The Project on the City assembles research from an ongoing graduate seminar directed by Rem Koolhaas at the Harvard School of Design; its first two volumes—the Great Leap Forward, an exploration of the development of the Pearl River Delta between Hong Kong and Macao, and the Guide to Shopping—have just appeared in sumptuous editions, from Taschen. [1] These extraordinary volumes are utterly unlike anything else one can find in the print media; neither picture books nor illustrated text, they are in movement, like a cd rom, and their statistics are visually beautiful, their images legible to a degree.
Although architecture is one of the few remaining arts in which the great auteurs still exist—and although Koolhaas is certainly one of those—the seminar which has produced its first results in these two volumes is not dedicated to architecture but rather to the exploration of the city today, in all its untheorized difference from the classical urban structure that existed at least up until World War II. Modern architecture has been bound up with questions of urbanism since its eighteenth and nineteenth century beginnings: Siegfried Giedion’s modernist summa, Space, Time and Architecture, for example, begins with the Baroque restructuration of Rome by Sixtus V and ends with the Rockefeller Centre and Robert Moses’s parkways, even though it is essentially a celebration of Le Corbusier. And obviously Le Corbusier was both an architect and, with the Radiant Cities, Chandigarh and the plan for Algiers, an ‘urban planner’. But although the Project testifies to Koolhaas’s commitment to the question of the city, he is not an urbanist in any disciplinary sense; nor can the word be used to describe these books, which also escape other disciplinary categories (such as sociology or economics) but might be said to be closest to cultural studies.
The fact is that traditional, or perhaps we might better say modernist, urbanism is at a dead end. Discussions about American traffic patterns or zoning—even political debates about homelessness and gentrification, or real-estate tax policy—pale into insignificance when we consider the immense expansion of what used to be called cities in the Third World: ‘in 2025,’ we are told in another Koolhaas collective volume, ‘the number of city-dwellers could reach 5 billion individuals . . . of the 33 megalopolises predicted in 2015, 27 will be located in the least developed countries, including 19 in Asia . . . Tokyo will be the only rich city to figure in the list of the 10 largest cities’. [2] Nor is this a problem to be solved, but rather a new reality to explore: which is, I take it, the mission of the Project on the City, two further volumes of which are so far projected: one on Lagos, Nigeria, and one on the classical Roman city as prototype.
There are intensities of expectation constituted by the savoir of music, but the suggestion that they will never be completely fulfilled entails precisely that they will be uprooted, then left, or changed – which is to say, deterritorialized: intensities of expectation becoming performance intensities. Once again, there is no “outlook” for these intensities, and certainly no judgment. There is no outlook, i.e., of intensities of expectation affecting the performance “negatively” or “positively.” For it is by way of an event that they affect the musical space at all. There is no judgment, i.e., of the performance being “bad” or “good” from having been affected by intensities of expectation. For if we wonder at this we are simply playing at music, resisting the musical space. Fair enough. But what of a recording? This would seem to present a slightly different problematic.
[Can't be sure, but I think Dom Maltempi provided both links. A long time ago]
posted by Brad Larcen 6/22/2003[edit]
