All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
and crossed. All existing streets and major building entrances surrounding the site should provide direct pedestrian access to it.
6. The literal continuation of streets and sidewalks is only the most obvious strategy.
7. The primary datum for crossing must be the grade of the site.
8. That grade should align with surrounding contours.
9. The event must be measured and marked.
10. This must include the footprints of the towers and their ramification in three dimensions, extending to bedrock and the heavens.
11. These ramifications should engage both space and use.
12. The site must permanently educate about the nature of the events that happened there.
13. The site should be a point of focus for a well-mixed urbanity downtown.
14. Any construction at the large scale must not preclude the possibility of the small.
15. The site should serve as a point of growth and spreading of green space.
16. The site should be well connected to its neighborhood, to New York City, and to the world.
17. The transportation infrastructure already below and near the site is crucial to these connections.
18. Many people should live near the site.
19. The elaboration of the site should support existing social, economic, and natural ecologies.
20. The site should be exceptional.
2002
15
Riff on Rem
I woke up to the Sunday Times to find the paper’s architecture critic again unhinged by the object of his affections. This time, a gushing review of Rem Koolhaas’s boutique for Prada on Broadway, which opened to the full Hollywood treatment: klieg lights, limos, blocked streets, and paparazzi. The Times’s well-timed coverage (only ten shopping days until Christmas) was bolstered by a sidebar hyping another overweight book from his firm, OMA, this one about Prada, a classic merchandising tie-in. (You’ve seen the movie, now get the action figure at Burger King.) The book includes lists of key concepts (“shops should not be identical”), pictures of handbags and of cardboard study models, larded with images of the master, photogenically craggy and dressed in clerical black.
I understand Prada to be an upmarket Tommy (Hilfiger, that is, whose hideous retro boutique recently opened on the other side of SoHo), an amplification of traditional shapes, styles and refinements. Prada’s corporate culture is likewise geared to the shopping theory of creativity. Another tie-in piece in the New York Times chronicled the company’s recent rapid expansion: “Over the course of its buying spree, Prada acquired controlling interest in Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, Church’s shoes, Azzedine Alaia, Carshoe and the Genny Group, along with a sizeable chunk of Fendi.”
The architectural haberdashery of the shop (which occupies much of the former space, and is twinned with the remnant of the downtown Guggenheim) similarly compiles brands within the brand—a boutique of received forms—from the Dan Graham light boxes to the Venturi-esque supergraphic wallpaper to the Portmanoid glass elevator, the SITE-like objects hung from the ceiling, the Diller and Scofidio video cams in the dressing rooms, the disco Mylar on the ceiling, the pulsing techno, the personnel dressed in security gray, whispering urgently into their mouthpieces. This conflation of shopping with invention is the philosophy embedded in both the shop and its massive apology. The store becomes museum and vice versa. Fabulous.
The main architectural move is sectional, a wooden wave that dips from the first floor to the basement and back, providing seating and a display surface for shoes. The wave is the Koolhaasian portmanteau metaphor and his logo for multinationalism, his “site.” The architect’s a surfer, the cool individualist who rides but does not pretend to tame the massive hydraulics of the system. Architecture makes multinational culture look good, all the while compiling a massive documentation of its nightmarish qualities, just to keep critical distance.
What we have here is the post–Organization Man, Madison Avenue approach to architecture, spinning the creative wheels to make the sale. In a 1991 book, What’s the Big Idea? How to Win with Outrageous Ideas, George Lois, legendary 1960s adman, writes, “Advertising should stun momentarily . . . it should seem to be outrageous. In that swift interval between the initial shock and the realization that what you are showing is not as outrageous as it seems, you capture the audience.”
The sixties were a watershed for the ad business and the formative era for Koolhaas. Hip ad people broke the mold of traditional advertising, with its stodgy formats and endless mock social-scientific and statistical research, with new “creative” approaches. The working method was co-optation: the legendary ads of the period took on the rebellious, teasing style of the counterculture; snoot cocked at the same corporations whose products they were promoting. Discarding the buttoned-down look, the ad business wore flowered shirts and ponytails, smoked pot in its boardrooms.
The Koolhaasian project merges both 1950s and 1960s Madison Avenue styles: from the 1950s, the authority of “objective” statistical information, the conflation of marketing and taste, with its barse-ackwards formulas of legitimation. From the 1960s, radical chic advertising is the crèche of postmodernity and its professionalized ambivalences, the birthplace of the multinational style. Rem becomes Rem ©. OMA spawns AMO. The idea of resistance, of friction, is lost in the go-with-the-flow. For the post-Andy generation, the subject-matter of art can only be anxiety and ambivalence, and Prada drips with it. Rem is our dark Seinfeld, producer of our Truman Show.
When Rem first began his Harvard operation, he called it the “Project on What Used to Be the City” (in a massive loss of nerve, it is now rebranded the “Harvard Project on the City”). This nominalist dodge was surely intended both to signal a fascination with the “post-urban” forms of globalization and its degraded universalism, and to put some distance between himself and the more prescriptive styles of contemporary architectural debate (eyes rolled at anyone still flogging the dead horse of humane urbanity).
The reticence is a commonplace: our legacy from utopian modernist urbanism is postmodern urban despair—suspicion and dystopia, and a fascination with weirdness. Modernity is the Taliban, something we can all oppose. Rem’s fascination with this urban other may spring from formative years in colonial Indonesia: the writing presents us with the Conradian gloom of the colonizer with a conscience, helpless before the horror.
In this portrait of urban hyperbole, suspicion attaches to any optimism for the future. The association of optimism and totalitarianism is foundational Koolhaas: he’s been called the most gifted architectural polemicist since Le Corbusier, and the comparison is apposite, if complicated. Koolhaas uses the epithet “optimism” to jeer at the Corbusian fantasy of power and to reveal his own deepest value: pessimism. The writing exudes it: colorfully acid descriptions of the onslaught of globalization and its weird generic architectures, couched in the prosody of enthusiasm. Backed by corporate organizational diagrams, charts of travel schedules, and a thousand neat hierarchies, the sellout becomes the marker of the ingenuity of the critique: embodying the contradiction escapes it. Architecture is performance art.
The Godardian tone of the writing—flat, ironic, Johnny Halliday voice-over as he drives through the Alphavillian night—disclaims optimism and mocks totalitarianism. Koolhaas treats urbanization like nature, a huge sweep of forces, rules without agency, the landscape of his bitter sublime.
He describes Lagos, the Pearl River Delta, and Atlanta with stylishness and insight. The prose is honed and coolly enthusiastic, like deadpan Tom Wolfe. But what actually is his position on the city? He writes,
If there is to be a new urbanism, it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence, it will be the staging of uncertainty, it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential.
“Staged uncertainty” sure sounds like the 1960s to me. “More or less permanent” recalls the first-do-no-harm techno