Antonio Negri on r.Koolhaas

Of the writings collected together in the book Junk- space, ‘Bigness’ (1994) is for me the most important. Rem Koolhaas’s other essays, ‘The Generic City’ (1994) and ‘Junkspace’ (2001), are partly coherent, partly paradoxical complements to it. But I agree with what is argued in ‘Bigness’. Indeed I would go even further and say that ‘Bigness’ and Delirious New York (1978) are basic texts for reading and critiquing architecture today.

Bigness is where architecture becomes both most and least architectural: most because of the enormity of the object; least through the loss of autonomy – it becomes an instrument of other forces, it depends. Bigness is impersonal: the architect is no longer condemned to stardom.2

Bigness no longer needs the city: it competes with the city; it represents the city; it pre-empts the city; or, better still, it is the city. If urbanism generates potential and architecture exploits it, Bigness enlists the generosity of urbanism against the meanness of architecture. Bigness = urbanism vs architecture.3

Here we have overcome the poetry and history of the city. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, between Simmel and Weber, Burckhardt and Braudel, the city had become polis again, the imperial centre. Now space and time destroy this utopian centrality. The complexity of the world market reconfigures the shape of the city: the ‘over half of the world population’ that inhabits the urban affirms a real centrality. Bigness, the dis-measure of the metropolis, is what we find. What, then is the metropolitan body?

The essay titled ‘The Generic City’ is complemen- tary to ‘Bigness’ and illustrates and deepens its reflec- tions. Yet I can only partially accept what is argued in this text. Of the seventeen paragraphs that make it up, I agree with more than half of the first section, where new notions of metropolitan identity, the history of the city, and public space, are de-structured by a demonstration of the manner in which the metropolis becomes fractal, anomic, enormous and multinational. But I agree with less than half of the rest of this text: the last sections in particular, where the metropolis is presented as a machine that empties the city of reality, a sociological field where the horizon is disappearing and where each moment of stabilization is hypocritical

and fleeting; the city as empty spaces, panic, insecurity, screams and rags, infrastructural parasitism, and so on. The postmodern, a fundamental category in regard to Koolhaas, which he had already inaugurated in his retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York, is here defined as an irreversible category and as a way of seeing the present. But it is also given as what is perverse and corrupted, and thus becomes the main characteristic of his description of metropolitan space.

I disagree with this.