THE DEATH OF URBANISM

In S, M, L, XL , Koolhaas describes at length the languish of modern Urbanism and the contempt for “ideal” urban gestures held by critical architectural practice. Quite convincingly he posits that architecture’s inability to understand or control wholly the city is due to the city’s complexity of multiplicity, and that this complexity paralyzes architectural practice and discourse to criticality instead of productivity. In doing so, he argues, “we dismantled an entire discipline, cut ourselves off from the operational, and condemned entire populations to the impossibility of encoding civilizations on their territory - the subject of urbanism.”

"Through our hypocritical relationship with power - contemptuous yet covetous - we dismantled an entire discipline, cut ourselves off from the operational, and condemned entire populations to the impossibility of encoding civilizations on their territory - the subject of urbanism.”

The proportions of the metropolis and the Culture of Congestion, Koolhaas writes, have defeated the profession of urbanism itself: “in spite of its early promise, its frequent bravery, urbanism has been unable to invent and implement at the scale demanded by its apocalyptic demographics.” Instead of greeting the insurmountable complexity of the problem as a font of endless possibility, architecture (a discipline of both tremendous egotism and cowardice) has become intimidated to a point of refusal to even acknowledge urbanism. “Dissatisfaction with the contemporary city has not led to the development of an alternative,” Koolhaas writes, but has instead manifested itself into endless repetition of criticism for the projects of the past and a refusal to accept partial control as a means of interface with the juggernaut of the Metropolis. In other words, the critical profession has refused to abandon the critique of classical planning methods but abstained from positing an alternative, recoiling from the complexity of reconciling “ideal” schemes with the realities of contemporary society into an airtight bubble of comforting and harmless form-making: architecture.

"This century has been a losing battle

with the issue of quantity."

- S, M, L, XL

Architecture, he writes, feeds off of the potentials generated by urbanism, but without one the other cannot survive: “our refuge in the parasitic security of architecture creates an imminent disaster: more and more substance is grafted on starving roots.” This concern, along with the understanding of the city as a mega-complex, untamable system, becomes the generative idea behind OMA’s strategies in the field of urbanism.