Sandra Anitowska

Tobb University Department of Architecture , Ankara Turkey

Keywords

Urban Archi-scapes, Rem Koolhaas, OMA, AMOMA, The carpet theory, Scape, contemporary city, The City of the Captive Globe (CCG), Singapore,CCTV,  Delirious New York,

“an (exploded mountain, a highrise, and a rice field in every direction—nothing between

excessive height and the lowness of a continuous agricultural/light-industrial crust, between

7the sky-scraper and the scraped. Scape©, neither city nor landscape, is the arena for a terminal

juxtaposition between architecture and landscape, the apotheosis of the Picturesque©”

Archiscape, landscape, introduction and genesis of terminology

The term SCAPE © introduced by Rem Koohlas, articulates to  us how to free ourselves from traditional terminology and thinking. The dialectical nouns town-scape and land-scape are not considered separately, but are conjoined to form a singular expression. SCAPE © is an idiom for the city, in which the distinction between center and periphery, between inside and outside, between figure and ground is erased.

Kolhass defines “a city” as a combination of various shapes and spaces that extend beyond our field of vision (it is continuous). In other words, he looks at a city in terms of its Topology, which is defined as the mathematical study of shapes and spaces. A city might be made up of structures of different shapes, sizes  and material, all in all everything that makes up that city comes together to form a complete picture that represents an urban area with a personality.

Each part or structure in the city serve the purpose of working together to form a fully functional institution which Koolhaas calls a city. In other words, the city is an “interconnected tissue”

Metaphorically a beautiful city follows the same rules that we follow in our daily lives. We expect harmony and patterns and smooth transitions in our lives, but the excitement, the lessons and the beauty in our live comes from the unexpected moments and the random actions, that we decide to take. Similarly a “beautiful city” in todays modern world is defined by its differences. The differences in, for example the heights of the structures, the different shape of them, their different functions and smooth spaces give the city a hint of randomness, thus making it spontaneous and beautiful. This idea of differences making a city beautiful, is different from the traditional architectural expectations of evenness and order in the urban landscape.

In Koolhaase’s perspectives iInfrastructure, architecture, and landscape represent one union. Instead of highlighting their differences and treating them as separate ideas, Koolhaases approach aims to represent these three concepts as one.

When architecture is  thought to be landscape, infrastructure to be architecture, and landscape to be infrastructure, then the ideal city can be understood on other basis than those conventionally presumed. Tis idea of combining infrastructure, architecture and landscape represents a hybridization of terminologies, identified by Koolhaas with the term MERGE©. An example of the term “MERGE” is combining the terms: ‘landscape and city = SCAPE©, business and pleasure = BUSINESS VACATION©, golf course and urban fabric = SMOOTH© green crust of THIN© urbanism.’

The different things that make up a city (infrastructure, architecture,landscape) have different components but they come together to give the idea of universality or uniformity. In Koolhaas’s perspective the “smoothspace” is  a particular space that is not bound by a specific place but is mainly marked by straight lines, multiplicities and different intensities of the solid objects around it. There are multiple ways to look at the same smooth space through. Smooth space is a 3 dimensional in nature and it is a smooth transition from one structure into another. A city according to Koolhaas should not have hierarchy, it should not have a centre, and should be a chaotic/nomadic nature. And this chaotic nature of the city means that there are always a pleasant surprise around the corner, when it comes to architectural design.

Koohlas during his very long and intensive architecture and filozofical career reflect a lot about the casual connection that exist between architecture and urbanism, and on their contribution to modern metropolitan culture. First he saw that concepts as a parallel, later they achieve symbiosis.

The City of Captive Globe

One of the earliest Koohlas design in this topic was “The City of the Captive Globe”. It could be intoroduced as a conceptual “fast forward of the life, death and eternal rebirth” of the metropolis. The image is a timeless and placeless grid in the middle of which is a half-buried globe. For Koolhaas a grid is a “dry archipelago” in which every block is and ‘island’. The islands are inhabited by design’s precursors like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe or Salvador Dali. And in effects, each “block” in the basis for ideological labolatory that attract  the masses inside, and keep them spin around, and that’s how the architecture contribute grows of ideology, and in effect development of culture at general.

Moreover, in Koolhaas opinion, people voluntarily accept confinement within scycrapers, that is whats make an concept of “dry archipelago” neutral. The metropolitan architecture, erected on there islands is the representation of

“the entire culture and especially the way in which architecture can still contribute to a formulation of culture instead of to the definition of itself”.

