Transatlantic transactionsIn this conversation with Rem Koolhaas,arq probes some of the issues raised byhis research into shopping, the subjectof his latest book, The Harvard DesignSchool Guide to Shopping. He arguesthat architects have largely ignored thisdominant form of urban activity, whichhas prohibited us from having an effecton its quality. Maintaining a critical butopen-minded position, he offersinsights of value to every architect.

arq: How might your research intoshopping affect what we do asarchitects?

Koolhaas: It is my hope that ourinvestigation into shopping spaceand how it differs from traditionalspace can liberate us as architects.For example, a completely bare andstrict architecture might reacquireinterest for us because we wouldnot be faced with this onslaught ofintentionality that characterizesshopping environments. A freedomcould emanate from our re-lookingat architecture that now seemsincredibly boring. Too manyarchitects have been simulating anatmosphere of frenzy in their work,perhaps because of a subconscioussense that anything that is not asequally frenzied as shopping spacewill not seem intentional.

arq: So its not the shopping spacesthemselves, but the residual spaces thespaces outside of or between shoppingenvironments that we should pay moreattention to?

Koolhaas: Exactly. Those residualspaces present incredibleopportunities for freedom,freedom that previously didntexist. Yet Im reluctant to apply aninstrumentality to those spacesbecause that has been one of the

weaknesses of architecture recently to look to domains other thanarchitecture to give us tools, withoutunderstanding or even having aninterest in those other domains.

arq: How has your being at Harvardhelped your research?

Koolhaas: Harvard wants peoplecommitted to practice, yet it stillwants to connect them to theinstitution, and theyve establishedwhat they call professors inpractice. Its very intelligentbecause it gives the advantage ofsecurity without the certainty ofstaleness. Your practice is supposedto be energized to the point whereyou remain interested and fresh aslong as you are there. I was initiallyreluctant to be involved in teachingbecause of the commitment oftime, but I eventually recognizedthat it was a tremendousopportunity; partly because thediverse student body at Harvardpresents a unique opportunity tolook at issues of globalization. Thatwas a strong incentive. The otherwas if I did only research, with thecomplete absence of any designteaching, it would give me a doublelife as an architect and as aresearcher.

arq: How did your research intoshopping begin?

Koolhaas: The initial notion was tohave four consecutive projects,each dealing with a different issue,but ultimately to see whatconnections there would be amongthem. For example, I wanted toinvestigate the Roman city, to seehow it is possible that the Romans,with so few means, were able tosustain cities and civilization inwhich so much was public and solittle private, without resorting to

the systematic shift from public toquasi-public that we are witnessingin our own time. How is it that we,in this moment of maximumrichness, are unable to supportpublic life, even though theRomans dedicated 40% of theircities to public life?

arq: But arent cities starting to devotemore space to public, pedestrianactivity?

Koolhaas: It is astonishing that wetolerate a condition where, forinstance, 42nd Street in New York isnot surreptiously, but openly takenaway from the public realm andgiven over to private interests, tocopyrighted design. That cityfundamentally offers an unlimitednumber of choices, from the goodto the bad, but this creates asituation where that unlimitedcondition is reduced and turnedinto an entirely predictable one.

In the 1960s and 70s, some of themost significant thinkers about thecity, such as Jane Jacobs or JacqueRobertson, based on an idealisticassessment of the importance ofthe street, had a paranoid andslightly nostalgic sense of duty toprotect the street. They advocatedpedestrianization and otherspecific measures to controlseemingly inevitable conditions inthe city, such as traffic andcongestion, and they were the firstof what would ultimately turn intoa much more ominous army ofpeople who take the city away. 42nd

Street reveals the interestingconnection between Disney andpedestrianization, which creates inthe city an anti-urban, anti-moderncondition. But thinkers about thecity, from Mumford to Jacobs toHuxtable, provided all of theformal models and arguments forthis hijacking of urban surface.

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Koolhaas on shopping

Also in America there is thispolitical correctness that is moreand more censorious vis--viscertain activities, which has madeintellectuals complicit in thelaundry of the city. Anti-pornography campaigns have beensponsored by some of the bestAmerican thinkers, who may notrealize that they are actuallypromoting Disneyfication. Theprivate and the public are shiftinginto a condition of either beingcontrolled or abandoned.

arq: Has the city been taken away orhave we given it away?

