S,M,L,XL

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In a first attempt to approach the contemporary city, I read S,M,L,XL by Rem Koolhaas. This book contains a lot of interesting point of views which definitely will inspire me further on. I’ll post all my notes in a pdf but here are some interesting quotes:

“Since the recent rediscovery of the street as the core of all urbanism, the simplest solution to this complex and ambiguous condition is to undo the ‘mistakes’ of the 1950s and 60s and to build once again along the plot lines of streets as a sign of a regained historical consciousness. This approach restores the grid, respectfully connects new buildings with the old, and attempts to hide most of the postwar buildings in an effort to render harmless the mistaken ideologies of the past from decades. But it is important to resist that temptation, to avoid becoming part of a mindless pendulum movement where the acceptance of one particular architectural doctrine leads to the adaption of its exact opposite a few years later: a negative sequence in which every generation ridicules the previous one only to be annulled by the next. The effect of such a yes-no-yes sequence is antihistorical in that it condemns the discourse of architecture to become an incomprehensible chain of disconnected sentences.”

“The ambition of this project (Très Grande Bibliothèque, Paris) is to rid architecture of responsibilities it can no longer sustain and to explore this new freedom aggressively. It suggests that, liberated from its former obligations, architecture’s last function will be the creation of the symbolic spaces that accommodate the persistent desire for collectively.”  

“If there is to be a ‘new urbanism’ it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding noxious, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnamable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensification and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the ‘new’, only about the ‘more’ and the ‘modified’". (1994)

Koolhaas, Rem, “S,M,L,XL”, New York, The Monacelli Press, 1997, p259, 604, 969