Description
Book SynopsisIn Junkspace (2001), architect Rem Koolhaas itemises in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is here updated and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from architectural critic Hal Foster.
'The manifesto is a modernist mode, one that looks to the future… Junkspace makes no such claim: “Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century,” states Koolhaas matter-of-factly. Junkspace does a harder thing: it “foretells” the present, which is to say that it calls on us to recognize what is already everywhere around us.’ Hal Foster
Trade ReviewJunkspace is the most important piece of writing on architecture of the 21st Century. The stream of Koolhaas’s prose is akin to a visionary dream, a structureless sequence of crystalline insight and enfolding opiate fog. . . It is distinctly literary, and there are moments of outright genius.
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Foster responds to Koolhaas with an argument for autonomy—both disciplinary (from one art to the next) and (by implication) personal—in order to find space (or the running room of the title) within the junk in which Koolhaas suggests we have drowned. And whether you are at an airport an art fair, that’s something we all need.
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Art Review
Rem Koolhaas’s luminescent essay
Junkspace decries the mall as the slagheap of America...Koolhaas illuminates the dark underbelly of the kind of advanced capitalism living in the mall.
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Columbia Review Magazine
