Junkspace with Running Room

by Rem Koolhaas, Hal Foster

Junkspace  first appeared in the  Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping  (2001), a vast compendium of text, images, and data concerning the consumerist transformation of city and suburb from the first department store to the latest mega mall. The architect Rem Koolhaas itemized in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is updated here and twinned with  Running Room , a fresh response from the cultural critic Hal Foster.  Junkspace  describes the bleak and featureless world of capitalism, while  Running Room  seeks to find a space within the junk in which the individual might still exist.

Genres: Architecture, Design, Nonfiction, Urban, Art, Theory, Essays

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 6, 2016

About the author

Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a representative of Deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
He is seen by some as one of the significant architectural thinkers and urbanists of his generation, by others as a self-important iconoclast. In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize. In 2008, Time put him in their top 100 of The World's Most Influential People. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this little tome because I so enjoyed Koolhaus’ deconstruction of pre-war Coney Island amusement architecture, and its relationship to Manhattan building trends. I highly recommend that book—“Delirious New York”. This is a small version of that with plenty of “Oh-SNAP” attacks on the dull and mind-numbing commercial architecture (mostly malls, airports and arenas) that is wearing away our collective soul.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

nytt intresse: ironi som bärande vägg

[Kola]

Junkspace is one of the most entertaining things I've read this year. I love Koolhaas's prose, and his disregard for any type of critical distance. Foster's add on to Junkspace is helpful to see the essay in context, but a little repetitive and I don't think his ending remarks felt grounded in the points he'd made before--pretty much the main reasons why this wasn't a five stars for me.

[Jeroen · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his memoirs, Jean Cocteau tells a great anecdote where he shows Picasso a letter, and Picasso exclaims: "Ah! an anonymous letter." Cocteau, confused, points out the signature to Pablo. Ah, but that doesn't matter, says the latter: the genre of the letter is "anonymous".

So what is Junkspace? According to Foster's introduction, a kind of retro-manifesto. Whereas typically the manifesto says "This is where we have to go," Junkspace only says: "This is where we ended up." It claims nothing, wants nothing, merely points out. But it uses the language of manifesto. Every sentence is a statement, and every other sentence a denunciation. It is written and writhing in violent hyperbole. Look around you: junk! everywhere! It's terrible.

But hey, I always like manifestos. I think I admire that boldness. Even if it's a pose, this sense of being so sure of something that you can ink it up in capitals and distribute it on billboards, it wows me. I wish I would have that, just once. I'd like to think it would come to me as a word. A word of my own making, something like "junkspace". The rest of the words would just clump around it like weeds.

[Ken Bresseleers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most Agressive writer,? Hah

[Jay Jesus · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Si la basura espacial son los desechos humanos que ensucian el universo, el espacio basura es el residuo que la humanidad deja sobre el planeta.“ Con este juego de palabras Rem Koolhaas define el tema que aborda en su libro, con una crítica muy cruda ataca las bases de la Modernización con frases como “la arquitectura desapareció en el siglo XX”, provocando al lector que vive las consecuencias posteriores de las decisiones políticas, económicas y sociales que vivieron las ciudades desde hace un siglo con la construcción de edificios racionales en sus diseños pero muy herméticos e insensibles con el entorno donde se emplazaban.

El espacio basura es “postexistencial” y deviene de la mutación de "lo postmoderno” a la vez que esencialmente depende de la macroeconomía. El adjetivo “basura” al concepto de espacio se pensaría como una referencia a la era geológica del antropoceno, más sin embargo es utilizada de manera despectiva para describir un tipo de espacialidad arquitectónica y urbana, que compete a todas las ciudades del mundo consumidas por la globalización.

Como consecuencia los espacios han sido conquistados en sus intenciones de uso y ocupación por un capitalismo rampante, como escribe Rem Koolhaas “la mitad de la humanidad contamina para producir y la otra mitad contamina para consumir”. Mientras las dinámicas de producción y de consumo no disminuyan, el impacto de estos "espacios basura" en el medio ambiente será todavía alto y devastador. Un “espacio basura” forma parte de una ciudad genérica que oprime su identidad a costa de rentabilidad y de pertenecer a la categoría de “primer mundo”, etiquetas determinan la visión de las ciudades, intereses políticos y económicos determinan los paisajes urbanos de las ciudades en perpetuo crecimiento lo que provoca indeterminar los lugares.

En la era de la globalización, las distintas sociedades sin importar su ubicación geográfica permanecen unidas por convenciones e incluso algunas impuestas por las transnacionales y las marcas. Podemos encontrar los mismos sitios comerciales y de servicios en un Ciudad de Méxicom Londres o Tokio, ya que las transnacionales se encargan de tematizar los lugares. Creando comunidades a base de intereses de consumo similares y no a base de la libre asociación, y todo pareciera ser parte del Zeitgeist.

