KOOLHAAS URBANISM

Downtown Athletic Club: Revisited

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OMA’s organization of the site, a 550,000 m2 former slaughterhouse in north-western Paris, bordered on the north by the Périphérique, the Science Museum and the Grande Halle, is defined primarily by parallel regular horizontal strips, “distributed across the site partly at random, partly according to a logic derived from the characteristics of the site.”

 

“We see this scheme not simply as a design but mostly as a tactical proposal to derive maximum benefit from the implantation on the site of a number of activities - the use of nature among them - in the most efficient and explosive manner.”

 

The primary diagram for this banded organization is a calculated mimicry of the Downtown Athletic Center. “The layering is not unlike the experience of a high-rise building, with its superimposed floors all capable of supporting different programmatic events, yet all contributing to a summation that is more than the accumulation of parts,” Koolhaas writes. The design ambition is a horizontal architectural framework for such a summation; he argues that the project is merely an organizer of program, a “social condenser based on horizontal congestion.” In this sense, it fits perfectly within the nature of the metropolis established in earlier writings; OMA accepts that the metropolitan ecosystem will project itself onto the project (“the more the park works, the more it will be in a perpetual state of revision”) and accepts a strategic compromise: design of a larger scale system which can facilitate revisions without compromise of architectural intent. Koolhaas writes, “we see this scheme not simply as a design but mostly as a tactical proposal to derive maximum benefit from the implantation on the site of a number of activities - the use of nature among them- in the most efficient and explosive manner.” This explosivity is achieved through the direct juxtaposition of disparate programs via the system of bands, or “pure exploitation of the metropolitan condition: density without architecture, a culture of ‘invisible’ congestion.”