallandscape of erasure where what once was acity is now a highly charged nothingness.4

Koolhaas uses the traditional Nolli plananalysis of urban tissue as solid and void,figure and ground, to describe the metropolis.His description is more figurative and pro-

jective than objective and researched. It is aconclusion more than an observation. The factthat he would allow himself to consider thegreat expanse of metropolitan fabric as a voidin spite of its vibrant reality and presencedenotes, to say the least, a value judgement.Elsewhere he would make this estimationmore explicit. If you look at our project forMelun-Senart, writes Koolhaas, there wereexplicit judgements of contemporary archi-

tecture: it is mostly merde [shit].5 But hedoes not simply mean that this architecturelooks bad. For him, it is bad. It is a form ofinstitutional and semantic oppression. Thecoercive aspect of architecture is something hefeels is constitutive of its mission.

In 1993 Koolhaas describes his 1971 visitto the Berlin Wall as the experience that wasto make him a serious student. He senses

an enormous reservoir of resentment againstarchitecture, with the new evidence of itsinadequaciesof its cruel and exhaustedperformanceaccumulating daily; lookingat the wall as architecture, it was inevitable totranspose the despair, hatred, frustration itinspired to the field of architecture.6 Sixteenyears later, his competition entry for a city atMelun-Senart, France, reconciles the twoideas that marked his student days: his

contempt for architecture, and his fascinationwith the closed town. A field of what isdescribed as nothingness eliminates thesprawling metropolis and contains a series ofneatly encapsulated urban islands. But inreality this void is a complex system ofparks where, as shown in his explanatorysketches, city dwellers are presented as exer-cising, or toiling the land. Nature returns as

the mythic edge of urbanity, and as its cure.

The sick city

Koolhaas formal sanitizing of the city withparks, or voids as he calls them, is a strategy


3/11

JORGE OTERO-PAILO S: BIGNESS IN C ON TE XT 381

with roots in the 19th century. By the mid-1800s, city bureaucracies in Europe andAmerica, responding to alarming healthreports, and to the devastation of cholera anddiphtheria pandemics, studied options forimproving conditions. In the United States,the idea of the urban park slowly surfaced as

a way to accommodate the need to insertnew infrastructure, to store clean water, toprovide increased light and air circulation,and to furnish citizens with spaces forrecreation.

The most famous example in the UnitedStates is Manhattans Central Park. Freder-ick Law Olmsted, famed landscape archi-tect, superintendent of the park since Sep-

tember 11th 1857, and main strategist of theplace Koolhaas now calls a void, won the1858 competition to design the park withthe help of his partner the English architectCalbert Vaux. In their eyes Central Parkwas to be much more than just a work ofengineering to hold fresh water in the Cro-

ton Reservoirs. The park was to be aRepublican Institution where the classeswould mingle as a single collective in thespirit of democratic fraternity. It was to be apleasure ground where citizens could findan escape from the pressures of crampedliving. The ideas behind Central Park were

accented by the moralistic overtones of theAmerican transcendentalists who believed ina metaphysical need for individual com-munion with nature, as a way of salvagingpersonal autonomy from the social con-formity spawned by the nascent commer-cialism of American culture. For the Trans-cendentalists, nature was the last bastion ofresistance to the ferment of the city.

Olmsted and Vaux endeavoured to con-struct not just a fragment of the countryinside the city, but an entire visual and formalsystem that would serve as counter balanceto the existing urban form. They turnedvistas inward, and masked the edges of thecity with plantings, in an attempt to create an

Figure 1 Islands of urbanity are contained by a series of parks. Rendering of Rem Koolhaas competition entry forMelun-Senart (1987). From Jaques Lucan, Rem Koolhaas: OMA (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991),

p. 15.


4/11


autonomous environment. Olmsted and

Vaux believed that by relating the non-urbanto the urban they were improving the whole.They rejected more utopian arguments aboutthe city in favour of processes that wouldtransform the existing one. Nature, thoughformally autonomous from the more urbanparts of the city, could nonetheless compli-ment and ameliorate it. What was onceseparated was here brought together within

an entirely new kind of urban form.7

The Void

Olmsteds parks interest Koolhaas becausethey resist the stability of the formal lan-

guage making up the traditional city. In the

parks formal indeterminacy he finds anexample of liberation from the formal coer-civeness of architecture, a kind of erasurefrom all the oppression, in which architectureplays an important role.8 In Koolhaas handshowever, the notion of form in flux ismisread and radicalized as absence of form.He describes Central Park simply as a voidor as nothingness.

The danger of such reductivist essentialismbecomes clear with Koolhaas treatment ofsprawl. In peripheral metropolitan areaswhere elite architectural capital is usually atits minimum, the cycles of the economyprecipitate fast changes in the formal make-up of entire districts. The constant met-

Figure 2An open boundary between the urban and the non-urban: Manhattans Central Park circa 1970. From F. L.Olmsted, Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, in F. L. Olmsted, Jr. and Theodora Kimball (eds)(Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1973, opposite p. 200].


5/11


amorphosis of form in time is understood byKoolhaas as the sprawls complete lack offormal presence. Through a questionable leapof logic, Koolhaas sets up a simple relation ofequivalences between all entities that arevoids. The sprawl is equal to, and cantherefore be turned into, a park, or aninfrastructure.

Koolhaas treatment of sprawl as a void isnot entirely innocent. His sleight of hand isrevealed when he describes his own projectsas voids that resist formal stability, and thusgrants himself the license to replace theexisting with his designs. He caters for the

highbrow rejection of sprawl as valueless andmeaningless, and complies with conservativepublic opinion by acting as its willing execu-tioner. He cleanses the metropolis of themerde, and substitutes it with Bigness.

His 1991 competition project for theMission Grand Axe, La Defense, Paris, illus-trates Koolhaas facile translation of publicopinion into an endorsement of urban pur-

ges, as well as his belief that the void and thetraditional city depend on each other forsurvival. He writes: This is La Defense, theoffice-city that nobody really likes but thathas one undeniable virtue . . . Its presence hassaved Paris; each eyesore realized there hasprevented an invasion of the center.Although he singles out some good struc-tures like the university or the future TGVstation, everything else is planktonthe

typical accumulation of undeniably inferiorbuildings built between the fifties and thenineties that forms the index of 20th-centuryarchitecture.9 The sprawl is not replacedwith nature, but with a ready made, idealizedBigness structureor infrastructure. Inessence, he paves the newly bulldozed sitewith a version of the Manhattan grid.

Today, we are no longer dealing with the

same problems that faced the 19th century.Cholera and diphtheria are not killing largesections of urban populations. What exactlyare the diseases harboured by todaysmetropolis? What does Bigness really solve?Some of Koolhaas descriptions of the citysailments have changed over the course of his

career. His early condemnation of the dullcomplacency of bourgeois urban life hasgiven way to a more abstracted discourseabout freedom that has been emptied ofinflammatory rhetoric. What remains strong,however, is his dissatisfaction with a looselydefined loss of reality in subjective experi-ence, and a similarly ambiguous dissolutionof social unity. Koolhaas runs through thecanonical list of reasons popularly under-stood to be the cause of these conditions:rising world population, higher dependencyon communications technologies, the impactof late capitalist forms of production and

consumption on social structures, and thesabotaging of the classical city by moderni-zation. His objective is to produce an archi-tecture that will resist the alienation of lifeexperience and the demise of collectivity. Indefense of Bigness he states:

[. . .] in a landscape of disarray,disassembly, dissociation, disclamation, the

attraction of Bigness is its potential toreconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real,reinvent the collective, reclaim maximumpossibility.10

By placing the possibility of authentic andwholesome life strictly inside of Bigness, andthinking of the city not as a whole, but as aseries of mutually exclusive good and badparts, Koolhaas breaks with a major aspect of

the City Parks movement. Bigness replacesthe whole with a new totality which isfundamentally independent of its outside.This insistence on projecting the model ofthe decontextualized fragment onto the exist-ing blinds Koolhaas from any discoveryabout the reality of the modern metropolis,and its forces of formation.

