[R&T] Essay_two

Generic City

 Rem Koolhaas

This paper discusses the idea of the Generic City according to how Rem Koolhaas perceive it. This essay introduces the idea of the generic city with the concept of the contemporary city like a contemporary airport – “All the Same” He goes on to consider the convergence of generic cities that loose there identity and ask the questions; what are the disadvantages of identity and what are the advantages of blankness?

 

It seems Koolhaas is claiming that this idea of homogenization is happening globally in all city. Even more it seems he is declaring the generic city is becoming a current movement and to ‘down with character’. The movement this paper conveys is one that is generic that loses identity. The effects that make identity are derived from history, context, the real, and the things that make culture. This is nothing that can be contemporised; history cannot be made from nothing. Koolhaas ensures this idea by claiming that the generic city is being thinned of it character and “grinds successful identities down to meaningless dust”.

 

“Identity is like a mousetrap in which more and more mice have to share the original bait, and which, on closer inspection, may have been empty for centuries”.

This paper then develops by using more analogies and metaphors into how the city is changing from the central mother to its conceptual orphan with inadequacies of what a city should be. Furthermore describing the generic city as becoming liberated from the centre, dependent on current needs and present abilities.  Koolhaas declares that the generic city is “Big enough for everyone… It is easy… If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews”.

Another question is asked at the Statistics point; did the generic city come from America and did it get exported out to the rest of the world? This is where the example of Asian cities that aspire to be a generic city is written and the concept of a city as a logo.

A part of this essay that I find touches on something interesting that needs more attention is the idea of cyberspace in the generic city. “The generic City is what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace”. Koolhaas describes the city as a place that is weak and distended of sensation and emotion. The city becomes sedate; moments that happen in the everyday are lost and become mundane.

Koolhaas describes what the city is supposedly meant to be at its centre, a place of business that is manic and hectic but as a generic city it is reduced to an eerier calm. The serenity of the generic city as this paper is described is to become a place that is solely design for an urban plane of necessity. A place that accommodates fundamentally for the car, the generic city is aiming for a ‘seemingly automotive efficiency’. This creates a landscape of endless repetition that fractures the cities milieu into a simple structure for the car. People should be on promenades in the generic city, to lift them off the ground to make way for cars below.

This paper then turns to a subject that I find very interesting, the concept of the airport. A space that is neutral by nature, a place that has no characteristic that is prevalent of importance to its space. The airport becomes a space of non-place, “airports become emblematic signs imprinted on the global collective unconscious in savage manipulations of their non-aviatic attractors”. Koolhaas discusses the airport as a concentrated location of the hyper-local, as a place that you can get things you couldn’t get anywhere else in the world to the Hyper global for it’s a place that you can get goods that you cant get from even the city the airport is in. He concludes this section by stating the airport and its facilities are like quarters in a generic city and that maybe they should be at its centre.

The paper then turns back to the discussion of the generic city having a lack of character in culture, which Koolhaas examines as a reason for its multicultural background and as a place for any religion or heritage. This lack of culture is also supported by the use of public art in the generic city to bring it life and a feel of place and purpose; once again Koolhaas claims this as being a lost cause: “The organic is the generic city’s strongest myth… the street is dead”.

Koolhaas touches a little on the idea of new towns that circulate around the generic city like vultures that age quickly and “dies of a disease in the first five years of its life”. It makes no difference of planning or design, the life of the new town is doomed. This is also similar to the life of the office, as Koolhaas describes soon they will become obsolete as people will work from home, to which the office will fight back and will become either converted to homes or become destroyed. As Koolhaas concludes:

“The generic city is like a dating agency: it efficiently matches supply and demand… that is the story of the city. The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now”.