L'Immeuble (brouillon de lettre)

so, as we can see, architecture is a very narcissistic profession. we even make a spectacle of our doubts or maybe a soap opera of our potential obsolesence, we eagerly anticipate our own redundancy, there have even been congresses organized about the death of architecture. can we imagine any other profession organizing an event around a similar theme? can we imagine a congress saying what can doctors do for the beginning of the 21st century, nurses, firemen, taxidrivers? how much more impressive would it be to organize a more aggressive congress, for instance "was leistet architektur für die stadt am ende des etc etc".

in the strange mixture of doubt and vanity that is the kind of present condition of architecture we have to abandon our obsessive preoccupation with architecture. architecture is a prison, architecture is a prison, we all have a life sentence, and the best idea would be a collective escape from that prison. architecture is a prison, becuase we still define it only as building as adding structures to an already overcharged world. architecture is still mass, matter, substance, detail, interest, beauty, and it is only very rarely thought. that kind of architecture as we still know it and as it is still mostly defined implies three conditions - control, stability and permanence. these, exactly these three conditions that are the necessities for architecture are the three conditions that at the end of the twentieth century are increasingly absent.

there are concepts that have to be abandoned forever. and therefore in this conflict between on the one hand the needs, the so-called needs of architecture and the present conditions in which control, stability or permanence are no longer availible, architecture has two choices. we can on the one hand have a heroic and maybe neurotic fight to the last architect, to conquer or maintain our position of architects, or on the other hand we can imagine a way to redesign architecture itself, and i think that could be a more interesting way to avoid a dilemma. we have to invent an architecture that implies that there is no longer control. each control brings additional authority, each authority brings additional authoritarianism, therefore each control implies less freedom, so therefore we have to find a kind of architecture that allows more deregulation and more freedom. we have to find a kind of architecture that lives with instability.

instability is in itself not a very attractive condition, the most stable condition is death, and therefore i think there is every reason to separate the relationship between architecture and stability. we have to find a way in which architecture can survive in permanence, some architectural memories are much more important than some of the present "bio-architecture" with which we are surrounded. we have to make architecture like a more general form of intelligence. it is humilliating in this day and age to only make things with our hands. we have to develop as architects a more developed, a more intellectual self-critical action. if a doctor looks at a desease, one of his choices is to do nothing. no architecture or architect at this moment has that ability. as architects we are always forced to do something, always forced to do architecture, always forced to imagine more architecture. in a world of incredible transformation why should we of all professions be on this side of conservation and this kind of conservatism?

so this is one part of my kind of representing the re-design of architecture. than the second issue i want to talk about is architecture in the city. at the end of the sixties my generation, the generation of may '68, inspired by our famous precedessors like aldo rossi and robert venturi, rediscovered the city. you all know perhaps the gap of images or remember the images of our paris in '68, we had a famous slogan "sous le pavé la plage" - underneath the pavement the beach - may '68 seemed a beginning of a new way of understanding the city, and i think this is unfortunate, it also was a new way of understanding the city, it immediately developed an obsession with understanding the existing city, the old city, the classic of the city, the city as we had known it. a movement that will later inspire and be formalized in the movement for the reconstruction of the european city and in germany more recently the iba in berlin.

what i think is dramatic about this kind of rediscovery is that in this kind of rediscovering the city we have lost somehow completely the ability to make the city. we have lost increasingly the ability to imagine the city as it could be and also to take the risks to imagine new cities and to take even bigger risks of making new cities. i would defend the thesis that the discovery of the city by architects is one of the greatest dangers that now threatens and faces the city. and this is again our problem as architects because we are forced to diagnose each condition only in the very limited terms of our own production. we are weak, because all our solutions are architectual. parallel to our increasing sophistication on the one hand, an increasing understanding about the existing city we have rediculed and laughed out of existence an entire profession, namely the profession of urbanists. they used to have avery famous profession, a profession of those who made the city, we as architects have somehow pushed them into a corner, made them ridiculous, simply because we did not like the cities they produced.

once it was a proud and elegant discipline, and instrument of a systematic optimism, a profession that knew how to built cities, but because we did not like their city, because we did not agree with the city, we have dynamited an entire profession away from the face of the earth. you may look at schools of architecture in america, in europe, more and more institutions of education have closed in the eighties and nineties their schools of urbanism. and his was a big and expansive mistake for architecture i think. we put ourselves in the foreground, our competition with the urbanists was won by the architects, we killed urbanism there can be no architecture.

urbanism is a profession that creates potential. urbanism leaves things open. architecture closes things, architecture pre-empts. urbanism widens, architecture narrows. and i think these important differences between these professions are incredibly neglected and we have incredibly underestimated the effect what has happened in our killing urbanism. well, architecture has been so far unable to deal with three major conditions of modernity and of this final part at the beginning of the 21st century - decontrol, impermanence and instability. urbanism is the one profession that can take them as points of departure, that can use them for its own ideology, and that can base a worldview on them, within which architecture could eventually play a role. but because we have killed urbanism, we are separated from this kind of modernity and it is harder and harder for us to find a connection with it. and this is, has been very obvious in our own work.

i would finally say that there has been one major shift from early part of the 20th century to the end. in the beginning you could be a hero or a visionary on the basis of generalizations. frank lloyd wright's broadacre city is a proposition for the whole of america. le corbusier offered his city on at least four continents and if he could he would he would have offered it on five. mies von der rohe produced an architecture that - in his opinion - could exist in europe or in america. now, the person who generalizes is inevitably almost a fool. the time for generalizations is over. there are no similarities any more between conditions.

the new period, the present moment needs an endless repertoire of intelligent specificities, an explosion of differences. the future will be high-specific, not general. it will be a rule of exceptions, and only the most flexible will be "heroic". the future will be the end of consistency.

/ by rem koolhaas.