Con la animosidad de un predicador Rem Koolhaas en su texto precisa de una descripción alarmante de cómo los "espacios basura" son parte de nuestros entornos urbanos cotidianos, como personas y además como sujetos que intervienen en las actividades y vida de una ciudad. Ya hablamos en términos de real o irreal, y en donde el concepto sobre lo físico y lo virtual permanece en constante transformación y aplicación -más en nuestros tiempos con el metaverso-.

Para alguien relacionado al diseño es un texto que no se debe sólo quedar en la memoria y considerarlo un texto más de teoría o sólo como un artículo periodístico o de una revista más. Sino es un balde de agua fría relevante incluso en la actualidad de la segunda década del siglo XXI, ya que presenta una crítica cruda sobre las construcciones de la ciudades globales al más puro estilo contemporáneo de Kenneth Frampton con el caso de Las Vegas.

Me quedo con una de las últimas oraciones casi utópica del texto hecha pregunta: ¿"la humanidad siempre está hablando de arquitectura"?

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Koolhaas, gesticulating wildly at ... seemingly everything: Junkspace!
Junkspace is a sort of repudiation of Koolhaas' prior work, "Bigness, or the Problem of Large". In "Bigness", Koolhaas had tried to articulate the emancipatory possibility that loss of autonomy brought not just to architecture, but to life in general. Freed of grand design and individual ego, Bigness sought to be the architectural equivalent of what Rolland Barthes' "The Death of an Author" was to literary criticism. Bigness, thought Koolhaas, was a "model of pragmatic alchemy". Divorced from personality and concerns about purity, Bigness had the potential to expand our imaginative capacities of what architecture could be.

In Junkspace however, Koolhaas now rages against bigness: It is simply too overwhelming. Because of Bigness, "like a crab on LSD, culture staggers endlessly sideways". Junkspace is "like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends"; it is "Kindergarten grotesque". Everything from Santiago Calatrava's grand, overpriced installations (and the even more dismaying ones of Thomas Heatherwick), to strip malls, botox fillers, traffic, cellphones: all this is junkspace. Junkspace is the apocalyptic synonym of that nebulous term - "late stage capitalism", typified by design that is directed at the consumerist first. It is cities turning into installations - as Bilbao with Gehry's Guggenheim. There's no more purity; nothing that could be called sublime. It sucks.

Hal Foster's essay, "Running Room", an introduction of sorts to Junkspace, is clearer and more cogent than Koolhaas' manifesto-esque ramblings. Placing Koolhaas in conversation with Frederic Jameson's "Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984)", Giles Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle (1967)" and other thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Foster teases out the aesthetic, moral and political implications of junkspace.

In a discussion of Karl Kraus, Foster notes the distinction between an urn and a chamber pot. Though ostensibly the same thing, one is for shitting at night, the other is for decoration. Art Nouveau designers, Kraus thought, wanted to make the utilitarian object - the chamber pot - art. Functionalist modernists wanted to do the reverse, to turn the shitting object into art. Junkspace is this "urn/ pot problem", Foster contends, "a hundred years later and a hundred times worse". What is left, then, after junkspace has completely dominated our lives, is a play on the title of Robert Musil's modernist novel depicting the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire: Die Welt ohne Eigenschaften (The World without Qualities).

[Nate Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A litany of architectural loss": Koolhass, once a towering figure espousing postmodern Bigness, brings all the delirious fury he can muster at the current state of dereliction architecture finds itself in, and oh boy do the sparks fly! This is a thrilling, fun, over-the-top bombastic work that feels like it's recklessly playing in the ruins of the world it's describing and criticizing.

The core concerns here are that architecture has become disposable, as postmodernism was supposed to prevent but ended up accelerating - that the Hadid school of Deconstructivists and other postmodernists that looked into the past to find alternate modes of architecture instead simply muddied the waters and caused everyone to lose track - that our pace of consumption just might leave no space for architecture beyond what he calls JunkSignature™️ (the output of the star-studded cast of global producers, our stadiums, record-breaking skyscrapers holding international wealth and no permanent occupants, and cultural centers like art museums, all of which offering us up just enough to convince ourselves that we still create meaningful Architecture with a capital A).

Junkspace is a tough piece to really reflect on substantitively, in the sense of - is any of this a problem, exactly? Is this just a guy who thought the fall of the Wall really truly would change the world order realizing that instead it was simply opening up a couple decades of profitable delusion that things truly may have change in a utopian way? Is this just the new way and the critics of the old ages have nothing meaningful to say except that it's Bad? Or have we truly transgressed in a way that's going to either cost us tremendously, or will need to have incredible actions of course correction enacted?

