Where We Live

PAOLO SOLERI

MIKE DAVIS

FRANK GEHRY

ORHAN PAMUK

REM KOOLHAAS

The megacities arising around the planet are like the Internet where many events
are taking place simultaneously. The urban scape today is becoming more a space
of flows migrants, trade, capital, information, microbes than a space of places
rooted in an historical identity.
The megaurban condition today encompasses many realities, from the glittering
generic city-state of Singapore to the slums climbing up the hillsides around Mexico
City or Sao Paulo. In these spaces we work, love and live out the intimate moments
of our lives. In these spaces we consume and spew out climate warming gases.
In this section, two of the worlds star architects Rem Koolhaas and Frank
Gehry the visionary arcologist Paolo Soleri and the Turkish novelist and Nobel
laureate, Orhan Pamuk, grasp at chronicling the reality of where we live.

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The Past Is Too Small to Inhabit

author of Delirious New York and S,M,L,XL, is the most exciting
thinker today on cities.The architects Rotterdam-based Office of Metropolitan Architectures
many projects include the gigantic Lille convention center, equidistant from Brussels, Paris
and London (thanks to the Chunnel), as well as the CCTV tower in Beijing.
I caught Rem on the run, literally, as he was commuting in May 1996 to Rotterdam,
Los Angeles (where he is designing the new MCA headquarters at Universal Studios), Seoul,
and London. In our conversation we covered a whole set of heavy subjects in the most generic
of settingsthe departure lounge of Los Angeles International Airport.
REM KOOLHAAS,

NPQ

| Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet, rejects the term post-modern. He

believes we have broken completely with modernity and now live in a time without measure, or pure time.
What he means is that modernism was about trading in traditions for the
future. Yet, after the failure of Communism and Progress, we no longer have faith
in the future either. That leaves us abandoned in the permanently temporary present. There are neither ruins, nor utopia. This pure time is neither optimistic nor

Let us embrace this tabula

rasa and celebrate it. Regrets
about historys absence is

pessimistic. It is free. A tabula rasa.

Similarly, outside the center core of European cities, the rest of the cities on
the planet are becoming a kind of pure space like Los Angeles, liberated from

a tiresome reflex. Historys

presence is not desirable.

the captivity of the traditional center, and thus a centering identity. Their past history matters little as they become sprawling receptacles of overflowing humanity
and global culture.
It is in this pure space of the present that what you call the Generic City
arises. Singapore, the most successful Generic City, you call an ecology of the
contemporary.
In your buildings and your writings, arent you saying Let us embrace this
tabula rasa and celebrate it. Regrets about historys absence is a tiresome reflex.
Historys presence is not desirable?
REM KOOLHAAS

| No, I would never actively remove history. I like history.

What I dislike is the way a collective, free-floating anxiety has been diagnosed as being
about an absence of history, center and place while, at the same time, a large part of
mankind seems happily capable of inhabiting the newness that has been built from
scratch, on the tabula rasa.
The wallowing in anxiety over a lost pasteven in America, which, at the
moment, is really gorging on nostalgia at almost every level, from the populist to the
elitistblinds us to the incipient emergence of another world, another city, another

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way of being happy. We somehow cannot imagine that anything contemporary

made by uscan contribute to identity. But the fact that human growth is exponential implies that the past will at some point become too small to inhabit and be shared
by those who are alive.
Also, in a distressingly emotional and sentimental way, this other way is simply
rejected as if it smells bad. It is never analyzed, described or investigated. Is the
contemporary city like the contemporary airportall the same? Is it possible to
theorize the convergence? And if so, to what ultimate configuration is it aspiring?
Convergence is possible only at the price of shedding identity. That is usually seen as
a loss. But at the scale at which it occurs, it must mean something. What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness? What is
Some continents like Asia
aspire to the Generic city;
others are ashamed by it.
Because it tends towards the
tropical converging around
the equator where most people
live a large proportion of
the Generic Cities are Asian.

left after identity is stripped? The generic?

That is why for my book S,M,L,XL I made myself go and try to understand Singapore.
As I note in the book, I turned eight on a ship in the harbor of Singapore. We did
not go ashore, but I remember the smellsweetness and rot, both overwhelming.
Last year I went again. The smell was gone. In fact, Singapore was gone,
scrapped, rebuilt. There was a completely new town there.
Almost all of Singapore is less than 30 years old; the city represents the ideological
production of the past three decades in its pure form, uncontaminated by surviving contextual remnants. It is managed by a regime that has excluded accident and randomness.
Even its nature is entirely remade. It is pure intention; if there is chaos, it is authorized
chaos; if it is ugly, its is designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity.
By the way, I dont agree with Octavio Paz that we have broken with modernity.
I see the present as a convulsive apotheosis of modernization. The postmodern vision
is essentially a form of simplification that plays an important role in celebrating modernization. It removes qualms and resistance. It is lubrication for the modern.

| Did the Generic City start in America?