To move beyond the rhetoric of the canon,

one must engage in comprehensive research.Specifically, one must not confuse designing,and instrumentalized observation with disin-terested attempts to describe the complextemporal and material substance of the realand of its contexts. It is not possible to acceptthe view that the metropolitan life is bad in


6/11


the absence of convincing evidence. It is stillmore dangerous to accept proposals based onfalse assumptions if we consider them in thelight of their implications. There is an empty-ing out of history and specificity in thenotion of Bigness that limits the right to liveonly to those willing to be equalized intosameness. Bigness is a broad metaphysicalview about history and about how society

works, which is derived from vulgar Marx-ism, and which depicts society as a badsystem that must be overthrown by attackingthe language, values, culture, history andideology of bourgeois culture. It is inter-esting that today this rhetoric drives thehomogenizing commercialism that Bigness

appeals to. It plays on the erroneous diag-nosis of reality as doomed, and on thenonsensical promise of liberation along thesingle path of Bigness.

It is still valuable to remember thatthrough research Olmsted and Vaux hadrebuffed the prevailing assumptions regard-ing city growth as inversely related to qualityof life. To do so they engaged with a complex

number of planning issues from transporta-tion, to expansion, to infrastructure, andhousing costs. By analysing the evolution ofstreet plans from medieval towns to contem-porary metropolises they came to embracethe accelerated enlargement of cities. Olms-ted and Vaux explained that growth should

Figure 3 Bigness closes itself off from the urban and seeks to replace it: Rem Koolhaas photomontage of Exodus(1971). From Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, Jennifer Sigler (ed.) (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995).


7/11


not be feared because the growth of 19thcentury metropolises induced major advan-ces in urban conditions. The expansion ofcities had precipitated public health reformsand the delivery of urban services whichwere previously unavailable, and whichgreatly diminished epidemic diseases. Theabandonment of compact buildings in favourof more open, light and air filled arrange-ments had indeed made cities larger, but ithad also contributed to making them moresalubrious. Unfortunately these historicalconclusions, along with equally relevant con-temporary studies, are stamped out by Big-

ness one-dimensional view of reality.

One world

Bigness is the ideal singularity. It is StephenHawkins model of the universe, boundedbut without edges. It is a seamless interiority.Koolhaas finds in Bigness a guarantee for

uniqueness because, like the walled city, it ischaotic but at the same time establishes aboundary which contains that very chaos.For Koolhaas, each large scaled architecturalproject acquires the pretension and some-times the reality of a completely envelopingreality, and an absolute autonomy.11 To thedegree that these mega-projects separate usfrom the world out there they also liberateus from it. They are worlds-in-themselves.Thus, Koolhaas proposes Bigness as an indexof possible new freedoms, and credits mega-projects with the power to transform cultureor, better yet, to create new forms ofculture.

Bigness permits the reformulation of theidea of singular place, of stable identity, andof traditional community, and serves Kool-haas as a tool to battle the forces of dispersal

that he feels are eroding todays society.12 Inrelation to his proposal for a library for theUniversity at Jussieu, Paris, he states:

I find that one of the most pregnant andprovocative elements of the library programin Paris was to re-formulate the idea of a

communal facility, an entity in themidst of a complete collapse of the publicrealmand certainly of its classicalappearance. Against the obvioushomogenization of electronic media, against

the erasure of the necessity of place, againstthe triumph of fragmentation . . .13

But Bigness is a place that floats above reality.It is an alternative world. A complete envel-oping virtuality where the horizon of the realis a man-made bubble. Voids after all areentities (either architectural or urban) thathave clear boundaries but that are internallyunstable. They determine autonomous

worlds that can pose as the real and feigntotality. Bigness is, to quote Koolhaas, thefinal, most radical break: Bigness is no longera part of any urban tissue. It exists, at most, itcoexists. Its subtext is fuck context.14 Onceinside, the outside (as with the shopping mall)becomes not only irrelevant but also inacces-sible.15 Koolhaas reasons a world wherenature has expired. It can no longer operate as

the mythic locus of Spirit. Inside his libraryproject for Jussieu he envisions a network ofboulevards creating a new public realm, amore concentrated city where visitors driftalong a hyper-urbanized environment.16

Architecture is the only ship capable ofcontaining humanity and of saving it from thetechnological flood.

