Logan Airport / Junkspace

Author: Rem Koolhaas
Year: 2002 (October 100, 175–190)
Source type: article/essay
Raw file: raw/articles/koolhaas-2002-logan-airport.md

Summary

Koolhaas's polemical essay "Junkspace" (prefaced by the Logan Airport billboard) defines Junkspace as "what remains after modernization has run its course ... its fallout": the endless, air-conditioned, brand-saturated, and largely unmemorable built product of late modernity. Junkspace is the "body double of space," sustained by air-conditioning and escalators ("we have been reading a footnote under a microscope"), whose additive, consuming logic cancels distinctions and erodes the credibility of architecture. "It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the twentieth century."

Key Claims

• Junkspace defined: "the residue mankind leaves on the planet," "what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout." Though its parts are "brilliant inventions ... their sum spells the end of Enlightenment." "Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing." "Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement."
• Modernization vs. modern architecture: "the built product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace"; "It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the twentieth century. Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century." The "encounter between escalator and air-conditioning."
• Air-conditioning and the endless building: "If architecture separates buildings, air-conditioning unites them"; "air-conditioning sustains our cathedrals"; "conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns into Junkspace."
• Brands as black holes: "Brands in Junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: they are essences through which meaning disappears"; "its modules are dimensioned to carry brands"; "myths can be shared, brands husband aura at the mercy of focus groups."
• The mystification of space: "When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers ... Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications."
• A reverse typology / accumulation: "it replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition," "a reverse typology of cumulative, approximative identity"; "the formless also a typology."
• Political economy of Junkspace: "Junkspace is political: it depends on the central removal of the critical faculty in the name of comfort and pleasure"; financed "through the unfettered play of the market," public-private complicities, "Default Preservation"; "Comfort is the new Justice"; "Naming has replaced class struggle" (oxymorons like life/style). "We will have conquered place."

Connections

Concepts: Junkspace · Consumerism · Spectacle · Iconic Architecture
Authors: Rem Koolhaas
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function · Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: The Optical Unconscious / representation (via Lang) · The Architecture of the City (Bismarck)

Direct Quotes

"Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout."

"It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the twentieth century. Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century."

"Junkspace is like a womb that organizes the transition of endless quantities of the Real ... into the unreal."

"The cosmetic is the new cosmic."

Open Questions

• Is Junkspace a resignation to (or ironic celebration of) late-capitalist placelessness, or a critical concept — and how does it relate to the "iconic"/starchitect building and to the "object" (Bismarck) that claims uniqueness within it?