Toward a Starchitecture

During the moments when the 44th president of the United States promised a brighter, shinier American future, the China Central Television Company’s live newsfeed of Obama’s inauguration became the center of media attention in that country. But at 1:17AM Beijing time, CCTV cut from the simultaneous translation of Obama’s speech back to the hosting anchor. Flustered, she confusedly began questioning her guest political analyst on Obama’s economic policy. The line skipped in the inauguration speech: “Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism, not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.” The Xinhua translator continued after the impromptu Q&A as if nothing had happened.

Watching the CCTV speech, and attempting to understand the theoretical polemics of Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas, who designed the channel’s headquarters in Beijing, are similar provocations. Koolhaas, a principal of the famed design firm Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), also inspires an experience of complacency followed by alarmed confusion. A nodding at a string of acceptable ideas, then a suspension of disbelief so sudden that you wonder if his readers are really supposed to take him seriously—a reaction both aesthetic and political.

DISSECTING A BUILDING THAT EXPLODES BEFORE THE FIRST CUT

In Koolhaas’ most recent publication, S,M,L,XL, an encyclopedia-sized volume of his theoretical writings, the architect lays down the foundations of his theory of architectural Bigness—an idea crucial to his design from the late 90s to now, on the eve of the completion of the CCTV building (which has been heralded as revolutionary to the concept of the skyscraper). The theory of Bigness is intentionally vague, so vague that it verges on self-defeating. But simultaneously, the argument makes itself oddly impregnable—in its ineffability, Bigness is self-protective, almost impervious to critique.

What is this paradoxical system? Bigness theorizes that, as a design reaches a certain capacity—Koolhaas, of course, does not specify what this capacity is—the building becomes an autonomous system that functions on its own terms. It cuts itself off from its environment by virtue of its complexity, becoming ahistorical. Koolhaas’ theory has been seen as emancipatory, freeing the architect from a moral imperative to political responsibility. Partly for this reason, Koolhaas has been able to justify his controversial work for CCTV in China, and for a mini-island city within Dubai. And unsurprisingly, Koolhaas’ OMA has been barraged by “politically concerned” critics who see his work as complicit with such vaguely defined evils as commercialization and suppressions of speech freedoms. Yet Koolhaas’ architecture is political in another sense. His system celebrates the complexity of human interaction—the overlapping of personal stories. So even as Bigness may appear ahistoric—perhaps in the same way CCTV’s omission was ahistoric—Koolhaas’ work, privileging short-lived micro-histories instead of seeking larger, more coherent narratives, is also supremely political. His system recognizes the culture of increasing attention-deficiency inspired by a post-capitalist global village in which our eyes, hungry for pretty shapes, are allowed to fleet from building to building.

CONTROL: THE COMPULSIVE WHITE LIE OF ARCHITECTURE

In an interview with Wired in 1997, Koolhaas commented that “People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything. More and more I think architecture has nothing to do with it. It’s both liberating and alarming.” He goes on to say, “Architecture can’t do anything that the culture doesn’t. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.” This is Koolhaas’ concept of the Generic City—the contemporary megapolis that announces the final death of planning in our age.

Of course, this is not to say that Koolhaas believes these cities—among which are Tokyo, Singapore, and our own Manhattan—are not planned. In fact, he recognizes that “huge complementary universes of bureaucrats and developers funnel unimaginable flows of energy and money into [the Generic City’s completion]; with the same money, its plains can be fertilized by diamonds, its mud fields paved in gold bricks.”

What Koolhaas takes issue with is the absurdity of the Modern architectural revolution as proposed by the likes of Le Corbusier, who believed that the informed sequencing of spaces and the creation of sublime constructions would lead to universally understandable forms, and through them, an abstract happiness. Casting these theories aside, Koolhaas declares that “the most dangerous and most exhilarating discovery is that the planning makes no difference whatsoever.”

Writing on the modern city-state, Koolhaas instead documents the unpredictability that results from each attempt to establish a regime of control. He comes to see Singapore as a model for the Generic City: divorced from context, based on nothing but efficiency, speed, and mobility, with history reduced to a token theme park. “Control only expands the edge of chaos,” he writes. “From Singapore, though, you can draw conclusions: history will disappear; the tabula rasa will be the norm; control will be episodic, proceeding through enclaves, so that it won’t generate an overall coherence; the skyscraper—Bigness—will be the last remaining typology.” It’s important for us to realize that Koolhaas is not so much interested in judging Singapore as understanding it—he’s not a Utopian architect with a political vision of the ideal city or society—and he doesn’t believe that architects are capable of building ideal cities, in any case.