Koolhaas: Exactly. It is all part of theintellectual foreplay to this event.

arq: How does this laundering of the cityseparate different classes of people, andwhy have cities allowed this privatizingof public space to occur?

Koolhaas: What always bothers meabout the Marxist analysis of classis that it always talks about otherpeople and never incorporates theperson doing the analysis intowhatever scheme of things we aretalking about.

If we look at most cities inAmerica or Europe, they do nothave the means at their disposal todo what needs to be done. Most arepoor or on the verge of bankruptcy,and so are condemned to makingdeals, selling off what they own,namely land, to private interests,who take the burden off theirhands. In some cases, they do thisquite sincerely, but it then forcescities to institute fees oncommercial activity. It ultimatelycomes down to the fact that nobodywants to pay taxes, includingarchitects, and therefore we are theones who have abandoned anysense of direct connection to whatis civic and our own enterprise asarchitects.

arq: Andres Duany has talked abouthow real estate investment seems topush the production of commercialspace, whether or not a market evenexists for it. Why is this happening?

Koolhaas: This is one of theabsolutely interesting aspects ofthis moment. We live under thetriumph of the mark economy, butif we look at how things really work,at the adjustment between supplyand demand, it is a unidirectionalsystem and the adjustment of twothings is never even remotelypresent. We have seeminglysurrendered to a system of moodswings and have entrusted ourentire well-being to the mostfrivolous goal of profit, with 23-year-old people making these decisions.

This is an interestinggenerational question. I had aconversation with some designersin New York, the oldest around 43and the youngest 33. I asked them ifthey thought the current economiccondition would continue the restof their lives, and they said yes.When I asked them why, they saidthat growth was the essence of themarket economy and that it willnever end; it is a terminalcondition. The situation is sological that there is no space tochange anything. That is thebrilliance of this system: in spite ofits patent insanity, it hasestablished itself as the ultimatereality principle.

arq: Didnt communists say the samething?

Koolhaas: Thats why, in ourChinese research, we had tointroduce the term marketrealism, which is related to theidea of socialist realism, wheresocialism was extremely ingeniousin exploiting the gap between theultimate ideal and the presentdiscontent, and using that gap as

an incentive to continue suffering.Market realism has the same effect.

arq: What can we do about this, asarchitects?

Koolhaas: I have an intuitiveconfidence that things will change.Everything changes about every 10years, particularly everything thatseems permanent. But knowingwhat to do about it is definitely anarea of weakness. In my life, as aresult, Ive always been interested inbeing inside a condition andcriticizing it, rather than being onthe outside, but that gives theimpression of my complicity. I havean extremely bad reputation assomeone who accepts everything.For me that is very strange, becauseI consider myself to be very critical.

arq: What is the relationship betweentheatre and shopping? In both cases,dont we give ourselves over to thecontrol of others?

Koolhaas: The whole notion ofshopping being thought of as atheatrical experience has beensuggested by architects like JonJerde, who have been involved increating these shoppingenvironments, and it is a verydistorted way of looking at them. Itis a kind of alibi. Jerde would like tothink he is an organizer of theatre,but actually it is wishful thinking.And by calling it theatre, shoppingis made to seem harmless,harmlessness it doesnt deserve.

arq: Some have seen a conspiratorialsense in your work on shopping.

Koolhaas: I have to take issue withthe idea that this work has aconspiratorial thrust. The mostliberating part of this wholeenterprise is that it enables us tolook at qualities without beingobliged to point fingers. We denythe sheer built volume ofcommercial space in America, butit is an important issue, regardlessof who is guilty for it.

arq: What effect do you see big-boxretailing having on the shopping mall?

Koolhaas: The real tendency is tobypass the mall. On one side, thereis a completely strict outletcondition of big-box stores, and onother side, there are museum-brand stores that dont really sellmuch. MOMA is a museum, but theMOMA store disseminates themuseum in commercial space.

arq: You have talked about Singapore asa city as a theme park? Is that anoutgrowth of that particular city itself or

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Mall = City Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota

part of the internationalization of citiesgenerally?

Koolhaas: In my book S,M,L,XL, Iwrote about Singapore and tried toreconstruct the last 40 years of itsexistence. What fascinated me isthat Singapore is a city nation, witha scale of operation that, in thenext century, will be moreconvenient and relevant than scaleof a nation. The economic unit willincreasingly be defined bymetropolitan areas rather than bycities or nations. That is whereSingapore is fortunate, and almosta prototype.

The leaders of Singapore havealso distrusted traditional forms ofplanning, and from the verybeginning, they have lookedsystematically at alternatives. Thewhole concept of a masterplan is adisplaced colonial device to imposeorder on basically what is not to beordered or impossible to order. TheSingapore regime has always had astrong instinct that it wouldbenefit from less order rather thanmore order, or a more diffusecondition rather than a conditionthat is crystal clear and completelyestablished. From the verybeginning, there has been aninterest in promoting a kind ofvagueness of physical structure andlegal system, and in that vagueness,the city becomes a series of blobsrather than a sea of streets. That is avery significant mutation, and thatwill certainly be a prototype of thefuture. That will never work on thescale of entire countries. Whereregions differ among them in acountry, it will be exacerbated overtime and will be ever harder to holdtogether under a single nationaladministration. In China, forexample, the differences andtensions between the sea coast andinland areas will make itincreasingly difficult.

arq: What effect will television shoppinghave on the shopping experience?

Koolhaas: This is one of the thingsthat panics shopping centres, andyou begin to see an interestingphenomenon in Europe, which ismore critical of shopping and triesto control shopping in a way that ismuch more rigorous and politicalthan in America. They controlshopping by controlling its sheervolume or where shopping can goin the city. Shopping is directedaway from the periphery to in ornear the city centre, but shoppingalso disrupts the city because itoften is too big, so the city has to beconverted in a whole process offalsification. But the country whereshopping is most controlled

Germany is also where mail ordershopping is biggest. Therefore youcan theorize that the moreshopping actually exists, the fewerthe invisible means of shopping,and the more it is controlled themore people will have to rely onother systems to shop, liketelevision.

arq: What about shopping centres thatfail?

Koolhaas: Thats an interestingdesign issue. I want to look at thequestion of a university movinginto a shopping centre, which isvery possible. Shopping centres arebuilt in ways that make them easyto raze. And maybe they dontdeserve a whole question of what todo with them except to abandonthem, demolish them, and startfrom scratch. One of the importantthings architectural culture haseliminated from its repertoire isthe idea of beginning from scratch.The idea that everything that hasever existed has a right, almost bydefinition, to exist for ever has putus into a position where we cantsay that this should grow, that cango, this is interesting, that isnt soget rid of it. As a result, we are, as aculture, incredibly burdened byvast amounts of totally redundantuninteresting space that weighsheavily on our conceptualmaintenance bill and that would bemuch better if just gone.

arq: But isnt that just an alibi fordevelopers who want to tear thingsdown all the time?

Koolhaas: Im involved in research,but that doesnt make me an expertin television or anything else. Thevirtue of what we are doing is thatit is extremely limited and doesntput us in a position of condoninginterpretations of our work. Weoffer it to you, but we are not the

people to tell you that one readingof it is good and another is bad.

arq: Dont gigantic shoppingenvironments, though, represent aconcentration of money and power suchas that of Disney? And isnt thatconcentration a threat to public life?

Koolhaas: Unfortunately we asarchitects have never investigatedthose concentrations as a creativeact. Large-scale shoppingenvironments are an evidentdevelopment where we prefer totake a position of abstinence,because of their presumedundemocratic aspects. But bymaintaining that abstinence wedisqualify ourselves for anyparticipation, so we are in thedifficult situation where ourjudgment before investigation hasnow put us in a position that makesit hard to judge ever again.

Its probably nonsense to say thatall concentrations areundemocratic. Then everyskyscraper would be so. New YorkCity is an example of howaccumulation can be given aframework that is still public anddemocratic, so I dont think isparticularly ominous. When we areinvolved in large-scale projects, wemust make judgments on anindividual basis about whetherthey are good or bad.

The book:Based on research by Harvard studentsin 199798, the Harvard DesignSchool Guide to Shopping is editedby Rem Koolhaas, Chuihua Judy Ching,Jeffrey Inaba and Sze Tsung Leong andpublished by TASCHEN America, 800pp,paperback $49.99. The Guide exploresthe spaces, people, techniques, ideologiesand inventions by which shopping has sodramatically refashioned the city. Theillustrations (by Sze Tsung Leong)accompanying this interview are takenfrom the book.

interview arq . vol 5 . no 3 . 2001 203

City = Theme New York New York Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada

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