The Tower of ???????
The Tower of Babel
“Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower that reaches Heaven. Let’s make ourselves famous so we won’t be scattered here and there across the Earth... God took one look and said, “One people, one language; why, this is only a first step. No telling what they’ll come up with next—they’ll stop at nothing! Come, we’ll go down and garble their speech so they won’t understand each other.” Then God scattered them from there all over the world. And they had to quit building the city. That’s how it came to be called Babel, because there God turned their language into “babble.” From there God scattered them all over the world."
Genesis 11:4, 6-9
The 100-Story Building
"The outlets of this techno-psychic battery are the keys to a scale of synthetic experiences that ranges from from the hedonistic to the hyper-medical. Some rooms can be "set" on Florida, others on the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The perfumes and the medicinal air suggest even more abstract destinations. In the 100-story Building each cubicle is equipped to pursue its private existential journey. The building has come a laboratory for emotional and intellectual adventure; the fact that it is implanted in Manhattan has become - almost - immaterial."
Excerpt from "Cultures of Congestion"
I present this juxtaposition not to hyper-compare the tower of Babel to the types of architecture Koolhaas is writing about in the "Culture of Congestion" but to point out that this is an idea... or an impulse that has been apart of the human desire from the beginning. It's this desire to dominate and create exactly what we want without having to go anywhere, to create "a world completely fabricated by man", to "live inside fantasy". In other words, we want to be the "god" of our built environment. Or perhaps said in a less pointed way, we want to be in control while also having it all.
And in many ways, our culture has created many versions of just that - whether you call it Babel or Manhattan. The pendulum swings back and forth as we realize the danger in simply building our own private utopias yet we always seem to find ourselves fighting for our own ideas of fantasy as if we were ever in control in the first place, as if we weren't given an environment to inhabit, take care of, and invest in.
The idea that we all have an impulse to create cities within cities, or even cities within structures without engaging the natural world/surroundings is interesting: we inhabit these man-made "utopias" to get away from the reality of the world that we've polluted. Our lack of control within the world can be seen through our rigid control of the built environment, especially at a larger scale like Manhattan.
ReplyDeleteI love the comparison to the tower of Babel. As a society we do wish to have the ultimate cultivated city and society. We live in a fantasy world full of false atmospheric presence that we've convinced ourselves is where we want to be. The more traction we get behind the continual additions just expedites the process of the Utopia.
ReplyDeleteControl and God are very interesting in terms of utopia and architecture. Ofcourse perfection is endlessly sought out by society in the ideals and fantasy tales of Atlantis and other utopias, but there have been countless moments throughout history where one society's everyday is the creation of the gods to another. This striving, this ideal of utopia and perfection is the drive that gets us to the next stage. Perfection may not be that, but the inventions that are god-like become tomorrow's everyday.
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