Manifest Destiny: Junkspace the new Frontier

“Because of its tenuous viability, Junkspace has to swallow more and more program to survive; soon, we will be able to do anything anywhere. We will have conquered space…

 God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing… an insulting evolutionary joke….”

Lewis & Clarke trekked across the West in 1805, Hillary summited Mount Everest in 1953, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon 1969 — within reach, we have conquered, colonized, and tamed nearly every possible avenue we can. Where else is there to go except for the path of least resistance? The proliferation of junkspace is the inevitable byproduct of our natural inclination towards quick-and-dirty behavior. Populations and economies continue to grow, junkspace metastasizes into new places. 

The extreme versatility of junkspace allows it to be anything and to become anything. When one fast food joint dies, another one moves in. The familiar pitched roof of a Pizza Hut™ is a Five Guys® now. Any notion of its original intention is a vestige. We as designers should triumph that type of versatility, it is the essence of what we love to call adaptive reuse. It’s the death of the author, the intended purpose of what was created is no more valid than what somebody else does with it down the line. To Koolhaas, while the author is dead, the architect is left standing. That type of adaptability in junkspace is an opportunity and lifeline for architects to hook onto.