Disagreeing with Rem Koolhaas

I disagreed with Koolhaas.

Of course, it wasn't me who had the discussion with Rem Koolhaas in Philadelphia in front of a few thousand architects. That honor belonged to the Dean of the Harvard School of Design, Mohsen Mastafavi.

Koolhaas at the AIA Convention

I only watched.  First, when I stood right at the front door of the convention center pondering the falling rain and the fact that I had left my umbrella in my room. Koolhaas walked up with the Harvard Dean in tow, the one tall, slender and bold, the other short, chubby and with a waving mane. It was two hours before the keynote and the two were headed towards the convention hall to scout out the location. They opened the door, unencumbered, without much notice and I didn't say a thing.

Later, when the "keynote" turned into this armchair conversation between two old white men that conference organizers wrongly consider a preferable variant to the traditional speech, presumably because it is casual. Old is relative, of course. The dean is four years younger than I, the Dutch superstar six years older. My assessment of the two men may have been tainted by the fact that I was seated between two very young female emerging professionals,one actually still a student in St Petersburg, FL, the other practicing architecture as intern in Virginia Beach. That unjustifiably made me feel younger and I began wondering whether the conversation on the stage may have any relevance for them.

My two young neighbors sat in rapt attention; this was their first AIA convention and they both hailed from different small towns that weren't likely to offer the live spectacle of a god of architecture in flesh and blood.  And here on the one stage there were two icons straight from the Olympus in one session, not even including Mohsen.

Goddess Denise Scott Brown preceded Koolhaas on stage, when she, together with her husband Robert Venturi, received the coveted AIA Gold Medal Award, for the first time given to a couple. Venturi was too frail for making it to Philly in person. 

Denise Scott Brown with the Gold Medal Award

Koolhaas offered that "Learning from Las Vegas" was an important book for him. Indeed, both share an appreciation for the unplanned "architecture without architects",  one for what springs up along America's commercial strips the other for self organization in the slums of Lagos. Koolhaas enjoys the consternation the celebration of the mundane causes among his order-oriented colleagues. Architecture without Architects by Rudofsky was an important book in the sixties, one can assume that falling into his formative years, Koolhaas was influenced by it. (Charles Jenks makes this connection as well in an interview with Koolhaas last year)

The conversation between Koolhaas and the Harvard Dean had been billed as a "kick in the pants".  I suppose that meant the pants of the architectural profession. But the kick never materialized. 

Instead two men reminisced about "Delirious New York".  Koolhaas published the book in the last century at a time when my two seat neighbors were just out of diapers. "What we can offer to the present is maybe memory," Rem mused sounding really old. The conversation reached the presence only in overtime when a brief reference was made to Syrian refugees  and how cities cope with them. The dialogue never reached the future, even though Koolhaas had correctly remarked that architecture was too slow for keeping up with rapid change. 

 

Mastafavi and Koolhaas conversation

He had also recalled how a discussion  he had witnessed at Harvard had demonstrated to him that "We in the west don't have any longer the initiative where the world goes". The discussion had been about a historic pier restoration. From subsequent travels to Africa and Asia Koolhaas concluded that the scale of urbanization and growth there somehow had transferred leadership to those continents. Koolhaas, fascinated by the informal self-organizing ways of the big metropolises of the world calls this "evidence without a manifesto" as he had already done in his book about New York.

That is where I would have taken the discussion in a different direction. No matter how big Lagos is and how much self-organization patterns and improvisation can be observed there or in the squatter tower in Caracas, it may be a prevailing pattern in many places, but does it convey leadership? Surely leadership has evolved into something entirely different from the time when Burnham admonished architects to think big, points Koolhaas has astutely observed and analyzed over the years. In taking the pulse of the mundane and then distilling a message from it he was ahead of many others, at times more journalist than architect. (Koolhaas worked as a journalist before taking up architecture). But his thought of "The West" as in decline is not unique, loudly promoted in the 2016 US presidential election season and for at least the past hundred years in literature. (Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918). Variably China, South America, or Africa, the emerging economies, are seen as the places "where it is at". I think one can dispute that hypothesis, and not only in the present when all these places have fallen into various stages of crisis mode, especially the former wunderkind Brazil. 

