Beyond Delirious — Rem Koolhaas Urban Strategies | Comprehensive Study Notes

Urban Voids – A Contemporary Front Line

  • Present-day planning climate: relentless drive to densify and “stop-up” every parcel.
    • Koolhaas argues for the opposite focus: urban voids / empty space as the main (perhaps only) arena where constructive intervention is still possible.
  • Two strategic advantages of emptiness
    • 1. Governability: Easier to control, program, and protect a void than to discipline already-built “uncontrollable” agglomerations.
    • 2. Consensus-builder: Landscape and open space elicit broad public support, whereas any new architectural object is "always suspect" and triggers distrust.

Reurbanizing Bijlmermeer (Amsterdam, NL)

  • Context
    • Massive Dutch "grand ensemble" from the \text{1960s} — likened to “Le Corbusier without talent”.
    • Comprises 12 hexagonal super-blocks; area of a single block ≈ historic centre of Amsterdam.
    • Current state: empty flats, transitory residents, discussions of total demolition.
  • OMA’s diagnosis
    • Positive latent qualities: light, space, sense of freedom & abandonment cherished by singles, divorcees, artists, car-owners.
    • Core defect = infrastructural severance: aberrant streets + garage slabs isolate people from dwellings.
  • Strategy of intervention
    • Leave housing intact.
    • Intensify & articulate open space:
    • Superimpose new grid where highways, garages, schools, stadiums become “islands” in greenery.
    • Connect to a central armature hosting labs, research centres, movie studios, etc.
    • Framed as indispensable national investment to cure a vast mid-Holland blight.

“Statistic Architecture” & The Problem of Repetition

  • Personal fondness for the “banal” 1950\text{s}–1960\text{s} work of Ernesto Rogers, Richard Neutra, etc.
    • Sometimes magnificently built, carefree, free.
  • Term by Bruno Vayssière & Patrice Noviant: “architecture statistique”
    • Power architecture whose power is effortless — shifts from prototype → series → endless repetition until ennui sets in.
  • Koolhaas’s position: live with it, detach from it, seek contemporaneity rather than nostalgia or naïve Modernism.

Generation of May 1968 – Two Divergent Reactions to Today’s City

  • Reaction A (Neo-Trad / Reconstruction):
    • Figures like Leon Krier reconstruct idealized classical cities (e.g.
      Washington proposal).
    • Holds faith in the city but lacks operational traction.
  • Reaction B (Abdication / Spectacle):
    • Coop Himmelblau at Melun-Sénart: abandons hope of coherent city, composes chaotic, subconscious spectacles.
  • Resulting tragedy: the rediscovered city remains a devastated territory – craving but not receiving effective action.

Melun-Sénart Competition (1989) – “Incompetence as Method”

  • Site: last “new town” in the ring around Paris; pristine French landscape with royal hunting forests.
  • Moral revulsion at erasing such terrain led OMA to invent “where we will NOT build” planning.
    • No building on northern/southern forest edges, royal deer corridor, or highway buffer.
    • Process of successive eliminations produced a sinuous "Chinese-ink" figure of protected green.
  • Outcome: proposal for a city defined by absences – an archipelago of voids guiding inevitable leftover development.

High-Density “Clumps” as Anti-Sprawl Weapon

  • Inspiration: Kowloon Walled City (mistakenly called the “Forbidden City”) demolished 1993.
    • Footprint ≈ 180\text{ m} \times 120\text{ m}, floor area \sim 300\,000\ \text{m}^2.
    • No programmatic stability: dwelling → brothel → factory → heroin lab → clinic, etc.
  • Design lesson: conceive buildings as “permanent accommodation for provisional activities.”
    • Frees architects from rigid programme–form concordance.
  • Antwerp test case: 1.5 million \text{m}^2 cluster positioned to save 2\ \text{km}^2 of peripheral land.

