“[R]eal life is inside, while cyberspace has become the great outdoors…”
-Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace
I am currently part of an online reading group, exploring the question: How has the internet transformed the urban built environment, and how can architecture help us make sense of digital space?
The meetings all take place over Zoom, with additional discussion on a private Discord server. Over the four weeks, we will read and address the following topics:
1. Junkspace, airport urbanism, and the endless building
(Reading – “Junkspace” by Rem Koolhaas)
2. Navigating physical and digital space
(Reading – Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown”)
3. Technological tools for inhabiting and understanding the environment
(Reading – Learning from Las Vegas & “The Great Gizmo” by Reyner Banham)
4. Space as a medium for power relationships
(Reading – “Postscript on the Societies of Control” by Gilles Deleuze)
Interestingly, all of the readings pre-date the internet as we know it, and are generally rooted in architectural theory or philosophy.
For the first week, we tackled Rem Koolhaas’s Junkspace, a meandering and playful text from 2002. In it, Koolhaas strings together a series of vaguely related vignettes, which, as a whole, begin to define junk space. However, Koolhaas intentionally avoids giving us a complete definition and leaving some mystery to the concept.
Rather than try to define Junkspace, I found it more useful to imagine the types of places that constitute Junkspace: Ikea, infinite loop airport shopping malls, tech co-working spaces and campuses, so-cal strip malls. Spaces in which the relation between elements has been nearly reduced to zero and the potential for commerce has usurped all other function; nothing new is created, existing objects are merely manipulated and regurgitated.
While Koolhaas refuses to define Junkspace, I couldn’t help but notice that Guy Debord’s idea of the diffuse spectacle does an almost perfect job of describing what Koolhaas avoided:
“65: The diffuse spectacle accompanies the abundance of commodities, the undisturbed development of modern capitalism. Here every individual commodity is justified in the name of the grandeur of the production of the totality of objects of which the spectacle is an apologetic catalogue. Irreconcilable claims crowd the stage of the affluent economy’s unified spectacle; different star-commodities simultaneously support contradictory projects for provisioning society: the spectacle of automobiles demands a perfect transport network which destroys old cities, while the spectacle of the city itself requires museum-areas. Therefore the already problematic satisfaction which is supposed to come from the consumption of the whole, is falsified immediately since the actual consumer can directly touch only a succession of fragments of this commodity happiness, fragments in which the quality attributed to the whole is obviously missing every time.”
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
In essence, everything can be reduced to a never-ending succession of splintering surfaces (shiny one at that), each fighting for your attention.
Looking at the digital space through this text created some exciting insight into the web and its relationship to physical spaces. The salient feature that links the digital and physical junk spaces seems to be the infinite scroll, and bottomless web of content.
In trying to isolate digital Junkspace to specific patterns of categories, the best fits seem to be social networks. The quote below sets this comparison up perfectly and even seemed to hint at the current surveillance/platform economy that encompasses most of today’s digital spaces.
“It sponsors a collective of brooding consumers in surly anticipation of their next spend…[t]he subject is stripped of privacy in return for access to a credit nirvana. You are complicit in the tracing of the fingrprints each of your transactions leaves; they know everything about you, except who you are.”
