Junkspace with Running Room
In Junkspace (2001), architect Rem Koolhaas itemised in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is here updated and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from architectural critic Hal Foster.
‘The manifesto is a modernist mode, one that looks to the future… Junkspace makes no such claim: “Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century,” states Koolhaas matter-of-factly. Junkspace does a harder thing: it “foretells” the present, which is to say that it calls on us to recognize what is already everywhere around us.’ - Hal Foster
Is there a future for architecture? If so, it might begin with the meditations – by turns elegant and frantic – of Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster: ‘even if there is no outside to Junkspace, there is still running room to be made in its cracks…’
‘Junkspace is the new flamboyant, flexible, forgettable face of architecture, rendered by Rem Koolhaas in a visceral and rampantly analytical essay.’ - Office for Metropolitan Architecture
What is Junkspace? ‘. . . a fuzzy empire of blur, fusing high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved’ . . . ‘smooth, all-inclusive, continuous, warped, busy, atrium-ridden’ . . . ‘the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning’ . . . ‘like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends’ . . . ‘this inferno of the neutral’.