How to Cure Longing
Dena Baker
Can the built environment cure the epidemic of longing? In Rem Koolhaas's essay, “The Generic City”, he illustrates ideas that dance around answering this question. Koolhaas begins by emphasizing the concept of identity—and how the hybrid of two energies creates a unique narrative that is different from the narrative of each actant on his or her own.1 Identity is subject to a list of factors that define it, such as context, properties, and history.2 Identity also needs a strong stance, “identity centralizes, it insists on an essence, a point.”3 Koolhaas then conjured up imagery of a circle with a center to describe the exercise of identity and relate it to the built environment of “The City”4. Just as identity shifts from one thing to another, so do city centers—fabricated by some axis of contemporary identity.5 The trend of shifting identity in cities has gone from spacious and personal to dense and capital. We, the inhabitants, are closer in distance and further in spirit.
Koolhaus spends much effort towards illustrating the ideals and practices of The Generic City. Among them is that The Generic City is able to gain much of its effect from its cookie-cutter blueprint of imagery, “it becomes transparent, like a logo,” this to me seems to be referencing typology6. Typology can be helpful—this idea is referenced in Learning From Las Vegas, a book by Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour. A loose idea I can glean from both Koolhaas, Scott Brown, Venturi and Izenour is that typology tells us there is a right and wrong way to do urban planning. Typology in urban planning can be helpful for curating an experience and improving circulation within the built environment.7 The imagery of the built environment is always running in a similar vein. As an experiencer—an actant who experiences things—I know firsthand that imagery, when coupled with certain emotions, can create a disillusioning and isolating experience that falls just short of permanent. The “trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences” Koolhaas mentions, and the examples he provides such as the neat juxtaposition of office windows in high rise city buildings, offering a neat array of fluorescent squares—such imagery, when converged with an inhabitant who is feeling the emotion of longing, for instance, is likely to create a lonely experience for the actant8. Two important concepts arise here: 1) nothing—no architecture, type, Generic City, or imagery is able to escape the projections of the actant. 2) Identity is bound to an additional factor—but which comes first? The built environment or the mind? The Generic City or need? Or is the Generic City so easily bound to our projections because it so expertly subscribes to blankness—in that way, it is ironically a blank projection screen—and fails to influence us as much as we influence it. Maybe blankness possesses no advantages. The blank city is a split from the city that prioritizes community. Architectural efforts such as the city square are built in place in order to establish this community. Maybe that is a good place to start looking for a solution for longing.
Bibliography
Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” and “"Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a
Potemkin Metropolis... or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa." SMLXL, (1998), 1238-67.
Potemkin Metropolis... or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa." SMLXL, (1998), 1238-67.
Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1972. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
