Isolation in Density

Density is seen by most architects and urban planners today as a positive outcome of city life. It forces interaction between people of different backgrounds and ideas in a melting pot of advancement. It is no surprise that most of America's GDP is produced in the cities where this intermingling of ideas happens. Of course, the idea of density has not always been looked at positively by our profession; the result of this was ideas such as the Garden City movement. City life is usually portrayed as hectic and full of responsibilities created by the occupational and economical stresses created by the price of having to live in a city. A backlash to this lifestyle has also been a discussion in American culture and is portrayed very clearly in the struggles of people such as Cristopher McCandles.

Koolhas looks at high rise buildings as the physical solution of the modern age to the problem of density for better or worse. Inside the layers of these high rise buildings we create fantasy worlds that try to fill the voids that we have lost through modernization. These "voids" are elements of life that McCandles was in search of when he set out on a solo trip to Alaska. Koolhas describes these "hysterical" structures as a "free fall in the space of human imagination". We have so over-programmed our built environment that we have written a script for our daily lives. This artificial programming of everyday life has created a world where people who live in a city surrounded by millions of others can still feel lonely and isolated from society. 

The struggle of modern life is clearly present today in a trend to build urban spaces like we used to in the past and it's part of what Koolhas is describes as the "artificial respiration and resucitation of "traditional"". Movements such as New Urbanism try to implement urban design principles of a traditional world such as boulevards, plazas, etc. in a modern city. Plazas and public spaces that tend to be less programmed and dominated by human scale elements. The problem with New Urbanism is that there's little emphasis to what happens with buildings as a extension of the built environment. Thus, modern buildings are plotted on the public spaces of classical cities and there's no resolution to this tension.