And this skepticism over planning’s power to generate narratives of meaningful human interaction is why Koolhaas is widely recognized as among the most cynical of contemporary architects. Earnest architects like Bernard Tschumi (incidentally, the designer of Lerner Hall) seek to understand human interactions with each other and with architecture by positing experience as a series of episodes that form a narrative. Koolhaas makes no pretension of writing Homeric hymns. Bigness is quite unheroic. As Columbia Architecture professor John Rajchman noted in his seminal Artforum article on Koolhaas, it is a theory that is indifferent and impersonal—not “colossal,” not “sublime.” It is labyrinthine and the point is not to find a way out, but rather to find new ways of moving about within its complexities and specificities, reinventing and reassembling its paths. Bigness is thus not an ideal, not a master plan—and that is why it denies what urbanism has supposed: that we might actually construct cities.

CHAOS/COMPLEXITY: MAKING SENSE OF PLANNING’S VANITY

Rajchman would go on to observe in Thinking Big, “Bigness is a philosophy averse to the earlier architectural urges to control or plan everything, and to work instead with unnoticed possibilities in a situation we realize we can’t completely master. It is to accept that cities are clashes of forces with unpredictable outcomes, loose assemblages from which new things and new connections derive.” It is a celebration of the most basic, yet most glaringly overlooked result of the past 150 years of building—it is a way of seeing things that have been unseen, of releasing new possibilities in our ways of being.

Indeed, as demonstrated by the Singapore-as-Generic-City case study, Koolhaas’ game is one of resigned observation, in the sense that he believes we will never understand how this surely-existent, underlying system of human activity works, or how its effects are produced. We will probably never know, and Koolhaas’ complex designs point to this. But his cynicism is still colored by a hint of romance: his resolve to continue designing despite planning’s inherent absurdity suggests hope in the capacity to generate fantasy. Arguably, Koolhaas is guilty of the same delusions of grandeur found in Le Corbusier.

Yet Koolhaas’ success has been predicated not on his connection to a modernist past, but on his subversiveness. His OMA has been described as a kind of mobilized war machine, engaging in “an ongoing struggle with developers, politicians, engineers, government agencies, and professors to introduce the fresh air of a new kind of urbanism, a new way of thinking about cities, which analyzes specificities while multiplying possibilities.”

But inasmuch as this theory envisions architecture as the mirror to urbanity’s complex networks, it may also be complicit with late capitalism—that idea of our global economy of which neo-Marxists are so critical. To be sure, Koolhaas has famously called himself a surfer, figuring “world culture as a huge ocean… and riding the crest.”

And it would be exactly upon these grounds that the likes of critic Michael Sorkin would attack Koolhaas. In “Some Assembly Required,” he denounces Koolhaas’ strategies as empty of moral judgment, arguing, “Global warming, the rapid disappearance of habitats and ecosystems, worldwide pollution, and the breakneck homogenization of the built environment are all symptomatic of a world in which we can no more consider ourselves simply another species than we can stand raptly outside it, shivering at its majesty.”

To critics like Sorkin, Koolhaas is cloyingly romantic, aspiring to a kind of post-technological sublimity. “For him,” Sorkin insists, “the onrush of globalization was merely irresistible, it had an aesthetic authority in its deep imprinting of form. Such ‘generic’ urbanism represented an unavoidable default, a condition growing autonomously, throwing up its endlessness of freeways and airports, office towers and gated communities, McDonald’s, and KFCs. The surfer epistemology panders to this updated universality with a canny resignation of agency, and hence responsibility.” Put simply, Koolhaas is a hypocrite whose design principle attempts to emancipate itself from culture, but actually reproduces it. Is this truly a fair reading of Koolhaas?

INDEPENDENCE IS NOT A SPATIAL CONCEPT SUGGESTIVE OF DISTANCE

Critiques from the likes of Sorkin come to underline the difference between having a political stance and being politically interested. Anthropologist Bruno Latour has made this point: “[Koolhaas is] said to be cynical, because he is not politically correct, in the sense of simply articulating the critical idiom,” he writes. “So he is often accused of being complacent and conniving with market forces, as if he were sort of enjoying this kind of power in architecture. Of course he does not have a political stance in the sense that he does not say what he is supposed to say or what makes people feel good—which is that market forces are dominated by late capitalism.”

