i wish i were articulate...

Good writing is such a pleasure to read. I'm really enjoying my Urbanism reading this week so decided to read some more Koolhaas. Some interesting + potentially controversial chunks...

"Urbanism doesn't exist. It is only an ideology in Marx's sense of the word. Architecture really exists, like Coca-Cola: Though coated with ideology, it is a real production, falsely satisfying a falsified need. Urbanism is comparable to the advertising propagated around Coca-Cola - pure spectacular ideology. Modern capitalism which organised the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than that of our own alienation. Its urbanistic dream is its masterpiece." (Koolhaas and Mau: S,M,L,XL, 1995)

"I think we are stuck with this idea of the street and the plaza as public domain, but the public domain is radically changing...with television and the media and a whole series of other inventions, you could say that the public domain is lost. But you could also say, that it's now so pervasive it does not need physical articulation any more. I think the truth is somewhere in between. But we as architects still look at it in terms of a nostalgic model, and in an incredibly moralistic sense, refuse signs of its being reinvented in other populist or more commercial terms.... you can go to these cities and bemoan the absence of a public realm, but as architects it is better for us to bemoan the utter incompetence of the buildings." (Koolhaas 'Conversations with students' 1996 p 45)