leading to mutilation of both activity and texture.” [78] Yet, he explicitly speaks of the fear of void, non-planned spaces and the compulsion to find an architectural form: “Maybe architects’ fanaticism – a myopia that has led them to believe that architecture is not only the vehicle for all that is good, but also the explanation for all that is bad – is not merely a professional deformation but a response to the horror of architecture’s opposite, an instinctive recoil from the void, a fear of nothingness.” [79] The entry for the competition of La Défense in Paris (1991) represents a different version of void in the way of preservation versus erasure. The project concerns the extension of a district along the existing axis that begins at the Louvre, continues via the Arc de Triomphe, and arrives at the Grande Arche in La Défense. In the text “Tabula Rasa Revisited” in S,M,L,XL, Koolhaas affirms one undeniable virtue of the place: “Its presence has saved Paris, each ‘eyesore’ realized there has prevented an invasion of the center.” [80] At that time, the area was already configured with buildings, including a future TGV station and a cemetery, as well as with “plankton – the typical accumulation of undeniably inferior buildings built between the fifties and the nineties that forms the index of 20th-century architecture.” [81] It is worth noting that Koolhaas does not mention the nineteenth-century memorial to the Paris Commune of 1871 close to the metro station at the Grande Arche. Koolhaas’s competition proposal breaks the taboo of radical erasure, as if “underneath the thinning crust of our civilization a hidden tabula rasa lies in waiting.” [82] (31) It is described as the initial application of the patent for “Timed Erasures” (1991) and operates with the concept of eroding almost all the existing city within several decades: “method of prospective preservation based on predicted lifespans of urban fabric.” [83] Although he relates his proposal to Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, with its “incredible eloquence” of scraping everything away at once, he considers this idea of eliminating the historic city as somehow too drastic (32). Instead, La Défense draws on a steady renewal according to the “perpetual cycle of construction, deconstruction, reconstruction that has been suspended out of fear of our own inferiority.” [84] It seems as if Koolhaas is well aware of the radical effects of the void, the “instinctive recoil from the void, a fear of nothingness” so that a gradual erasure would be a more
[78] [79] [80] [81] [82] [83] [84]
110
Ibid., 202. Ibid., 200. Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 1092. Ibid., 1096. Ibid., 1132. Koolhaas, AMOMA et al., Content, 75. Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 1103, 1132.
CHAPTER 2: VOID
(31) Rem Koolhaas/OMA, “The process of erasure could be spread over time in a surreptitious way – an invisible reality. We could gradually scrape …,” , La Defense, Paris/France, 1991, photograph. Source: Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 1108–1109 © 2015 OMA
(32) “A new city to replace the old,” Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin of Paris, model, 1925, photograph. Source: Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, 135 © 2015 VBK Wien
moderate application of the concept of tabula rasa. [85] Central to the proposal is the idea that the largest part of the existing urban structure can be considered provisional architecture, without a right to be treated as worth the effort of preserving. In contrast to the buildings of ancient cultures, such as those of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Incas, all buildings constructed after 1950 would inherently have predicted lifespans. No more than a few buildings can be seen as having a specific value for the site, whereas most of the substance, including many historic buildings, is mediocre and declared as worth-
[85]
111
Koolhaas, “Imagining Nothingness,” 200.
VOID AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENT