"Identity" and Postmodern Koolhaas
..."Identitity" is the new junk food for the disposed, globalization's fodder for the disenfranchised...
Rem Koolhaas in many ways expresses his perhaps "closet", modified post modernist ideals about architecture. The "People's Architecture" as he refers to it is categorized as junkspace, and in many ways to Koolhaas is such. Turning to the decorated shed vs the duck from Ventri, Brown, and Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas, in many ways what Koolhaas is casting aside are the decorated shed models which pull identity from elsewhere or from their own organic growth. Little towns in shopping malls to crowded overpopulated cities in a box really boil down to decorated sheds. Second, I would assert that this need for identity is a very postmodern idea. Modernism for all it's concern for the the human lacked just that, a human identity, the icon which people could "latch" onto, perhaps attributing to the success of postmodernism from a "people's architecture" standpoint which Koolhaas claim's modernism missed. Sound's like postmodernism to me. Looking into Koolhaas's work, let's take the example of the Seattle Public Library.
Many do not even realize that, Koolhaas's building is one of twelve new libraries, many of which are very architecturally interesting.
What Koolhaas did was essentially merry the two ideas of the Duck and the Decorated shed. He created a duck, an icon or a representative architectural piece for the library system through ironically enough a complex decorated shed. Even the circulation of the building through coloring has a "duck"-esque quality though not through historical context, but created context within a larger duck. Identity, the consumptive need of the now deprived masses thanks to modernism, is created by Koolhaas, not borrowed from history.
As an aside, I do not dislike Koolhaas or his architecture, but it is not without criticism, through which many lessons can be learned and understood.
Rem Koolhaas in many ways expresses his perhaps "closet", modified post modernist ideals about architecture. The "People's Architecture" as he refers to it is categorized as junkspace, and in many ways to Koolhaas is such. Turning to the decorated shed vs the duck from Ventri, Brown, and Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas, in many ways what Koolhaas is casting aside are the decorated shed models which pull identity from elsewhere or from their own organic growth. Little towns in shopping malls to crowded overpopulated cities in a box really boil down to decorated sheds. Second, I would assert that this need for identity is a very postmodern idea. Modernism for all it's concern for the the human lacked just that, a human identity, the icon which people could "latch" onto, perhaps attributing to the success of postmodernism from a "people's architecture" standpoint which Koolhaas claim's modernism missed. Sound's like postmodernism to me. Looking into Koolhaas's work, let's take the example of the Seattle Public Library.
Many do not even realize that, Koolhaas's building is one of twelve new libraries, many of which are very architecturally interesting.
What Koolhaas did was essentially merry the two ideas of the Duck and the Decorated shed. He created a duck, an icon or a representative architectural piece for the library system through ironically enough a complex decorated shed. Even the circulation of the building through coloring has a "duck"-esque quality though not through historical context, but created context within a larger duck. Identity, the consumptive need of the now deprived masses thanks to modernism, is created by Koolhaas, not borrowed from history.
As an aside, I do not dislike Koolhaas or his architecture, but it is not without criticism, through which many lessons can be learned and understood.
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