Hal Foster's "Running Room", framed as a response to Junkspace, is wonderful in that it doesn't pretend to have all these answers. But it does have things to say, and its pairing is quite delightful in raising some questions a bit more directly that Junkspace would take a few reads to gather.

Together, these two essays are spectacular. They really arouse a variety of emotions, the despair and the wonder of the modern architectural environment and its utter lack of ability to be described or generalized to one narrative. Super awesome; thrilled to have it in print.

[Lily Louis]

Rem Koolhaas’ Junkspace reads more like a Kurt Vonnegut or Hunter S Thompson semi-lucid ramble than architectural thesis. It is at once childish, radical and brilliant, conveying far more about Koolhaas’ principles and ideology than the serious, and jargon-full architectural pieces I've read. It is chock-full of texture that allows readers to feel, smell, taste and even understand what he means by junkspace. While altogether unalike Peter Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard, Koolhaas's polemic against city and urban planning confronts the very same American landscape. He insults modern buildings, their lack of theory and thought, and the cacophony of sound they produce. His rambling is textured and evokes the very chaos he critiques. One cannot escape or move easily through his words. Koolhaas contends that architecture too has lost its order and dignity. Too obsessed with external perception, today’s architects are not architects at all. They deal not in the design of spaces but rather in the stroking of egos. In attempting to build for the masses they have forgotten the experience of the very inhabitants of the spaces they construct. Instead, the buildings they construct are the ‘junk food’ of architecture, cheap, artificial, saturated in fat and altogether unconcerned with its impact on the human body.

Like junk food, Koolhaas suggests that junkspace is an inevitable product of capitalism. Koolhaas’ words seem to simultaneously venerate (with disgust) the sheer excess of humans while also lobbing criticisms at consumerist and capitalist culture of “more and more, more is more”. This slogan, GDP’s very own, seems to repeat itself in various forms throughout the piece. With no one truly at the helm, Koolhaas urges his readers to panic. What was “a vast potential utopia clogged by its users” serves to imprison modern society. Koolhaas suggests that city inhabitants are unable to escape the complex nexus of modern buildings because, though authorless, Junkspace is authoritarian. It confines and confuses, a modern playground where entropy reigns supreme.

[Nini Pharsenadze · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a hypocritical, yet powerful piece by Rem Koolhaas explores the “justification” of the modern landscape. Interestingly, he puts the entire blame on modern architecture and the choices made by architects. To explain my point better, I want to reference the following quote “According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more Junkspace under construction in the 21st century than survived from the 20th… It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the 20th century. Architecture disappeared in the 20th century.” (Koolhaas, 3). Was modern architecture created by individuals or individual fields? Can architecture truly take responsibility for the Junkspace created in the world? Isn’t modern architecture a direct response to the needs of humans in general? Thus, could we have avoided it? If it was a mistake, how else could we have progressed? Did architecture in general have a say in the way the modern world took direction? Koolhaas also states that “Junkspace is political.” (Koolhaas, 4). Indeed, is anything not? I believe the specific type of audience can find a political side in everything even if it is not created to be political. Junkspace is the residue of the commercialized spaces that masks the globalized consumerist culture of the modern world. Consequently, Koolhaas makes amazing points which I also agree with. For example, he states that “Traffic is Junkspace, from airspace to the subway; the entire highway system of Junkspace, a vast potential utopia clogged by its users.” (Koolhaas, 3). The best example of Junkspace is the way US cities are so spread out, dirtied with highways, and wasting space that can only be felt by inevitable transportation. I would have liked to read Koolhaas' opinion/suggestions about how to fight the modern junkspace as Architects...

[Slow Culture Magazine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid 3.5 that is currently featured on Slow Culture.

Junkspace is an angry, frank, explosive take on modern architecture and its globalized illusions. Rem Koolhaas’ writing is as disconcerting as the reality he dissects. Some might have the feeling that this writing is extreme and one-eyed, but Hal Foster’s response comes to round out the angles before offering new perspectives and hope.

Above all, this book unites the work of two passionate idealists completing each other, and that it always precious to experience.

[Saba Rostamnezhad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Koolhaas is so disappointed about todays architecture and at the end authors do not give any solutions about the problems. Also, you need to have a good background in art and philosophy before reading this book. totally I found it complicated and not so practical.

[Dungus Crungus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly written and sourced. Really interesting to see how the argument developed over the years (and was often substantiated by time). One of those essays where I found myself underlining every page.

[Eva Bart · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is obviously something significant to note, however while you read there is a feeling on paper of heavy aggressiveness of the writer.

[howtovaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

dilo mi rey

[charlotte burden · Rating 2 out of 5]

absolute bullshit