|
New York
(Photo by Stephan Edelbroich)
Deconstructive Thoughts on the City
New York
(Photo by Stephan Edelbroich)
"But Koolhaas's fame as an iconoclastic
visionary has been growing since the publication, in 1978, of 'Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan'
(2 pounds, Oxford University Press), which looks at urban life in this century as a fluid, largely chaotic 'culture of congestion'
over which architects can assert virtually no lasting control. And who would want to? Not Koolhaas.
His love of the urban condition is surpassed only by his mania for the unknown, the untenable, the unmanageable,
and the untried."
Katrina Heron
(Interview in Wired Magazine)
"Historic Centre" Potsdam with Schinkel's Nikolaikirche
(Photo by Willi Engel, Berlin)
Contemporary "Cityscape", Somewhere
(Photo: Tripod Image Gallery)
Residential Suburban Sprawl, Everywhere
(Photo: Tripod Image Gallery)
"Modernism's alchemistic promise - to
transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition - has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn't work. Its
ideas, aesthetics, strategies are finished. Together, all attempts to make a new beginning have only discredited the idea
of a new beginning. A collective shame in the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater in our understanding of modernity
and modernization."
Rem Koolhaas
"What ever happened to Urbanism?"
Favela, Cingapura, with Luxury Flats in Background, Brazil
| 
