I recently stumbled on this short film featuring Rem Koolhaas and an unknown gentleman discussing the boundaries of architecture and urbanism. I think the narrative is wonderfully eloquent: it draws nicely upon the idea of urbanism as being ‘fundamentally generous’ whilst architecture remains ‘fundamentally egotistical’, something I tried to elaborate on in my edit of Centreplan 70.
Koolhaas also discusses the ‘imagining of a number of episodes within a building or within a city and the establishment of relationships between them or the separation of relationships’ and being able ‘to read existing situations … and then find within them the arguments for connecting new architectures to them’. Both threads provide an excellent starting point for my investigation: whether or not these relationships and the resulting arguments can be derived from the open-source, digital city.
The transcript:
I think we are interested in the city, we love the city, but we don’t want to start from scratch.
Urbanism is about creating potential; Architecture is about exploiting potential.
And what is fascinating for me now that we are involved both in architecture and urbanism is to discover that they really are totally different things; that architecture tries to define, tries to limit, tries to exclude other possibilities. If you do an architecture you are forced not only to say what this specific thing is but by saying what it is you also exclude everything it cannot be and I think that is interesting about urbanism, urbanism is just creating potential, saying this should happen, but maybe this should happen and this can also happen here so you simply make a (kind of) very compact or intense version of things that are possible, enable something and then the architect comes and takes something away from that potential you have accumulated and makes his own exclusive statement. (and so) Therefore I think that urbanism is fundamentally generous and that architecture is fundamentally egotistical in a sense.
What a script writer does is to invent a sequence or series of events and episodes and what a good script writer does is to imagine a suspenseful sequence which makes more of his material than you would otherwise think. And I think that in that sense I don’t see architecture or urbanism as fundamentally an issue of design but also the imagining of a number of episodes within a building or within a city and the establishment of relationships between them or the separation of relationships between them because connections are very important but breaks are also very important, ruptures. (and so) For me the two are actually amazingly close in terms of the inner-workings of the profession.
What we are witnessing now is that there is a (kind of) much more dispersed sense of the city and that maybe the greatest city at this moment can be a city where there is a (kind of) maximum comfort and where people in a way are liberated from an overly strong and domineering identity.
We are challenging (the situation) cities in a way maybe more strongly by being able to work with the situation as it exists. I think that that is in a way our strongest force; to read existing situations … and then find within them the arguments for connecting new architectures to them. And so this ability to read the existing situation is, I would say, a new thing in my generation but also something that is particular with our office.