However, Koolhaas’ handling of the question of “non-modernism,” “second modernism,” or “hypermodernism,” as he may call it, is highly political in the sense that it produces architecture (such as the CCTV headquarters) that recognizes the presence of politics. And to be sure, Koolhaas’ ahistorical architecture is not meant to function independently from cultural reality—instead, it performs alongside of it.

Among the most influential Koolhaas proponents is Robert Somol, Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, who jokes that Koolhaas is like Clint Eastwood: You don’t know if he’s cool or boring. Somol sees in Koolhaas a jaded view of Critical-Architecture and a subsequent embrace of the late capitalist and supershiny. For Somol, Koolhaas heralds the advent of fantasy architecture.

Somol’s critiques, commonly labeled a post-critical Projective Theory of architecture, attempt to withdraw from a perceived theoretical stagnation in contemporary architecture. Instead, architects like Somol design buildings that are more easily relatable, and hence, more public—even populist. This faction generally tries to make architectural theory more salient by forging tectonic identity in easily legible shape. The goal is a franker architecture that finally begins to recognize public consciousness and imagination in the vulgar reception of buildings, whether or not each detail is pregnant with conceptual intent. It is for many architects an uncomfortable admission that sometimes—probably most of the time—people do not care if the CCTV building was designed to be a semi-self-contained biome whose interior was carefully planned to act as a mediapolis with multiple circulation pathways that seamlessly and physically bind different program functions together. “Some Beijingers,” Paul Goldberger ironically notes in his June 2008 review, “have taken to calling it Big Shorts [after its shape].”

THE VANITY OF RECOGNIZING CONCEIT

It is the question of how people actually interact with buildings that may cast Koolhaas’ spectacular theoretical gymnastics as overly idealistic, and Somol’s praise as reductive. In the Columbia undergraduate architecture program, one of the most fatal mistakes that a student can make is failing to include a proper silhouette in rendered section or perspective drawings, indicating how people would use the space. Contrary to what Koolhaas might suggest, this is often quite predictable. You can’t draw a ballerina on the final drawing of your bike path and claim that your landscaping project is going to inspire a dancer to get into her tights and pirouette. People act in unexpected ways, sometimes generating Koolhaasian chaos, but they’re not really that random.

Bigness’ flexibility, though, might shield Koolhaas from the charge that his conception of unruly human interaction doesn’t describe the way we actually relate to buildings. As a design principle, Bigness emphatically asserts a framework, but allows for individual discovery. Whether the observer’s reaction is one of complacency, awe, or skepticism springs out of the moment—and is therefore, Koolhaas would probably suggest, unknowable in advance.

Perhaps Koolhaas hopes to inspire not a grounded period, but a floating question mark about contemporary architectural practice. He’s very much like Andy Warhol in this respect: a militant avant-garde figure and/or cynical joker whose work is so brilliant that you can’t ignore it, but whom you’re not sure you should take seriously for fear that it’s all just one big prank at your personal expense. Undeniably though, Koolhaas is transforming skylines. As Richard Lacayo writes in the architect’s profile for TIME Magazine’s list of the World’s Most Influential People in 2008, “He may not be a man who wants to impose his vision on the world, but somehow the world is looking more and more like he wants it to.”

SIDEBAR: THE TENETS OF BIGNESS

In Koolhaas’ essay “Generic City,” collected in his 1978 book Delirious New York, he implied a latent “Theory of Bigness” that he would explicate in S,M,L,XL. The theory would be a set of qualifiers and goals for the contemporary structure founded on five principles:

1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures.
2. The elevator negates issues of composition, scale, proportion, and detail, and thus the “art” of architecture, through its potential to establish mechanical rather than architectural connections.
3. In Bigness, the distance between the core and the envelope of the building increases to the point where the façade can no longer reveal what happens inside. This humanist (and Modernist) expectation is doomed.
4. Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good or bad. Their impact is independent of their quality.
5. Together, all these breaks with scale—with architectural composition, with tradition, with transparency, with ethics—imply the final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue.