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was the unlikely marriage between appearance and performance where architecture was not a matter of mere aesthetics but had succeeded in providing the basis foraunique metropolitan form oflife. The architecture of Manhattan relates, in the words of Koolhaas, 'to the forces of the Groszstadt like asurfer tothe waves'. DeliriousNewYork was subtitled 'A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan'. Koolhaas analysed the way in which the twocharacteristic twocharacteri stic features ofthe urban structure onthe island, t he grid/ block structure and the skyscraper, made congestion into a recognized social and cultural quality, thus resisting the trend to see congestion as a problem formodern society. The book contained in-depth discussions discussions ofin their time utterly modern constructions constructions inManhattan, including the Rocke- feller Center and the Downtown Athletic Club (a38-storey high skyscraper entirely devoted to leisure and fitness). Although Although the possibility to accommodate a very heavy programme in a grid/block structure permeates the book, book, the key key ofKoolhaas's analysis isasocial variable: Manhattanism. This This was the typically modern culture ofrejoicing inthe maelstrom ofurban life. As always half tongue-in-cheek, half serious, Koolhaas presented DeliriousNew
York as as a 'Blueprint for a Culture of Congestion'
and thus declared himself adefender ofurbanism asasocio-spatial theory. S,M,L,XL can be seen as part two of Koolhaas's intellectual intellect ual auto biography. It is the reflection ofthe same urbanist on the possibilities of reinventing the city 20years later. Inthis respect respect the book gives anaccount anaccount ofthe
wYork towork. wayinwhich Koolhaas has sought sought toput his his urban theory of Delirious Ne wYork towork. S,M,L,XL contains descriptions ofa(large) selection of Koolhaas buildings and competition entrie s. Koolhaas can be seen to try and find expression forhis positive appreciation appreciati on ofcongestion, especially especiall y in the designs forpublic buildings. That isarguably what Koolhaas's architec- ture inessence isabout: the quality ofhis public buildings tends tobeinthe programming, in the clever cl ever way in which he creates an intermingling of activities activitie s ororganizes spaces and facilitates their utilization. Here Koolhaas has encountered alot ofresistance. On the one hand he isnever politically politicall y correct: in an era in which the automobile is frequently taken to be the symbol ofthe defunct 'first modernity' causing environmental decline and traffic jams, cars playa generally positive role inhis projects. For Koolhaas there is nothing as detestable as apedestrianized inner city. Friction and dynamism iscelebrated inawaythat isreminiscent ofthe futurists. Onthe other hand he has atendency to even involve the powerful in this combi- nation ofindividual programmes orfunctions. For instance, for the Dutch city The Hague, Koolhaas basically designed the town hall in such away that itwould become asmall city initself: the local administration came out asjust one ofthe many functions. Koolhaas argued that the construction of the town hall was the one chance the local government had h ad to make the slightly dull town ofThe Hague into acity. This This eventually led tothe turning down of his proposal in favour of one of RichardMeier's sterile white buildings, a style that was much more congenial to the self-image ofthe city governors, and indeed the local understanding ofaTown Hall.
