Tropical Island

In reading Koolhaus “Junkspace” I think about all the spaces I’ve experienced and never took notice to the bland, boring and function-less spaces around me. For example, shopping malls, you can easily loose yourself in one for hours on end and they usually are disorganized.  These spaces have a forgettable quality to them, it lacks ingenuity and creativity.

 “…Junkspace is a Bermuda triangle of concepts, it's a hollow chaos with no resolve”

Malls essentially have no program but to appeal to the consumer and sell goods. That's helping the developer make money, not the community or serving the greater good. I do see why Koolhaus is so frustrated, these spaces pop up all around us and have no clear function or reason for their existence and completely ignore their context.

Additionally, Koolhaus would probably consider Tropical Island in Berlin to be “junkspace” because its function is a altered view of reality, it's fake and is a "dysfunctional tourism". Tropical Islands main purpose is a holiday resort destination in Europe. Though, I believe Tropical Island is a creative idea for a one stop holiday get-away and addresses the problem of being landlocked. Opening in 2004, it attracted close to 1 million people on the first year and can accommodate 8,200 visitors a day. The architecture certainly isn’t anything to write home about, its chaotic and the whole thing stresses me out from an acoustic/code/life safety standpoint. But it’s a very unique concept and I totally support the Europeans for vacationing there!