Curing the sick city

While trying to digest Koolhaas’ continual back and forth between revulsion and euphoric metaphors in Junkspace, I found that Fredrick Jameson’s Future City helped clarify what Koolhaas was forcing us to reconcile. We must first realize that the built environment is a never ending process of modernization and its construction is a reflection of what is happening in our society, albeit maybe one step behind at times. As a solution to modernization and more specifically consumerism, the architecture that is supposed to accommodate us lacks true value in the sense of phenomenology. The experiences people have in these places forego any true fulfillment, they fail to give us a chance at discovering Utopia. The problem is that these buildings become a patchwork of re-(insert operative verb here): restore, rearrange, redesign, renovate, etc. It’s an ever repeating process where program and dimensions of space get lost and die and then repeated until Utopia is served. But is Utopia even something that can be achieved? Is there something beyond Utopia once we arrive there? Only time will tell, and hopefully architecture is what feeds it.

By bringing this approach to other typologies that have essentially become shopping malls, like airports, we can start to build a phenomenology that is congruent with what Koolhaas hammers into us throughout the pages of Junkspace. For example, Morphosis’ Hanking Tower in Shenzhen is an example of this architectural and societal evolution of space: an overlapping density of shopping, office, residential, and cultural programs working synergistically. Not to mention the massive atrium central to the tower is reminiscent of the one first experienced in John Portman’s Marriot Marquis in Atlanta, GA. I must admit that without the capitalistic intelligence of people like John Portman, what one may perceive as greed but others may describe as seizing opportunity (and beyond any tax incentives that may be involved) the developments and designs of John Portman helped shift the dialogue we have with futuristic cities, building momentum toward a thoughtful plan, readjusting the paradigm of urban spaces and making them more sensible to human experience.

Not only is this process cohesive with the capitalistic nature of modernization and the consumerism that has been programmed into our very existence, but the architecture that houses this becomes an organism for which a Utopian society can develop: an overlapping of people, spaces, program, and events, all encased within the confines of a vertical mixing bowl of engagement, interaction, entertainment, and culture. If we look at Jerde, as pointed out in Future City, and his work with shopping malls and urban spaces, his philosophy is summed up by an equation: 

CityMaking = Living + Wandering + Working + Gathering + Connecting. 

I think this ethos is one that needs to be followed, explored, and implemented at its highest quality in order to cure the sick city.