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15

Riff on Rem

I woke up to the Sunday Times to find the paper’s architecture critic again unhinged by the object of his affections. This time, a gushing review of Rem Koolhaas’s boutique for Prada on Broadway, which opened to the full Hollywood treatment: klieg lights, limos, blocked streets, and paparazzi. The Times’s well-timed coverage (only ten shopping days until Christmas) was bolstered by a sidebar hyping another overweight book from his firm, OMA, this one about Prada, a classic merchandising tie-in. (You’ve seen the movie, now get the action figure at Burger King.) The book includes lists of key concepts (“shops should not be identical”), pictures of handbags and of cardboard study models, larded with images of the master, photogenically craggy and dressed in clerical black.

I understand Prada to be an upmarket Tommy (Hilfiger, that is, whose hideous retro boutique recently opened on the other side of SoHo), an amplification of traditional shapes, styles and refinements. Prada’s corporate culture is likewise geared to the shopping theory of creativity. Another tie-in piece in the New York Times chronicled the company’s recent rapid expansion: “Over the course of its buying spree, Prada acquired controlling interest in Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, Church’s shoes, Azzedine Alaia, Carshoe and the Genny Group, along with a sizeable chunk of Fendi.”

The architectural haberdashery of the shop (which occupies much of the former space, and is twinned with the remnant of the downtown Guggenheim) similarly compiles brands within the brand—a boutique of received forms—from the Dan Graham light boxes to the Venturi-esque supergraphic wallpaper to the Portmanoid glass elevator, the SITE-like objects hung from the ceiling, the Diller and Scofidio video cams in the dressing rooms, the disco Mylar on the ceiling, the pulsing techno, the personnel dressed in security gray, whispering urgently into their mouthpieces. This conflation of shopping with invention is the philosophy embedded in both the shop and its massive apology. The store becomes museum and vice versa. Fabulous.

The main architectural move is sectional, a wooden wave that dips from the first floor to the basement and back, providing seating and a display surface for shoes. The wave is the Koolhaasian portmanteau metaphor and his logo for multinationalism, his “site.” The architect’s a surfer, the cool individualist who rides but does not pretend to tame the massive hydraulics of the system. Architecture makes multinational culture look good, all the while compiling a massive documentation of its nightmarish qualities, just to keep critical distance.

What we have here is the post–Organization Man, Madison Avenue approach to architecture, spinning the creative wheels to make the sale. In a 1991 book, What’s the Big Idea? How to Win with Outrageous Ideas, George Lois, legendary 1960s adman, writes, “Advertising should stun momentarily . . . it should seem to be outrageous. In that swift interval between the initial shock and the realization that what you are showing is not as outrageous as it seems, you capture the audience.”

The sixties were a watershed for the ad business and the formative era for Koolhaas. Hip ad people broke the mold of traditional advertising, with its stodgy formats and endless mock social-scientific and statistical research, with new “creative” approaches. The working method was co-optation: the legendary ads of the period took on the rebellious, teasing style of the counterculture; snoot cocked at the same corporations whose products they were promoting. Discarding the buttoned-down look, the ad business wore flowered shirts and ponytails, smoked pot in its boardrooms.

The Koolhaasian project merges both 1950s and 1960s Madison Avenue styles: from the 1950s, the authority of “objective” statistical information, the conflation of marketing and taste, with its barse-ackwards formulas of legitimation. From the 1960s, radical chic advertising is the crèche of postmodernity and its professionalized ambivalences, the birthplace of the multinational style. Rem becomes Rem ©. OMA spawns AMO. The idea of resistance, of friction, is lost in the go-with-the-flow. For the post-Andy generation, the subject-matter of art can only be anxiety and ambivalence, and Prada drips with it. Rem is our dark Seinfeld, producer of our Truman Show.

When Rem first began his Harvard operation, he called it the “Project on What Used to Be the City” (in a massive loss of nerve, it is now rebranded the “Harvard Project on the City”). This nominalist dodge was surely intended both to signal a fascination with the “post-urban” forms of globalization and its degraded universalism, and to put some distance between himself and the more prescriptive styles of contemporary architectural debate (eyes rolled at anyone still flogging the dead horse of humane urbanity).

The reticence is a commonplace: our legacy from utopian modernist urbanism is postmodern urban despair—suspicion and dystopia, and a fascination with weirdness. Modernity is the Taliban, something we can all oppose. Rem’s fascination with this urban other may spring from formative years in colonial Indonesia: the writing presents us with the Conradian gloom of the colonizer with a conscience, helpless before the horror.