And also in my opinion, that is the bottom line of every analysis, every project and even every design of AMOMA/Rem Koolhaas. His ambition was to explore contemporary cities which now exist and develop without any recognizable archicetrural or systematic approach. He marked, that what we experience now is not a global impossibility of planning, but that is a personal mantra against that planning. The architect’s main contribution to this world is dedication to the ideology of metropolitan architecture, plus, staying confortable with the image of The City of the Captive Globe:

“So the city of the future, and in fact even the city of today, constitutes not a whole but an archipelago of different enclaves, where ideological values could be installed in limited, strong, and specific places, but with no pretence at being universal” (…)

The architect has to be able to adapt himself to the new conditions. And, “This is not necessarily utopian” [Reem Koolhaas, quoted in Lotus no. 84, 1995, p. 121]

Synthetic carpet + Potemkin villages = Singapore

In his essay “Singapore Songlines” (1995, from S,M,L,XL) Rem Koolhaas diagnose Singapor’s contemporary metropoly as a collections of cardboard elements, where artificality reigns boths inside and outside. In other worlds, the artificiality, which at first was confined to the interiors of scycrapers, now it is taking over the surface area, defined as a “synthesic carpet”. Singapore have no geometrical stability and vision. Moreover, the surface area ceases to be neutral, and they acquire identity and ideology so that it starts to compete with the architecture.

Koolhaas notion of the relation between architecture and metropolis is conceptually clear: the scycraper neider develop nor satisfies the urban culture. The atrium is the empty heart of the skyscraper that sucks the masses inside and cripples them ideologically, and skycrapers are placed so far from one another that they become urbanistically ridiculous and programmatically useless. They are empty and impotent phallic icons. The public space between them is not a dry archipelago, but an artificial morass, a synthetic condition.

In Singapore a Western modernity was interpreted the wrongest way – It is stripped of any ideology, It has stopped thinking about the city and architecture and clings stubbornly to its phallic image.  According to Koolhaas, this separation between city and architecture can only lead to insidious or iliferation or metastasis. The skyscraper no long plays a pivotal role or contributes to urban culture. Instead of that, It become a virulent cancer, and as well as the Singapore it the most developed and influential city in China, that will spread modernizartion throughout the all Asian continent. That’s why the next project of Koolhaas is so important.

CCTV

Within the article “Beijing Preservation” in content, Koohlas gets involved in the debate about urban modernization of China, trying to understand the culture and lying bare its motivations, possibilities, expectations and underlaying views on architecture and urbanism. In the combination of the desing for the headquarters of Chinese state television network (CCTV) and the idea behid “Beijing Perservation” Koolhaas analyses of and designs for architecture and urban development come together in one operational plan. So the project is both an attack on the skyscraper and an argument in favour of urban modernization project.

Kolhaas also had the another, not so obvious motivation: the CCTV project is to China what the Rockefeller Center in “Delirious New York” was to manhattan. The latter was the architectural hight point and symbol of greatness of Manhatan cutrule. There, in the city area, building was erected with “the simultaneous existence of different programs on a single state, connected only by the common data of elevators, service cores, columns and external envelope… the very medium that denies the need for congestion as condition for desirable human interaction” [Deliroius New York, p. 197]

Considerind that, Koolhaas created a formalist-functionalist architecture; non phallic, but vaginal, one that contributes both to the modernization of communist culture and to the definition of architecture. His desire was to rethink the future of the city in the contest of the public domain, which should make a fundamental contribution to urban life, as a “Central Business District Carpet”.

As he observed, the increasing ubiquity mobility of information technology paradoxically stresses the importance of face-to-face human interaction so that, at the dawn of the 21st century, business is communication. The essential question became one of how the CBD Core could distinguish itself in a forest of towers with isolated cores that minimized interaction.

“In Beijing, you have these needles and they collect their own little pathetic communities while breaking down the larger community around them. It’s an incredible squandering of the potential for exchange. It creates isolation right in the center of the city.”

What he proposed (as the solution) that the same amount of urban substance can be configured in many different ways from a compact tower to a dispersed network. CBD Core evolved to become a lowrise network of dispersed cores and flexible office courtyards combined with commercial and recreational activities that not only maximize interaction, but also offer the opportunity for a CDB with a 24-Hour urban life. As a compliment to this series of dispersed horizontal nodes, a dense network of vertical connections (including offices, apartments, and hotels) is proposed over one of the peripheral urban highways. That how Beijing’s CBD Core ultimately becomes 100% Park and  100% Program.

Kill the skyscraper

So is “Kill the skyscraper” an interesting way of achieving symbiosis between functionalist and formalistic ? Is that an answer for the real requirement of contemporary city? For everyone, who once thought in terms of an architecture and urbanism as a one unity, yes. In Koolhaas point of view, skyscraper had quite deliberately separated that two, that’s why he renounces its as a formal and ideological promoter and generator of urban culture. But that doesn’t mean that the modernization of the city has now reached a point of no return.  It goes without saying that Koolhaas and AMOMA are prepared to deliver the blueprint. The urban modernization of Beijing provides Koolhaas with both an architectural icon and planning strategy. And the two support one another. Preservation and modernization go hand in hand and are to designed to propel the city into permanent state of progress.  Kolhaas see contemporary urban modernization as a deed of eternal salf-imposed curtular change that’s finds expression in the architecture. And I am sure that this task will result in urban and architectural satisfaction.