Osservatorio sull’Architettura / Fondazione Targetti
in collaboration with the Office for Urban Planning of the City of Florence and the Quodlibet publishing company, presents:
Junkspace
For Radical Rethinking of the Urban Space
A meeting with Rem Koolhaas, Antonio Negri, and Antonio Scurati
Curated by Pino Brugellis and Manuel Orazi
Thursday, 4 October 2007 at 5:30 p.m.
After Yona Friedman, Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Thom Mayne, Greg Lynn, Vito Acconci, and others, the meetings organized by the Fondazione Targetti’s Osservatorio sull’Architettura continue with three exceptional thinkers who are among the most attentive observers of the transformations of the contemporary world. With their essays, they have drawn lucid and sometimes unmerciful analyses of society from different perspectives, prophetically anticipating our future and influencing entire generations with their theories. Three very different writers who work in apparently distinct sectors that, nevertheless never cease to interweave the ones with the others and to create reciprocal interference.
As is by now the custom at the Osservatorio sull’Architettura, these different approaches interact to create a “cultural mix” of architecture, art, communications, politics, economics, manufacturing, philosophy, sociology, literature, etc., capable of synthesizing the many social issues that find their most concrete expression in the metropolis. The big city is understood as a plural site that goes beyond planning, in which powerful dynamics, conflicts, overlapping cultural strata, forms and lifestyles, and multiple hypotheses and projects for the future nevertheless coexist.
The meeting will take the form of a dialogue, interrupted by the theatrical intrusions of actor-director Giancarlo Cauteruccio, who will be reading excerpts from the book Junkspace. Per un ripensamento radicale dello spazio urbano [Junkspace: for Radical Rethinking of the Urban Space] by Rem Koolhaas (edited by Gabriele Mastrigli, Quodlibet, 2006). On request by the author, the book brings together three of Koolhaas’ works that should be read as an ideal sequel to Delirious New York (1978), the by-now “classical” Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. The book offers a crisp vision of the ungovernable forces that regulate space in our cities: in the title of the volume and the last, latest work, Junkspace (2001). This landmark essay is preceded by two works from the mid-Nineties: Bigness and The Generic City.
As Antonio Negri has remarked, Koolhaas’ works are a grand narration of the destruction of the Western city to leave space for a mestizo metropolis. They thus offer a theoretical pretext for addressing the great issues of the present day: globalization, identity, and communication. These issues, seen from different perspectives by Koolhaas, Negri, and Scurati, are fertile terrain for a comparison that opens new vistas for engagement. As Scurati has written, “For Kundera, the novel is the paradise of individuals. The individualized society in which we live, which imposes individual solitude as an institutional requirement; is its hell. For precisely this reason, society is where criticism takes place.”
Florence will be the venue for what is certainly destined to become a signature event in city culture. It will be interesting, in a city with a strongly identificatory character, to see how the relationship between history and identity (or between “destiny and “character,” as Walter Benjamin would say) will be developed. Koolhaas harshly unmasks the dynamics of this relationship in the Junkspace: “Identity conceived as this form of sharing the past is a losing proposition: not only is there – in a stable model of continuous population expansion – proportionally less and less to share, but history also has an invidious half-life – as it is more abused, it becomes less significant – to the point where its diminishing handouts become insulting. This thinning is exacerbated by the constantly increasing mass of tourists, an avalanche that, in a perpetual quest for ‘character,’ grinds successful identities down to meaningless dust.” And the response to all this cannot be the by-now trite concept of “non-space” but will necessarily be something more vast in scope. We will, surely, be spectators to enunciation of a new category of thought, which Koolhaas, Negri, and Scurati will introduce with lyric cynicism to open our eyes to the space in which we live, and perhaps to space in general.
We might think that the Junkspace is an aberration, a temporary solution, but this is a mistake. Junkspace is reality. 20th century created it, and the next century will be its apotheosis.
Biographical notes:
Rem Koolhaas (1944) trained as a journalist and movie script writer in the Netherlands; he studied architecture in the late 1960s, first in London and then in New York. In 1975, with others, he founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and since then has been building in various countries, winning the prestigious Pritzker Prize, the ultimate architectural award, in 2000. His latest projects include redevelopment of Rome’s Mercati Generali (General Markets Area) and design of Prada’s New York and Los Angeles stores and the upcoming colossal Chinese Central Television headquarters building in Beijing. In 1995 he created OMA’s twin structure, the AMO (Architecture Media Organization), conceived as a creative think tank to study the potential of architecture as an intellectual activity beyond construction.
Beyond his strictly professional activity, Koolhaas is an authentic producer of concepts and as such plays a role which, for Deleuze, should be more proper to philosophy. What is more, Koolhaas’ disenchantment undermines traditional faith in cultural progress, in architecture and otherwise, at its very foundations - and this fact has often placed him at the center of raging debate): “Change has been divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture wobbles endlessly sideways . . . “
Koolhaas’ writings, translated and published worldwide, include: Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (published in Italy by Electa, 2001); with Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (The Monacelli Press, 1995); Content (Taschen, Köln, 2004).
Antonio Negri has taught political science at the Universities of Padua and Paris VIII. With Michael Hardt, he is author of Empire [Impero. Il nuovo ordine della globalizzazione, Rizzoli, 2002], translated into twenty-five languages.
Antonio Scurati is the author of two novels, Il sopravvissuto [The Survivor], winner of the 2005 Campiello Prize, and Il rumore sordo della battaglia [The Dull Sound of Battle], both published by Bompiani. He is a research fellow in Cinema, Photography, and Television at the University of Bergamo, where he coordinates a research group on the languages of war and violence. His works on this subject include Guerra. Narrazioni e culture nella tradizione occidentale [War. Narrations and Culture in Western Tradition] (Donzelli, 2003), and La letteratura dell’inesperienza [The Literature of Inexperience] (Bompiani 2006), a reflection on the media, literature, and humanism. He is a contributor to La Stampa and directs Bompiani’s new “Agone” non-fiction series.
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