In this portrait of urban hyperbole, suspicion attaches to any optimism for the future. The association of optimism and totalitarianism is foundational Koolhaas: he’s been called the most gifted architectural polemicist since Le Corbusier, and the comparison is apposite, if complicated. Koolhaas uses the epithet “optimism” to jeer at the Corbusian fantasy of power and to reveal his own deepest value: pessimism. The writing exudes it: colorfully acid descriptions of the onslaught of globalization and its weird generic architectures, couched in the prosody of enthusiasm. Backed by corporate organizational diagrams, charts of travel schedules, and a thousand neat hierarchies, the sellout becomes the marker of the ingenuity of the critique: embodying the contradiction escapes it. Architecture is performance art.

The Godardian tone of the writing—flat, ironic, Johnny Halliday voice-over as he drives through the Alphavillian night—disclaims optimism and mocks totalitarianism. Koolhaas treats urbanization like nature, a huge sweep of forces, rules without agency, the landscape of his bitter sublime.

He describes Lagos, the Pearl River Delta, and Atlanta with stylishness and insight. The prose is honed and coolly enthusiastic, like deadpan Tom Wolfe. But what actually is his position on the city? He writes,

If there is to be a new urbanism, it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence, it will be the staging of uncertainty, it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential.

“Staged uncertainty” sure sounds like the 1960s to me. “More or less permanent” recalls the first-do-no-harm techno fantasies that yielded such product as “equipotential” space, “support structures,” mega-structures, flexible modules, user-change—the last gasp of modernist urban science fiction and its pre-cybernetic technical fix. A massively noncommittal space could liberate everyone: by predicting nothing, it would accommodate everything. The city would be a series of laminations that serve its shopping subjects by smoothing the flow of traffic, allowing efficient circulation between a narrowed set of architectural certainties produced by the wisdom of the market.

After working through such post-urban paradigms as bigness, sprawl, hyper-development, and retail, Rem’s Harvard (the Prada of universities) research project has turned its attention to the techniques of Roman city building, investigating especially its style of code-making. This reversion is produced by the generic city, which must inescapably turn to type for the means of its own inhabitation. Built up of standard components, the generic requires a basic gene pool of building types that can take on a variety of recombinant forms.

For Koolhaas, historicism stands in for prescription. The village green, the constructivist archive, Coney Island, Vegas, and ancient Rome are ideal postmodern enthusiasms: all understood at a distance. One as easily imagines Robert Venturi playing craps as Rem Koolhaas riding a rollercoaster. Having fun is not the point. The professional objects of Rem’s sly veneration—John Portman, John Jerde, Wallace Harrison, etc.—are all big American men representing big American business, druids of a practice in which innovation is largely technical and organizational.

There’s a hint of shame behind this nostalgia, the taste that dare not speak its name. Koolhaas clearly adores the actuality of postwar modernism, the repetitive blocks of the Albany Mall or downtown Stockholm, the thin curtain wall of Lever House, the 1964 World’s Fair. I can understand this: I grew up on Vallingby and Scandinavian Modern. It’s like liking vanilla. Ditto the thin columns, strip windows, and lifted volume of the Villa Savoie and the compulsive repetition of the Ville Radieuse. Rem’s projects are darkly traditional, ironic sequels: Mies III.

The remorseless, addictive celebrity and rapier prose obscure an old-fashioned whine of alienation and a complete refusal of risk. Although he has helped open interesting territories for analysis, Koolhaas’s project excludes any idea of subjectivity beyond hedonism or slavery, and any optimism for anything but the bottom line. With world-weary resignation before corporate “nature,” the voluminous oversimplification, the campiness, the fogy disdain for the political, the ironic combination of criticism with celebration, all mark the larger failure to ever tell us what he really wants (so uncool).

But there must be at least one relevant urbanism somewhere between hysteria and totalization, perhaps in places to which we’ve turned a blind eye. The neoliberal, economic version of rationality is soulless and converts our affections to commodities. The asphyxiating environment, the grossly uneven distribution of resources, the repression of the regimes—Singaporean, Chinese, Nigerian—that run these fascinating cities, the lived lives behind the defensive walls of the compounds in Lagos or in the jerry-built apartments at the edge of the Chinese town that are replacing traditional bustling neighborhoods, the sheer stupidity of the culture of consumption—these are not to be desired. A useful urbanism needs to take a stand about what is.

2002