KOOLHAAS URBANISM

Tactical Compromise: Parc de la Villette, Paris, 1982

 

OMA’s plan for the 1982 Parc de la Villette competition leverages the position posited by Koolhaas’ musings on the Metropolis. The mechanism of this project is interface with the existing system; much like the generic skyscraper, it posits a framework of an architectural nature instead of an architecture itself. There is ambiguity of the future usage of OMA’s plan, but the framework remains - there exists architectural concept malleable to the physical manifestations of realities of the city. This strategy is one ideal response to the untamable Metropolis: “an architecture that allows any shift, modification, replacement or substitution to occur without damaging the initial hypothesis.”

 

“If there is to be a “New Urbanism” it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accomodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions - the reinvention of psychological space."

 

The above quote summarizes the critical foundation of OMA’s Parc de La Villette competition entry. OMA’s method of applying this theorem has five principal parts; I will go into detail describing the first two of these and the project’s overall relationship to the critical basis.