Decontextualising ‘Junkspace’
“If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built … product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown… Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory…”
Rem Koolhaas’ essay might still be one of the most important pieces of architectural writing in the 21st Century — but it’s also arguably one of the most important pieces of writing about design, interaction and experience.
I wish I could cut and paste Junk Space in it’s entirety here. It’s a pretty magical work, and until recently I felt as if I maybe somehow had the right to do so — the essay was notoriously difficult to find in print, and if you did, it was most likely to be an Italian or French edition. But recently it’s seen a reprint in English (see here) courtesy of the forward thinking Notting Hill Editions, and they should be supported in their publishing endeavours — so buy it from there. If you’re a student or just mildy curious then you can read it here but you should then feel guilty and buy it for reals.
I am however going to extract some passages from Junk Space and place them here (sorry Rem) — extracts I’ve seen as relevant to current discussions and trends in experiential design, extracts I’ve seen as jumping-off points for other discussions, or just some quotes that seem timeless beyond ‘architectural writing’. Junk Space has a habit of being an undercurrent, an ‘I told you so’ and a ruthless explainer of ‘how we got to here’.
These extracts are — of course — out of context. Which gives them a new context, depending on how you approach them. In many ways this varied context approach is in-keeping with the essay; I became absorbed with the complete work, but have found its increased worth through decontextualising some of these finer points — breathing new life into well formed arguments and bridging the gaps between ‘now’ experiences, and the experiences described by Koolhaus in what is, at it’s heart, a philosophical work (albeit one based in the rage of the post-modern ‘now’ of 2001). Junkspace is in the business of world building — it describes the current while superimposing the future upon it. It’s a futurist work based on the reality of the human current.
And with that, I’ll leave you with these to place in your own contexts.
‘Transparency only reveals everything in which you cannot partake’.
‘Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in junkspace. There is no form, but proliferation… Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honour, cherish and embrace manipulation…Superstrings of graphics, transplanted emblems of franchise and sparkling infastructures of light, LED’s and video to describe an authorless world beyond anyone’s claim, always unique, utterly unpredictable, yet intensely familiar.’
‘With enormous difficulty — budget, argument, negotiation, deformation — irregularity and uniqueness are constructed from identical elements. Instead of trying to wrest order from chaos, the picturesque now is wrested from the homogenised, the singular liberated from the standardized.’
‘a vast potential utopia clogged by it’s users, as you notice when they’ve finally disappeared on vacation.’
‘procedures that took place in your absence; now you’re a witness, a reluctant participant.’
‘There are too many raw needs to be realized only on one plane. The absolute horizontal has been abandoned. Transparency has disappeared, replaced by a dense crust of provisional occupation (…) Corridors no longer link from A to B, but have become ‘destinations’.’
‘remnants of former geometries create new havoc, offering forlorn nodes of resistance that create unstable eddies in newly opportunistic flows (…) the idea that a profession once dictated, or at least presumed to predict, people’s movements, now seems laughable, or worse: unthinkable. Instead of design there is calculation: the more erratic the path, the eccentric the loops, hidden the blueprint, the more efficient the exposure, inevitable the transaction.’
In this war, graphic designers are the great turncoats: where once signage promised to deliver you to where you wanted to be, it now obfuscates and entangles you in a thicket of cuteness that forces you past unwanted detours, turns you back when you’re lost.’
‘succesive transformations mock the word ‘plan’. the plan is a radar screen where individual pulses survive for unpredictable periods of time in a Bachanalian free-for-all.’
‘there is zero loyalty — and zero tolerance — toward configuration, no ‘original’ condition, architecture has turned into a time-lapse sequence to reveal a ‘permanent evolution’.’
‘History corrupts, absolute history corrupts absolutely. Colour and matter are eliminated from these bloodless grafts; the bland has become the only meeting ground for the old and the new…Can the bland be amplified? The featureless be exaggerated? Through height? depth? length? variation? repetition? Sometimes not overload, but it’s opposite, an absolute absence of detail.’
‘Conditioning is applied (…) reveals vast antiseptic expanses of monumental reticence and makes them come alive, vibrant as computer rendering (…) latent fascism safely smothered in signage, stools, sympathy…Junkspace is post-existential; it makes you uncertain where we are, obscures where you go, undoes where you were. Who do you think you are? Who do you want to be?’
‘Anything stretched (…) turns to junkspace, it’s orignial concept abused. Restore, rearrange, revamp, renovate, revise, recover, redesign, return, redo, respect, rent: verbs that start with re-, produce junkspace.’
‘It prempts people’s sensations. It comes with a soundtrack, smell, captions; it blatantly proclaims how it wants to be read; rich, stunning, cool, huge, abstract, minimal.’
‘On popular demand, organised beauty has become warm, humanist, inclusive, arbitrary, poetic, and unthreatening.’
‘Colour has disappeared to dampen the resulting cacophony, is used only as a cue; relax, enjoy, be well, we’re united in sedation…why can’t we tolerate stronger sensations? Dissonance? Awkwardness? Genius? Anarchy?’
‘a post-it universe; team memory, information persistence, futile hedges against universal forgetting of the unmemorable, the oxymoron as mission statement.’
‘Color in the real world looks increasingly unreal, drained. Color in virtual space is luminous, therefore irresistible.’
‘Conceptually each monitor (…) is a substitute for a window; real life is inside, cyberspace has become the great outdoors’
‘Espace becomes e-space. The 21st Century will bring ‘intelligent’ junkspace; on a big digital dashboard: sales, anything that goes up or down, from good to bad, presented in real time like the automotive theory course that compliments driving lessons’.