KOOLHAAS | Is it so profoundly unoriginal that it can only be imported? The
NPQ

Generic City now also exists in Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa. The definitive move away
from the countryside, from agriculture, to the city is not a move to the city as we knew
it: It is a move to the Generic City, the city so pervasive that it has come to the country.
Some continents like Asia aspire to the Generic city; others are ashamed by it.
Because it tends towards the tropicalconverging around the equator where most
people livea large proportion of the Generic Cities are Asian. One day this discarded product of Western civilization will be absolutely exotic again, through the
resemanticization that its very dissemination brings in its wake.
NPQ

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| Your attitude towards Singapore seems ambivalent.

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You have written that Singapore is a city without qualities, a Potemkin

metropolis. Yet, you speak with begrudging admiration about the new norm
being synthesized is Singapore a hard-core Confucian shamelessness, a kind of
ultimate power of efficiency that will fuel Asian modernization.
The rest of Asia, where there will be 50 megacities with more than 20 million
inhabitants each, wants to emulate Singapore, leading you to remark that two
billion people cant be wrong.
The impression one gets is that there are only two alternatives for Asia:
ordered Singapore or chaotic Bladerunner-type cities which can already be
glimpsed in Calcutta or even Shanghai. Isnt Singapore the most prepared of any
Asian city to enter the twenty-first century?
KOOLHAAS

| Another way to look at Singapore is that it is (a corporate)

Bladerunner. I also dont think Singapore is the place most prepared to enter the
twenty-first century. It is at the same time entirely new and incredibly old-fashioned
in the sense that it has been completely planned. It is the opposite of flexible. It is a
real city where absolutes have become vulnerable; by definition on-its-way-toobsolescence. It is built to last, and thus will age. It will be viable as long as everybody knows their place, but that will not be forever.
Recently, I was on an island in Thailand and found an even more compelling
model: a minimum of electronics and a minimum of substancebamboo, palm
leaves, corrugated iron. The fluorescent tube is the minimum increment of modernity. Sometimes two restaurants share a single light through switches on palm trees

Another way to look at

Singapore is that it is
(a corporate) Bladerunner.

that suddenly illuminate a clearing in the jungle.

That kind of liteness seems supremely capable of dealing with anything bound
to come along in the twenty-first century.

| What, then, might the Asian city look like?

KOOLHAAS | It has been precisely in order to find answers to this question
NPQ

that I am working on Harvards Project On The City where each year we research
clusters of interrelated theses on a different subject.
The subject this year is the Pearl River Delta, a region that includes an extreme
diversity of cities, some of which are well known: Hong Kong, Macao, Guangzhou;
some of them less known, such as Shenzen, Zuhai, and DongGuang.
We are trying to extract from our researchwhich incorporates subjects such
as architecture, infrastructure, landscape, ideology, demographicsa new conceptual apparatus to discuss new urban phenomenon.
This cluster of cities in the Pearl River Delta is destined to become one of the
worlds megacities. The area already has more than 25 million inhabitants.
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But what do we call this first unrelated group of cities, each with its own history?
We suggest the name of City of Exacerbated Differences. It is undeniably a future
metropolis, but each component defines itself in terms of maximum difference from
all the others. We also call it bastard metropolis because one component is overly
dense, one is a garden city, one is expensive and therefore another cheap.
It is therefore likely that the Asian City of the future will have all the conditions
within its spacelite and heavy, intense and sparse, lively and sedaterather than
one overriding characteristic. If there is an advantage to being a megacity, with
impossible demographics like 20-30 million inhabitantsthen that multiplicity has
to be one of them.
Another concept that will help us define the supercites of tomorrow is Scape.
Scape: is neither city nor landscape, but a post-urban condition. It is obvious that
the world of 2050, with its 10 billion people, will be covered by a lot of Scape. This
will be pervasive, generic conditions, punctuated by an event here or there, possibly architecture.

| You have said the street is dead. What do you mean?

KOOLHAAS | The street is dead mostly because it appears that all the new cities
NPQ

are less and less dense and more and more sprawling and sparse. But the vitality of the
If there is an advantage
to being a megacity, with
impossible demographics like
20-30 million inhabitants
then multiplicity has to be
one of them.

street depends on density.

