absorber, social condenser, great emancipator, connector – undeniable fabricator of community… The evaporation of the actual building infinitely enlarged its possible program.”118
In 1976, the fictional Constructivist pool lands in Manhattan. But the Architects / Swimmers / Lifeguards are horrified that the city that they set out for 40 years prior no longer existed. It was replaced with the same, crude lack of individuality that they had hoped to leave behind in Moscow. The New Yorkers for their part were not happy with the encounter. The pool offended “the dry taste of their fabricated poetry, the agonies of their irrelevant sophistication, they complained that the pool was so bland, so rectilinear, so unadventurous, so boring; there were not historical allusions…”119 In a lackluster act, the New Yorkers presented the Constructivists with an award, inscribed with, ‘THERE IS NO EASY WAY FROM THE EARTH TO THE STARS’. Later, “The raft of the constructivists collides with the raft of the Medusa: optimism vs. pessimism. The steel of the pool slices through the plastic of the sculpture like a knife through butter.”120 The collective strength of the social condensers found in Tatlin’s Tower and later works of Constructivism defeats its antithesis, a cold drama of normality raised to formal and historical gesture; pointlessness.
As with his “The Story of the Pool”, Rem Koolhaas approaches his work with the dialectic of thesis and antithesis. In Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, this dialectic is played out as good versus bad (prologue) and inside versus outside (the intention of switching the conditions of his contemporaneous Berlin). Later, this dialectic is intensified with OMA’s CCTV tower, an antithesis to the ever-present desire to build taller and taller buildings. But these dialectics aren’t formulated in a vacuum. They require an agenda; at its core this agenda is intimately related to social condensers and architectural influences on social behavior. This
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Rem Koolhaas, “Palace of the Soviets: Bedtime Story” from “S,M,L.XL”, page 825 Rem Koolhaas, “The Story of the Pool” from “Delirious New York”, page 310 Rem Koolhaas, “The Story of the Pool” from “Delirious New York”, page 310