Extension of Reality

Never once have I been to Coney Island nor do I know what the experience of being inside the theme park is like, but after reading the article by Rem Koolhaas on "The Culture of Congestion", I begin to question the success of mechanization in our cities today. In order to accommodate large influxes of people that enter this metropolitan-like state, dehumanized systems were put in place to maintain demand. From the "inexhaustible cow" - a machine designed to produce milk, the metropolitan synthetic shift to "electric bathing", the elite experience of horseback riding democratized through technology, or the attempt to eliminate how the metropolis creates loneliness and alienation through "barrels of love" - the unrelenting rotation then creates synthetic intimacy between couples who would never have met without its assistance, we find ourselves losing a sense of natural human interaction and physical feeling of the true experience and are replacing it with temporary mechanized fixes. 

"This technology is not the agent of objective and quantifiable improvements— it is a superior substitute for the “natural” reality that is being depleted by the sheer density of human consumers" -- Rem Koolhaas

The more we grow, the more technology becomes the face of our reality. As paralleled to reading from our studio class, we are met with technological advances to streamline systems to move people to and fro but are losing the value of human interaction, the beauty in well-designed details to worldly problems, and a simplified, one-size-fits-all society.