 

French edition

Obviously, rapid change is, indeed, occurring and the Old World Order of the large imperial powers has long given way to a new one in which "The West" doesn't simply dominate as an oppressor. Yet, if we look at the main drivers of today's change, they are popular culture, computerization, digitization, robotics, genomics and the re-definition of labor.

In all of these areas the West and the US are leaders. Not simply in debating what to do with an old industrial pier in Boston, as Koolhaas recounted elite Boston while studying there. As Koolhaas himself observed in Delirious New York, the city rapidly adjusting without manifesto is proof that The West is not that a calcified rigid expression of a time long past.

In fact, the discussion on the stage could have taken a very meaningful turn to the future by harnessing Koolhaas’ skill of observation and analysis to show the potential of digitization for openness and flexibility and the empowerment of the people. Google, Amazon, and Facebook, are all American power houses but also expressions of the new algorithms of interaction fueled and directed with data from the bottom up. It is no accident that self driving and innovative electric cars are made in the US, that the genome was sequenced here, and leaders from all over the world come here when they are sick and need treatment. All these things can promise freedom, but more so, they require freedom to be developed in the first place, the kind of freedom Caracas, Lagos, Istanbul and Mexico City do not offer.

The question of how a post-industrial society can be organized is being asked nowhere with more urgency than in the US, with answers slowly emerging in many fields. The US may be the most post-industrial society on the globe, certainly the largest if defined by non-industrial value creation relative to overall GDP.

Koolhaas CCTV building, China:
 “It exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context.”

How a city should manifest itself in the transition from an assembly-line based industrial maker economy to a place where digital knowledge is produced and exchanged would have been a fascinating topic to discuss.

Far from having lost leadership, the US is well-positioned in the post-industrial economy. From services to fashion, from entertainment to research, the US leads. Our culture has permeated all the corners of the world, powered by Intel chips, run by Microsoft software, disseminated by US apps and social media. What is the physical manifestation of this in cities?

The matter of the adaptive reuse restoration of an old pier is part of this exploration and so is the increasing inequality and tension in our cities. The extreme urbanization of China, Latin America, or Turkey is in many respects a repeat of what this country has gone through during industrialization, from the massive displacement of people to the horrendous air pollution. No doubt, the emerging economies are not simply replicating our mistakes, they innovating and leapfrogging in many fields, and have overtaken "the West" in various aspects, especially in transportation, in which Bogota and Curitiba revolutionized and innovated how a bus can be run, for example or where China created a new generation of high speed rail. 

Yet, poor governance, authoritarian structures, insufficient education and unsustainable approaches have impeded much of that progress. The emerging non-industrial city can best be found right here in the US, stamped out of green-fields in Orange County, in the Silicone Valley or in Tysons Corner to name just a few such places. We may not like them architecturally, but they are much closer to a post-industrial manifestation than the often older, bigger and much faster growing cities of emerging economies, mostly structured around manufacturing and rarely really post-industrial. More interesting than Irvine, maybe, are post industrial cities which are sprouting from the ruins of the industrial legacy city. Obviously, where cities have gone the furthest in the process of de-industrialization, the urgency to re-invent themselves is the biggest.

The many tensions, fissures and inequities stemming from the disruptive conversions of our economy and the resulting inequalities in access, education and workforce as it exists compared to the one needed must become drivers for emancipatory innovation. The reinvention and transformation of Detroit, Buffalo and Baltimore to "brain-centers" is by no means a stale topic. I would have loved to have asked Koolhaas about that and seen how that discussion could have provided some answers for the young professionals to my left and right.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA