The Past Is Too Small to Inhabit |
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| Authors: | REM KOOLHAAS |
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| Affiliation: | Author of Delirious New York and S,M,L,XL, is the most exciting thinker today on cities. The architect's Rotterdam‐based Office of Metropolitan Architecture's many projects include the gigantic Lille convention center, equidistant from Brussels, Paris and London (thanks to the Chunnel), as well as the CCTV tower in Beijing. |
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| Abstract: | The megacities arising around the planet are like the Internet where many events are taking place simultaneously. The urban scape today is becoming more a space of flows—migrants, trade, capital, information, microbes—than a space of places rooted in an historical identity. The megaurban condition today encompasses many realities, from the glittering generic city‐state of Singapore to the slums climbing up the hillsides around Mexico City or Sao Paulo. In these spaces we work, love and live out the intimate moments of our lives. In these spaces we consume and spew out climate warming gases. In this section, two of the world's “star architects”—Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry—the visionary “arcologist” Paolo Soleri and the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, grasp at chronicling the reality of where we live. |
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