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According tothe architect and critic Peter Eisenman the twobooks by Koolhaas will have a more lasting impact than all ofhis buildings taken together. Nevert heless, Koolhaas is apractising architect and the first and most obvious approach tothe book istoread itasan account ofthe designs by Koolhaas the Architect. The title, S,M,L,XL, refers to the increase in scale in (aselection of)Koolhaas's projects. Starting offwith afewvillas, a theatre in The Hague and housing projects in Amsterdam and in Fuku oka (Japan), Koolhaas gets into ever bigger projects and commissi ons cumu lat- ing in the controversi al Euralille project at the intersection of two high- speed rail links inLille innorthern France. Perhaps most remarkable isthe design foranew sea terminal atZeebrugge, Belgium (1989). Here Kool haas sought t o find an architectural answer to the challenge posed to the ferry companies by the Channel tunnel. He proposed tocreate abuilding in the shape ofa mooring-bu oy, 42 meters high, filled with casinos, restaurants, conference facilities, night clubs and functional spaces. The design is remarkable because itsucceeds in illuminating howthe 'culture ofconge s- tion' can indeed provide an alternative tothe 'zero friction' technology that the Channel tunnel seeks tobe. Inthe predomin ant vision oftravelling, one seeks to maximize the smoothness ofthe journey with an emphasis on a general avoidance ofconscious experiences. Koolhaas's terminal building, however, gives symbolic power totravel as agoal and experience in itsel f: rather than trying t o hide the apparent loss oftime by constantly shifti ng passengers about asinthe typical airport terminal, people would here revel in a collective circus ofmovement and celebrate the transfer from car to ship. Ashappened tosome ofKoolhaas's best buildings, itwonhim the first prize but was not built. Another example ofhis brilliance as an architect is his design for the Centre for Art and Media Technology in Karlsr uhe, Germany (1989). At that time, the centre could claim tobe one ofthe loci ofexperimentati on with new artforms inEurope. Koolhaas's proposal wasto build one big container to 'generate density, exploit proximity, provok e tension, maximize friction'. Koolhaas purposely sited the building as close as possible tothe railway station, aiming torelate the new technol ogies to the oldtechnologie s outside. The design wasasclose asarchitectural design could come toan explicit understa nding ofthe ideal place and function of the new media: t he essence ofthe new centre was the blurring ofart and technology, art high and low, and art and (urban) context. Again, Koolhaas won the contest but abizarre run ofevents meant that his design was never actually constructed. These are just two highlights from the architectural narrative in the book. The book provides an interesting read along thes e lines, inwhich Koolhaas explains his designs and comes up with insightful commentary on the essential role of the building process and the man y procedural and cognitive obstacles for the creation of a truly 'post - traditional ' approach toarchitecture. The most significant contribution of the book comes from those sections where he transgresses his own building projects, turns back tothe core of DeliriousNewYork and explicitly reflects onurbanism, the future of
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the city and ofurban culture, and the role ofplanning in all ofthis. Here Koolhaas questions whether professional disciplines such asarchitecture or urban planning still have arole toplay. Inthe essay 'Whatever Happened to Urbanism?' Koolhaas repositions the challenge forurbanism: itisnolonger how tocreate the sort ofcongestion that he admired in New York. The new challenge ishowtohandle the rapid process ofurbanization inthe world. In face ofthis development, which isdriven byboth demography and economic growth, urban theory isconstantly outpaced bythe sheer growth ofnumbers. Hecriticizes the professional disciplines ofurban planning and architecture forfocusing their deliberations onwhat henowsees asa'classical model' of the city (the sociological equivalent being Sennett's model of the 19thcentury city) and forfailing tocome up with anew approach tounderstand and deal with the contemporary process ofurbanization. Koolhaas ispreoccupied with the newurban question. Inallthe essays onthe future ofthe city that are contained i nthe book, Koolhaas distances himself from the architectural mainstream. Koolhaas puts the 'parasitic security ofarchitecture' with its emphasis on aesthetics against the search for a 'new urbanism'. Here he claims that the traditional approaches to urban planning donotface up totheir task: Ifthere istobe a'new urbanism' itwill not be based onthe twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; itwill be the staging ofuncertainty; itwill nolonger be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation ofterritories with potential; itwill nolonger aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse t o be crystallized into definitive form ... it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation ofinfrastructure forendless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions - the reinvention ofpsychological space ... (1995: 969)
