COMMUNITY IN JUNKSPACE?

 

"It creates communities not out of shared interest or free association, but out of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an opportunistic weave of vested interests. Each man, woman, and child is individually targeted, tracked, split off from the rest ..." -Koolhaas, Junkspace.pg 183

Junkspace, as Koolhaas elaborates, is essentially the fallout from whatever modernized architecture(s) have left in their wake. To have before us this large conglomeration of muddled architectures across the landscape is irrevocably damaging to the ideas of designers tomorrow. That is because today, the systems entrenched in ensuing that communities today remain complacent within junkspace, and they will as long as their consumerist needs are met. There is no longer a community founded on commonalities, moral, or ethical principal. Rather, there exists selfish, indulgant, and opportunistic collectives that perpetuate junkspace.

The solution for architects perhaps lies in working with conditions of lack, free from all major political, social, historical, economic, and cultural strata within the existing. As Jill Stoner coined this "minor architecture", perhaps there, purposeful space and communities can be revived within.

"Here is an infinite amount of hope, even for us. So much space is available!—an embarrassment of riches disguised in mediocrity. What is ubiquitous is also latent with specific desires. Every city has its deep ecology, its geometries of vacancy, inventories of waste, politics of space and consequent lines of flight. The same Indo-European root that gave us the relationship between “door” and “forest” is also the root of “foreclosure”—a contemporary phenomenon engendered through the economic abstractions of development dislocated from material history. The resulting vacancies are already out of balance, space is pressed out the door, listing toward the outside.

Like a book no one is reading,  a vacant building vibrates with unseen intensities, ready to shed its excess, its burden of overwrought grammars, its syntax of profitability: its closed interior and its brittle shell. If we can, let us imagine emptiness recalibrated, space unfolded toward smooth and slippery and nonconforming use. American cities, in particular, are full of overstuffed assemblages waiting to be unpacked."

Stoner, Jill. Toward a Minor Architecture, MIT Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/clemson/detail.action?docID=3339404.
Created from clemson on 2024-01-30 06:28:48.