Lille – Building a Virtual Metropolis (TGV + Channel Tunnel)

  • Transport revolution
    • Old Lille–Paris train = 2.5\ \text{h} → now 50\ \text{min}.
    • Lille–London cut from 13\ \text{h} → 1\ \text{h}\ 10\ \text{min}.
    • Lille–Brussels 40\ \text{min}; Germany < 2\ \text{h}; Disneyland Paris 45\ \text{min}.
  • Time-based mapping shows 60 million inhabitants within \le 90\ \text{min} – Lille becomes accidental hub.
  • Commission 1989: OMA asked to untangle TGV, Eurotunnel link, ring highway – the "Gordian knot".

Conceptual Shock for the May '68 Architect

  • Koolhaas never expected his generation to handle such heavy infrastructure – highways were "for uncles." Projects reveal how ideological self-exile from operational reality left them unprepared.

Design Moves

  • Bluff Solution (accepted):
    • Widen TGV from 2 to 6 tracks at station.
    • Highway buried parallel to tracks.
    • Install "largest car park in Christendom" – 8\,000 spaces between rail & road.
    • Massive subterranean infrastructure equal to the scale of Europe yet invisible at surface.
  • Phase I programme: 1.5\ \text{million m}^2 – towers, offices, hotels, housing.
  • Tilted plane between old & new stations forms building on city side, dips on tunnel side to expose arriving TGVs – literal stage-set of transformation.
  • Towers straddling the station (bridge-buildings) – +8\% cost tolerated for symbolic value.
    • Importance measured not by local geography but by being 60\ \text{min} from both London & Paris.
  • Role: “architecte en chef” – sets envelopes, sections, relationships; other architects do façades → blend of power & impotence.

"Dynamique d’enfer" – Developer’s Tactic

  • Developer’s credo: create “hellish dynamism” so complex that all partners are "prisoners chained together,” unable to withdraw – guarantees project completion.
  • Koolhaas recognizes OMA unwittingly fuelled this mechanism – now an item in their toolkit.
  • Construction: first slice planned 1989, becomes one of Europe’s largest building sites by mid-1990\text{s}.

From Architecture to Urban Operating Systems

  • Increasing focus on manipulating urban planes & infrastructures rather than composing isolated buildings.
  • Large scale permits invention of new typologies and collective envelopes, while respecting programmatic flexibility.

Theoretical & Ethical Undercurrents

  • Ecological / Anti-sprawl stance: clustering density to protect landscapes aligns with William McDonough’s call for flexibility & re-use (Ch. 8) and with modernist “open plan” ideals.
  • Cross-Programming Legacy: earlier OMA projects mixed incongruous uses (cf. Bernard Tschumi, Ch. 3) – surreal results anticipate today’s “permanent/provisional” clumps.
  • Philosophical Shift: from Modernist faith in form to embracing emptiness, absence, uncertainty, and the incidental as positive urban catalysts.

Key Numerical & Spatial Data (Quick Reference)

  • Bijlmermeer: 12 mega-blocks; each ≈ Amsterdam historic core.
  • Kowloon model: footprint 180\text{ m} \times 120\text{ m}; GFA 300\,000\ \text{m}^2.
  • Antwerp clump: 1.5\ \text{million m}^2 buildup saves 2\ \text{km}^2 of land.
  • Lille timelines & reach: Paris 50\ \text{min}, London 70\ \text{min}, Brussels 40\ \text{min}, 60 million people ≤ 90\ \text{min}.
  • Lille car park: 8\,000 spaces; Phase I floor area 1.5\ \text{million m}^2.

Core Take-Aways for Exam Preparation

  • Void-based urbanism can reclaim agency where form-based planning falters.
  • OMA’s method often begins with negation (where not to build), producing legible green “figures”.
  • Extreme density clusters justify themselves ecologically by freezing sprawl.
  • Infrastructure choreography (rail, road, parking) is increasingly the real architectural act.
  • Koolhaas embodies the paradox of the ‘68 generation: critical consciousness + accidental power.
  • Projects operate on a spectrum from symbolic bravado (towers as addresses) to calculated inaction (protected voids).