S,M,L,XL can thus be seen as a move away both from the 20th-century cityscape ofManhattan and the related disciplinary approaches toarchitecture and urban planning. Koolhaas points at a paradox in contemporary urban thinking. The commitment tothe historical concentric form ofthe (European) city leads to the search to both preserve the authenti-city ofthe historical inner cities and the drive to constantly modernize them to make sure t hey also keep their role as centres ofsociety. In answer tothis, Koolhaas points at anew urban form which he labels the 'generic city'. The generic city stands for everything the archetypical urban sociologist does not like: sprawl, same- ness, repetition. It is literally, a city without history created on aplane, a surface. Koolhaas thematizes the phenomenon ofurban sprawl asanessen- tial characteristic ofthe future inwhich density isartificially created inthe form ofurban simulacra: shopping malls, theme parks and museum environ- ments. In the model ofSennett's 19th-century city society isheld together byitspublic domain. Koolhaas's generic city thrives onthe liminal residual
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zones in between cities. These zones are free from conscious state politi cs, refuge ofthe illegal as well as the site ofendless - commercial - manipu- lation. Being dominated by highways connecting sites of 'inexplicable isolated density', the new landscape is very different from the Man-hattan grid. Koolhaas's ideal ofaculture ofcongestion seems to hit on the more sociological analysis ofthe emergence ofageneric city: the cumulation of programmes and the idea ofproximity ismaking wayforurbanization onthe wider 'plane' in which accommodati on of programmes 'somehow, somewhere' isall that matters. The form ofthe book reflects this. The design ofS,M,L,XL contrasts sharply with the clarity and orderli- ness of DeliriousNewYork.The typography and layout of DeliriousNewYork convey the structure of the Manhattan grid. It contains clearly separate chapters, each with their ownsubject matter just asthe essence ofManhat- tan is in the sociocultural programme contained in its individual blocks. Likewise,
S,M,L,XLmust beinterpreted asanattempt toconvey the sense of living inthe generic city. The book isacumulation ofdifferent typographi- cal forms and styles with photo illustrations inevery shape (from stamp size to full page, from in focus to extreme blowups resulting in very rough impressions of the original images), with drawings as well as a long alphabetically ordered list of statements, arguments and epigrams, some ridiculous, irrelevant or mysterious, some insightful and important. Ifthis irritates, itisthe generic city that bothers the reader, notthe book. The idea ofthe generic city isone ofthe most significant statements on the future ofthe city ofthe last couple ofyears. This isnotsimply because of the content ofthe statement: the idea that the classical city should now be seen asamere element inamuch wider urban constellation isnotnew. The idea ofan 'urban field' ora'non-place urban realm' even dates back tothe 1960s. Of course, we have been told about the existence ofthe lOO-Mile City, the emergence ofthe edge cities, the dubious qualities of shopping malls and the ethnography ofplaces on the margin already. Yet here we have a statement that brings it all together and relates the sociological knowledge toamuch wider variety ofaudiences. The generic city points out the overpowering importance ofinfrastructure for urban life in the coming decades. Not proximity but connectivity, not history but adaptation are the key variables. Koolhaas relates these elements ofanew urban sociology - that wealso find inthe recent work ofCastells (1989, 1997) orGraham and Marvin (1996) among others - toan attack onthe Western 'obsession' with history as a source of social identity. Koolhaas, who has a sharp polemic style ofwriting, despises the lack ofimagination and the lack oftrust inthe possibility ofcreating post-traditi onal relationships that are both new and meaningful. We can no longer rely on the crutches of history espe ciall y when 'history' does not so much disappear in the generic city as return as hypertext:
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There is always a quarter called lipservice, where aminimum ofthe past is preserved .... Its phone booths are either red and transplanted from Londo n, orequipped with small Chinese roofs. Lipservice - also called A ftert hought , Waterfront, TooLate, 42nd Street, simply the Village, oreven Under ground is an elaborate mythic operation: it celebrates the past as only the recent ly conceived can. It is a machine . ... History returns not as farce here, but as service. (p. 1256-7)
The generic city is one ofthe rare concepts that explicitly position archi- tecture and planning in the context of the process of globalization.Yet despite the effective rhetoric, Koolhaas seems himself uncertain how to respond to the generic city. The book contains graphsindicating the increasing number of airmiles travelled by Koolhaas, showing how the Office for Metropolitan Architecture became aglobal player itself. On the other hand Koolhaas dreams of reducing his office to just ten people as opposed tothe increasing number ofassistants that comes with aglobally active architectural practice. What is clear is what he does not like: unimaginative defenders oftraditional urban structures that fail to see the new challenges. In this regard Koolhaas isthe modernist who continues to look for new formations that will set free new identities. 