We must insist on asking, however, who isbeing excluded from the ark, and why. Nomatter how one depicts it, the reality is thatKoolhaas projects are not for everyone.They are not the porous Republican Institu-tion of Olmsted. They have walls, they havegates, and they are owned by selectiveconstituencies. Koolhaas is always deliber-ately vague about precisely what kind ofcommunity he envisions inhabiting Bigness.

The Russian doll

Bigness no longer needs the city, proclaimsKoolhaas, it represents the city; it preemptsthe city; or better still, it is the city.17 Read inthe light of the American city this break


8/11


liquidates the progressive, democratic func-tion of the non-urban. What gave the parks

of the 19th century their revolutionarypower, that is, the power to contest and totransform the conventions of authority oper-ative through the traditional city, was thatthey stood in for that which was beyondhuman control and design, i.e. nature. Theparadox of course is that the parks weremanicured environments. They can andshould be read as highly constructed ambien-

ces. Yet, we cannot overlook that they arealive, and that this brings them close toeffacing their own artificiality. They have alife of their own. At the very least Olmstedsparks speak a formal language that is com-pletely antithetical to the architecture of thecity. In this sense, the parks keep open the

possibility of a different life and social reality.They are not simply compensatory environ-

ments. Bigness, on the other hand, folds thecity back onto the city, thus foreclosing onone important possibility of imagining resist-ance to the establishment.

We are in effect faced with a completeinternalization of metropolitan life behind anew kind of city wall. Instead of non-urbanpockets in an urban field, Koolhaas gives usislands of urbanity in a sea of non-urbanity.

On this count, Koolhaas fails to carry out hisproject to a successful conclusion. He chal-lenges the existing by calling it nothingness,but instead of really taking a fresh new lookat it, instead of investigating the rich poten-tial of sprawl as the source for a new kind ofurbanity,18 he replaces it with an idealized

Figure 4White urban islands float in a sea of black nothingness: Figure/Ground diagram of Rem Koolhaascompetition entry for Melun-Senart (1987). From S,M,L,XL, op. cit., pp. 982983.


9/11


view of the city and its indeterminacy.Bigness internalizes urbanity and demotes

the contemporary metropolis to un-city.This attitude towards the city has been a

constant in Koolhaas work from the start,and not the result of some prolonged studyof the city. His 1972 thesis project at theArchitectural Association entitled Exodusor the Voluntary Prisoners of Architec-ture,19 depicts London as a sick city, abehavioural sink. The problem of the city is

really the problem of the subjects apathy.Urbanism meets psychology. Borrowingheavily from Superstudios ContinuousMonument project (1969), Koolhaas designsa linear megastructure in which the subject isforced into action and denied his or herhistoricity and specificity. Everything must

be created anew: feelings, social and sexualmores, family structure, health care, types of

community, kinds of livelihood, aestheticforms, and personal identities. Individualsare forced into group experience. Koolhaasnew city stands inside a double wall meant toenclose and protect this zone to retain itsintegrity and to prevent any contaminationof its surface by the cancerous organism thatthreatens to engulf it. Outside stand themenacing forces of power politics, the bour-

geois home, and the Protestant work ethic.The new city offers Londoners collectivefacilities that fully accommodate individualdesires. For those strong enough to love it,the city makes individuals ecstatic in thefreedom of their architectural confines. Thebuilding is not just a social-condenser, as

Figure 5 Bigness as infinite confinement. The outside becomes inaccessible: Photomontage of Rem Koolhaas Exodus(1971). From S,M,L,XL, op. cit., pp. 89.


