KOOLHAAS URBANISM

Planning With Voids

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The site for the project is Southeast of Paris, an open plot of 5000 hectares containing “old villages... two enormous forests, farmland, a future campus, and a very beautiful area of land where French kings chased deer from one mini-forest to another, and shot them as they ran for cover.” OMA’s conundrum: given the ever-advancing, “out of control” built fabric, creation of a comprehensive plan with architectural agency. Their solution lies in the void, rather than the built - acknowledging that they know no better than architects how to corral the forces of the built metropolis, they propose corralling instead the unbuilt metropolis: “the preservation of the void is comparatively easy.” This manifests in a plan whose chief objective is definition of a discontinuous system of irregular zones of void - and the rest is left undefined, allowed to form around these voids organically.

 

“This project is more a discourse on what should not happen at Melun-Senart than on what should.”

 

Asserting control over spaces that would remain relatively unbuilt, OMA is able to architecturally define zones of preservation - a composition that could come to define the city without attempting to master its nebulous mechanisms. “And then we said, ‘the rest we will surrender to chaos,’” Koolhaas writes, “to the average-contemporary-everyday ugliness of current European-American-Japanese architecture and generate, through that ugliness, a potentially sublime contrast.” The plan of voids is truly brilliant - definition and preservation of the most architecturally potent qualities of the site by isolation, contrasting with the inevitable (unpleasant, Koolhaas asserts) qualities any contemporary planned city would take on regardless. Reversal of the assumed roles of the urban planner gives the plan unprecedented leverage over the urban condition - as Koolhaas concludes, “this system of emptiness that guarantees beauty, serenity, accessibility, identity regardless - or even in spite of - its future architecture.” In this sense, the plan for Melun-Senart is an ideal for the modern day - one that officially acquiesces to forces greater than any organization while corralling such forces in a realm they cannot disrupt.