'The past is too small to inhabit', is one of Koolhaas'sfavourite phrases. This is why Koolhaas feels attracted tothe new constellation ofthe generic city where houses are literally build ongolfcourses and urbanization simply springs up wherever one can exit the highway. In this sense he provides a biting critique onthe American variation ofthe 'new urbanism' where the public domain is reinvented in a neo-traditional form on the level ofthe (gated) neighbourhood orasthe Disney manufactured town of'Celebration'. Onthe other hand the generic city istoomuch ofaconceptual antithesis toWestern historicism tohelp todefine apowerful response tothe newpatterns that are now emerging. The emphasis onnew liminal zones (that wealso know from Sharon Zuckin), onthe 'plankton' between the cities, onthe strength ofthe anarchy of the periphery, are all somewhat suspicious attempts to avoid addressing the discourse-coaliti ons that produce generic cities. Koolhaas signals that he is aware that the generic city tends tobe the product ofan authoritarian political culture. One step further one would argue that if Europe ispreoccupied with history, itissoby choice: the modernist era of town planning was effectively brought toastandstill byashout inthe street, inMarshall Berman's (1983) wonderful phrase. It is typical for the debate in our age that we are aware of the democratic correction to the usage ofspace, but dissatisfied with the net result. The generic city should inthis sense beunderstood inrelationship to the research themes such asthe reinvention ofcitizenship, the technological culture and individualist suburbanism asadominant lifestyle. After all, itis technology that produced the collapse oftime and space (Harvey, 1989) that eroded the orientation ofphysical presence and proximity and that, com- bined with individualist consumerism, produced the generic pattern of
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urbanization. Here t he very idea ofapublic domain, that has always been central tourban theory, is in adeep crisis. Is there afuture for the publi c domain beyond the historical city? This is an issue that deserves attention and preferably from a more mixed group ofintellectuals than over recent years. This isagroup that ispotentiall y united as readers of S,M,L,XL. An interesting initiative isthat ofBenjamin Barber who chooses torelate tothe reality ofthe generic city inhis attempt toinvent what he calls a'malltown square'. Obviously, it is not self-evident that ametaphor ofsuch apubli c structure can be used inacommercial setting without losing the essence of its meaning. Koolhaas does not explicitly deal with these sorts ofissues in the essays of S,M,L,XL. In that sense the essays in the book are perhap s disappoi nting. However, Koolhaas recently admitted in interviews that the older he gets, the more herealizes howmuch he has been influenced bythe agenda of 1968. Both in his projects and in his theory one can find the references to that frame of mind. He, too, searches for the creation of a public domain, as is clearly shown in his entry to the competition for the Bibliot heque Nationale in Paris or the aforementi oned Town Hall for The Hague. He isvery conscious ofthe fact that alibrary seems inmany regards an antiquated concept in the age of electronic commun icati on. Yet in projects such as these, he explicitly chooses to goagainst the tide. So on the one hand his recent thinking onurban matters suggests the generic city isinevitable and simply coming towards us, onthe other hand his very own projects prove his macro theory wrong: the seaterminal forZeebrugge woul d be an example of how architecture can respond to the anonymous zero friction network society. Itseems asmall example that shows that planning and design can actually change discourses of travelling and create new nodes of urbanity. Yet Koolhaas has not managed to relate the sort of intervention on the level ofindividual projects to the urban theory ofthe generic city. DeliriousNewYork wasawonderful but with hindsight perha ps slightly traditional progra mmatic statement for an architecture ofconges- tion.S,M,L,XL isaremarkable statement and certainly points atthe issues for contemp orary urban society but also does not excape the intellectual crisis in urban theory that Koolhaas himself pointed out. The true signifi- cance ofthe book might be inthe combination ofits statement and its cult book status. Inthat sense itmight have more political effects than the more disciplined sociological texts on the subject. S,M,L,XLgives us an idea about the bizarre form in which statements sometimes must be made to generate wider attention than can be achieved alone by the ideas of the author. References
Barber, B.(1996)'MalltownSquare: Reconfiguring Commercial SpaceinSuburbia asCivicSpace'. Mimeo,WaltWhitman Center, NewBrunswick, NJ. Berman, M.(1983) All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London:Verso. Castella, M.(1989)The Informational
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Castells, M.(1997)TheRiseoftheNetworkSociety. Oxford:Blackwell. Graham, S. and S. Marvin (1996) Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces,UrbanPl aces.London:Routledge. Harvey, D.(1989)TheCondition ofPostmodernity. Oxford:Blackwell.
Maar ten Hajer is professor ofPublic Polic y at the University ofAmster- dam. He previously taught atthe Institute ofSociology ofthe University of Munich. He is the author of The Politics of Environment al Discourse and the Policy Process (Oxford University Press, Ecologic al Modernization 1995) and co-editor of Living with N ature: Environment al Politics a s Cultur al Discourse (Oxford University Press, 1999).
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