The Generic City

S, M, L, XLRem Koolhaas

Tom is at the beach. Building sand castles is his favorite hobby.

Stripping is the most critical moment. His castle has to be perfect.

The creation is quick but Tom has to be very accurate and focused.

A design office said it...

To make it solid and durable, Tom has to mix 8 volumes of sand with 1 volume of water

However, it is impossible to escape from the sun. The humidity that sticks each grain of sand together begins to evaporate.

Sadly, the dreaded moment comes:the sand castle begins to collapse.

The first parts to collapse are the weakest ones; the corners.

... returns to dust after a couple of hours.The sun destroys it progressively.

The sand castle that seems solid and durable...

To make this transitory architecture persist, the simplest way is to build it again.

Tom has now to flatten the sand to build above the last castle.

Rem Koolhaas asks the question of homogenisation of cities through mondialization and urbanism. He reports the city as an “actual way” to make the city evoluate without any restrain. The Generic City is ruled by supply and demand. These cities function like airports in which the same shops are always in the same places. Airports come in two sizes: too big and too small. Yet their size has no influence on their performance. Eve-rything is defined by function, and nothing by history. This can also be liberating.The traditional city is very much occupied by rules and codes of behavior. But the generic city is free of established patterns and expectations. These are cities that make no demands and, consequently, create freedom. In an age of mass immigration, a mass similarity of cities might just be inevitable.

Is the generic killing our societies by making identity disappear and becoming our cities unpersonal and similar?

Nowadays, we can observe the appearance and the expansion of generic cities, mostly situated in Asia. They are the result of mondialisation. We can define generic cities as megalopolis specifically increasing because of rural exodus.

The generic city is in continious movement, each building is a small world and is designed to be independent. The urban plane now only accomodates necessary movement, fundamentally the car, people need to go faster. The city is losing its identity. Therefore, the generic city gets different architectural styles and this architecture is the result of an immediate answer of demand.

The Generic City is fractal, an endless repetition of the same simple structural module. The city is made to be easy for inhabitants and could be re-built every week like a cinema studio.

The great originality of the Generic City is simply to abandon what does not work and accommodates both the primordial and the futuristic.

The organic is the Generic city’s strongest myth, it does not exist anymore but maintains the city. Pedestrian ways are put forward to respect inhabi-tants because roads are only for cars, but they destroy what should be honoured.

On its way from horizontality to verticality, the Generic City is becoming denser and isolating without any connection between each parts. However, the horizontality exists but is slowly disappearing. People pay more to live in the air than in the ground, city codes appears to be reversing.

We are now developing a new illiteracy because we are not able to write our city. Its aesthetic could be defined by “free style”.Architects planned cities and tried to be different but results are always the same. The Generic City presents the final death of planning.

Sociology is the study of human social reliationships and institutions. The sociology is happening in the Generic City, it is a continous field of new experiences which can be preserved or forgotten. Nevertheless, sociology is the worst system to capture sociology in the making.

The Generic City had a past, once, and kept a mark which is so called a “relic”. Its history creates general memories, it is the major preoccupation of the Generic City. Hotels are becoming the generic accomodation and now implies imprisonment. In addition, hotels are now part of huge shopping centers, there is no competing place left to go.

Fortunately, each Generic City has an edge where it meets another condition, a way to escape. It is here where “hawkers” try to sell to tourists the “unique” aspects of the city.

The architecture of the Generic City is by definition beautiful. Complex forms can be designed thanks to curtain walls, but these facades need glue with high yield. As a result, the resistant is made maleable, the application of the unprincipled. The mediocrity is elevated to a higher level.

The style of choice is postmodern and will always remain so. To mix the practice of architecture and the practice of panic is only possible with post-modernism. This movement produces enough results to follow the high speed of the Generic City’s evolution, which is how a new unconsciousness comes.

The Generic City’s inhabitants are happier than the others and the weather is better than anywhere else. It is inhabited by those who do not like it elsewhere.

The iconography that the Generic City adopts is redundant and always ruled by the surroundings.

A city is a place where things are continiously in movement. The presence of history drags down this evolvement and is against evolution. The Gene-ric City is not improved but abandoned and when it does not work, no history is written. To study the Generic City, you need to travel around.

Each infrastructure competes with the other. Transport systems are no longer pretending to create functioning wholes, but now spin off functional entities. Improving a place is only to kill or to reduce the chance of another place surviving.

That is the story of the city. The city is no longer. Could we leave the theater now?

I think it would be a misunderstanding to ask whether Koolhaas praises the advent of the Generic City or lament about it. It is also quite clear that this piece is not a theoretical work. It looks more like a script, or even a report about an unexplicated script of a not yet realized film.

Actually, it is somehow verysurprising that people indeed take this piece literally, whether they praise it or complain about it, as if it would describe obvious empirical “facts”!