From time to time it seems that people like density. They feel the apparent need
for something eventful. But not too much. Not everyday.
What is interesting about City Walk [a contrived main street of shops where people
gather and strolled.] at Universal City in Los Angeles is that it creates density in a
city of sprawl. And it is a success! This suggests that only the dead can be resuscitated.
NPQ

| What about the widely heralded hope that cyberspace will be the new

street, the piazza in our sprawling cities of connected isolation; that cyberflaneurs
will promenade around the Net like Baudelaire taking a stroll around Paris?
KOOLHAAS

| It is true that the Net has established an incredible, seething

community, connected and bubbling. It is true that you can be a flaneur in cyberspace.
But can you be more than a flaneur? Since people exist as bodies, they have to be
parked somewhere.
Maybe the tumultuous richness of cyberspace reveals something about the apparent paucity, the minimalism of the new urban condition. Maybe the Generic City triumphs because cyberspace provides the complementary excess? The Generic City is
what is left after large sections of urban life have crossed over to cyberspace. It is a
place of weak and distended sensations, few and far between emotions.
But I am, and remain, an architect. I continue to bet, so to speak, on the continuing
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desire for intercourse of whatever kind. The point now is whether we can imagine
hybrids of real and cyberspace.
NPQ

| Wont Generic Cities be redundant with the same global culture?

Mickey Mouse, Madonna, and Baywatch will be seen everywhere?

As Maxim Gorky once said of Coney Island, cities of varied boredom?
Yet, at the same time, these tabula rasa Generic Cities will be the home of
La Raza Cosmica the cosmic race, a multicultural mosaic anything but
homogeneous.
KOOLHAAS

| In each time zone, there are at least three performances of the

musical Cats. The world seems surrounded by a Saturns ring of meowing.

Yet, I think the threat of homogeneity is grotesquely exaggerated. For those with
eyes, it is becoming very clear that globalization implies, also, an explosion of difference.
The Generic City is, as you suggest, seriously multiracial, on average 8 percent
black, 12 percent white, 27 percent Hispanic, 37 percent Chinese/Asian, 6 percent

of the European intellectual.

They abhor the hordes that go
there, but EuroDisney is the only

indeterminate and 10 percent other.

NPQ

Mass culture is the dirty secret

| Great odes to trade and finance are rising to the skies in Kuala

Lumpur and Shanghai, taking the lead as the worlds tallest buildings; in Arab

institution that can receive them

with a minimum of dignity.

Islam mosques and monuments are still built to faith and martyrdom. Yet, the
most interesting architects in the West today are building cathedrals of the great
entertainment empires. You are building for Universal Studios, and Frank Gehry,
Michael Graves, and Arata Isozaki for Disney.
What is going on?
KOOLHAAS

| What makes Universal Studios different than Disneyland is that

it is a place of authentic production. Films and television are made there. There is also
a place of consumption, the theme park. City Walk is strange, a place of simulation
that has almost become authentic.
So we are definitely not involved in making cathedrals. We have to organize and
exploit for maximum social benefit the coexistence on a single site of so many conditions and realities, of which landscape is only one.
NPQ

EuroDisney was said by one French critic to be a cultural

Chernobyl. Can a Disney park be a Chernobyl in Europe, but not in America?

KOOLHAAS

| EuroDisney can only be considered a cultural Chernobyl because

the Europeans themselves are in massive denial. They have refused to take the issue of
mass culture seriously, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that Beaujolais, cappuccino, or the Roman Colosseum have been unable to ward it off. Mass culture is the
dirty secret of the European intellectual. They abhor the hordes that go there, but
EuroDisney is the only institution that can receive them with a minimum of dignity.
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NPQ

| Arata Isozaki says he wants to build architecture without irony. He

likes to build in America, he says, because there is no irony, no distance or conflict

with ancestral territory. Ruins are the pathetic sentiment about what was lost.
Is your Universal Studios project architecture without irony?
KOOLHAAS

| Can anyone outrun irony today?

There are large ironies in America, one of them is that a culture which was about
newness has abandoned its role in its further definition and development.
By not understanding cities,
urban life, we kill them. And
when they are dead, we wring
our hands and begin mouthto-mouth resuscitation.

What concerns me, and what may be the result of a collective flight backwards,
is that New York, which, if anything, used to be a real city, a city without selection,
without exclusive morality, is now expelling, as in some kind of Biblical farce, the
entire sector of sin. A cabal of well-meaning people has caused the death of 42nd
street. A last domain of randomness, possibility and, most importantly, urbanity
the Metropolitanis eliminated in the name of rehabilitation and Disney.
By not understanding cities, urban life, we kill them. And when they are dead, we
wring our hands and begin mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

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