Moments, Relationships, and Money.

         Rem Koolhaas’s “Delirious New York” and Atelier Bow Wow’s “Made in Tokyo” readings pose some interesting congruencies. This notion of congestion for Rem seems to read as a way of generating interactions happening in situ in NYC. New York city’s evolution as a migrant destination and port city provided the necessary population of innumerable cultures to act as a foundational element for this “congestion”. And out of this congestion, Rem found these urban interactions to be distinct and a point of interest. Rem took the idea of this congestion at the urban scale, along with the study of the Downtown Athletic Center in Manhattan, and compressed it into sections in his later works. So congestion becomes the elemental staple of his work and the architecture “proper” becomes a vestige for the congested programs. Whether successful or not, the work demonstrates a clear proposal of generative interaction. By creating this condition, Rem’s architecture seems to try to create interactions that would not happen otherwise. Natural congestion, however, is a by-product of the behaviors of people within a condition such as NYC. NYC as an island is limited in area and is a hub for work primarily. These two constraints create an interesting paradigm in America where people live on top of each other rather than beside each other. With this new paradigm of living, interesting relationships and moments are created. “Moments, relationships, and money” exist in stark contrast to the usual home size, individual identities, and free enterprise lifestyle usually found in the United States. In this trade, a shift in American culture finds itself an unusual predicament by creating its own alter ego in NYC. NYC creates congestion and Rem takes congestion and makes it a commodity.

Something similar happens in “Made in Tokyo”. Studio Atelier Bow Wow begins to notice an unusual phenomenon in Tokyo, unusually shaped sites. The unusual sites have a long history. At one point in Japan’s Kanto region’s history, sites for buildings were plentiful. As the population in Tokyo grew, the number of available lots remained the same. Out of necessity, the culture began to sub-divide lots over 2-3 generations, eventually leaving awkwardly shaped leftover lots. In an American context, most of the lots would be disregarded as useless and or undevelopable. As Tokyo continued to age as a city, firms like Atelier Bow Wow, found a way to develop these awkward lots. These lots would become “pets” of their parent lots and thus “Pet Architecture”. Tokyo’s metropolitan population is an eye-watering 38 million + and its finite landmass created congestion of sorts. The finite size of Tokyo and the large population of people means every land resource must be utilized. There is simply no excess fat on the city land use. This forces interesting developments such as stores beneath train tracks, soccer pitches on the roof, pizza sliced shaped lots into commodities rather than waste.    

Congestion for both Rem and Atelier Bow-wow seem to be linked. “They are both at a different stage in capitalism”. This is a quote from Adrianna Spence and I have to agree. While NYC has a greater metro population per square mile than Tokyo, the sheer population still needs to be housed. As NYC continues to grow, it will adopt ideas similar to pet architecture to continue space making where there seems to be no space. Tokyo is already there. The economic conditions force both contexts to behave in a way that continues to formgive as the arrow of time continues forward. This “congestion” is an elemental design device for Rem but a similar behavior to pet architecture will eventually become the reality of NYC.

TL: DR

At the urban scale, middle-stage capitalism creates congestion. Late-stage capitalism breeds ideas like pet architecture.

America is too big. I said what I said.

Architecture is at a stage where the development of elemental components seems to be influencing the progression of architecture more than philosophy.  Architecture, in a synergistic fashion, seems to be greater than the sum of its components but truly the development is in the iterative design parts or ideas, not the finished product.