DELIBERATE SURRENDER

If OMA’s Parc de la Villette plan is an example of how to work within the Metropolitan system, their plan for Ville Nouvelle Melun Senart is a strategic withdrawal from it. Koolhaas writes that “it would take a second innocence to believe, at the end of the 20th century, that the urban - the built - can be planned and mastered,” implicitly referencing the metropolitan condition established in previous writings. Instead of interfacing with the complexity of the metropolis, OMA’s proposal is “a deliberate surrender - tactical maneuver to reverse a defensive position.” A refusal to succumb to the powers of the modern civic environment, however, does not paralyze the project; on the contrary, it invigorates it - and the method is nothing short of spectacular.

“If the built - le plein - is now out of control - subject to permanent political, financial, cultural turmoil - the same is not (yet) true of the unbuilt; nothingness may be the last subject of plausible certainties.”