10/11


Central Park is for Olmsted. It is the promiseof infinite confinement that Bigness delivers.Resistance is futile.

Status quo

Koolhaas claim that he is resurrecting thereal and the whole is false. In his model theparticular stands in for the universal. HisBigness is an attempt to replace the world asthe ultimate horizon of life with miniaturecities. Inside Bigness is a programme of theclassical city that has been aestheticized,

cleaned up, made safe, varnished, and ulti-mately impoverished. It proposes a germ-free world that is not contaminated by thesame social ills of the world outside. Kool-haas urban theory plays the game of navesocialism, but fails to account for socialismsfailure. The refusal to address history andcontext leads Bigness down the double pathof a bureaucracy of authenticity doomed to

self-destruction, and of a pure mirror of theworld it replaces. Bigness confuses itsmyopic understanding of sprawl with alicense to obviate the real. Just as the 19thcentury urban park acquired moralistic pro-portions through the writings of the trans-cendentalists and the combined efforts ofplanners and landscape architects, Bigness ispolished with the wax of virtue by Koolhaas.Where morality was once measured against

nature, freedom is now held up to thestandard of a new synthetic nature: Bigness.

But what is at stake in this freedom?Freedom from what, and for whom? Kool-haas projects, and how he describes them,provide the answers. The freedom that Kool-haas values most in both Bigness and capi-talism is the freedom to exclude. As such itcan claim to effect connections to all that is

outside, because, once you are in, there is nooutside, only the semblance of exteriority ina perfect interiority. His Bigness is a repre-sentation of urbanity that lays claim toreality in the name of consumer culture. Byappealing to the old rhetoric of the new,Koolhaas liquidates its very possibility.

Notes

1 The irony is that the obsession with history andspecificity has become an obstacle in therecognition of these new realities. Rem Koolhaas,as quoted in Alejandro Zaera Polo The day after:a conversation with Rem Koolhaas, in El Croquis79 (1996), p. 19.

2 To disentangle the resulting landscape requires thecombined interpretative ability and 19th-centuryclassificatory stamina of Champollion, Schliemann,Darwin, and Freud. See Rem Koolhaas, TheTerrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century, in RemKoolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, Jennifer Sigler(ed.) (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), p.206.

3 See Ildefonso Cerdas Teora General de la

Urbanizacion (Madrid, 1867), Vol. 1, parte 1,Introduccion, p. 1.

4 Rem Koolhaas, Imagining nothingness, inS,M,L,XL, op. cit., p. 201.

5 Alejandro Zaera Polo Finding Freedoms:Conversations with Rem Koolhaas, in El Croquis53 (1992), p. 24.

6 Rem Koolhaas, Field Trip: A (A) Memoir (First andLast. . .), in S,M,L,XL, op. cit., p. 226.

7 David Schuyler provides a convincing argumentthat what resulted from Olmsted and Vauxs work

was really an enti rely new urban form that istypically American. It integrates nature andurbanity over large expanses of territory, andre-organizes city life in accordance. See DavidSchuyler, The New Urban Landscape: TheRedefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica (Baltimore and London: The JohnsHopkins University Press, 1986).

8 Rem Koolhaas, Conversations With Students (NewYork: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), p. 63.

9 Rem Koolhaas, Tabula Rasa Revisited: Mission

Grand Axe, La Defense, Paris, France, 1991, inS,M,L,XL, op. cit., pp. 10901096.10 Rem Koolhaas, Bigness, in S,M,L,XL, op. cit., p.

510.11 Alejandro Zaera Polo, Finding Freedoms:

Conversations with Rem Koolhaas, op. cit., p. 20.12 Bigness must be read in the context of the many

critiques of the contemporary metropolis circulatinginside the Architectural Association in the latesixties when Koolhaas was a student there. Bignessplays on the idea of the building as a city that,according to Peter Cook (an AA professor, an

member of Archigram), had crystallized by themid sixties into numerous theories and builtprojects. Cook argues that the concept captivatedtheorists because of its clarity and homogeneity,and because it combined the compact character ofthe much treasured Italian town with the heroism ofthe Unite dHabitation. The concept came with a


11/11


whole supporting stratum of ideas: Thedevelopment of the multilevel environment, and thestudy of the building as container for randomdevelopment. Bigness also addresses the sixtiesdebate, especially central in British urbanism,about how to insert the new into the old. There

were those at the AA who argued for improvingthe existing through the careful insertion of newelements. Alison and Peter Smithson wereresearching how to introduce new large structuresinto cities without disrupting existing use patternsof association. On a smaller scale, Michael

Webbs experiments with mobile inflatable systemsfor individual habitation were attempts to resolvethe deficiencies of the city through punctualinsertion of new elements at the level of the user.See Peter Cook, Experimental Architecture (New

York: Universe Books, 1970), p. 97.13 Rem Koolhaas, as quoted in Alejandro Zaera Polo,

Finding Freedoms: Conversations with RemKoolhaas, op. cit., p. 17.

14 Rem Koolhaas, Bigness, in S,M,L,XL, op. cit., p.502.

15 Koolhaas quoting Frederic Jameson to defineBazaar is particularly telling in this regard: TheBlade Runner syndrome is the interfusion of crowdsof people among a high-technological bazaar withits multitudinous modal pointsall of this sealed

into an inside without an outside, which therebyintensifies the formerly urban to the point ofbecoming, or being analogous to, the unmappablesystem of late capitalism itself. The abstract systemand its interrelations are now the outside, theformer dome, the former city, beyond which nosubject positions is available so that it cannot beinspected as a thing in its own right, although it isa totality. Koolhaas understanding of Bigness interms of capitalism denotes his desire to design atotality so perfectly autonomous that it erases itsown boundaries. See S,M,L,XL, op.cit., p. 16, and

Alejandro Zaera Polo, Finding Freedoms:Conversations with Rem Koolhaas, op. cit., p. 21.

16 Through their scale and variety, the effect of theinhabited planes becomes almost that of a street;this boulevard generates a system ofsupra-programmatic urban elements in theinterior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases,cafes, shops. [. . .] Also, the life span of thestructure and that of the crust of the settlementsare not necessarily the same; the path and thepublic domain are analogous to the permanence

of the city, the infill of the libraries to that ofindividual architectures. In this structure, programcan change continuously, without affectingarchitectural character. Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL,op. cit., pp. 13261329.

17 Rem Koolhaas, Bigness, in S,M,L,XL, op. cit., p.515.

18 Other architects around the globe are proposingnew methods to visualize the existing, to map evennon-visual elements, in order to make their projectsarise from a fresh discovery of the site, and adeep understanding of the forces that shape it. The

work of UN Studio in Holland usesparameter-based computer technologies to

visualize the correspondences between the variouselements of the site and the programme to beinserted. Then they generate a situation-specific

organizational structure out of their research.Shayne ONeill in the United States is lessdependent on technology and more resistant togiving the programme priority from the start. Hisprojects draw on mappings of the site from variousdisciplines (from geology to air traffic) in order toproduce a composite picture of the forces offormation of the site from which a site-specificresponse to a programme may be modelled. SeePatrick Schumacher, UN Studio: Arnhem Central,in AA Files 38 (Spring), pp. 2336.

19 See Rem Koolhaas, Exodus, or the VoluntaryPrisoners of Architecture, in S,M,L,XL, op. cit., pp.221.

Jorge Otero-Pailos (Madrid, 1971) is alicensed architect with a practice based inBoston and San Juan, Puerto Rico, and aPh.D. candidate from the History, Theory,Criticism section of the Massachusetts Insti-

tute of Technologys School of Architectureand Planning. In addition to his academicwritings, which are featured in The Journalof Architectural Education, PostmodernCulture, Il Progetto, and Archivos de Arqui-tectura Antillana, Otero-Pailos has maderegular contributions to newspapers like ElNuevo Da, and has lectured widely in Italy,Spain, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico,India, and the USA.

Documents

Bigness in Context