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2008-12-08 00:28 Title: Bigness or the Problem of Large Credit: Rem Koolhaas Date: 1995 License: R. Koolhaas Section: passages Tags: Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, Theory

Bigness or the Problem of Large by Rem Koolhaas

Beyond a certain scale, architecture acquires the properties of Bigness. The best reason to broach Bigness is the one given by climbers of Mount Everest: because it is there. Bigness is ultimate architecture. It seems incredible that the size of a building alone embodies an ideological programme, independent of the will of its architects. Of all possible categories, Bigness does not seem to deserve a manifesto; discredited as a intellectual problem, it is apparently on its way to extinctionlike a dinosaurthrough clumsiness, slowness, inflexibility, difficulty. But in fact, only Bigness instigates the regime of complexity that mobilises the full intelligence of architecture and its related fields. One hundred years ago, a generation of conceptual breakthroughs and supporting technologies unleashed an architectural Big Bang. By randomising circulation, shortcircuiting distance, artificialising interiors, reducing mass, stretching dimensions, and accelerating construction, infrastructures formed a cluster of mutations that induced another species of architecture, The combined effects of these inventions were structures taller and deeperBiggerthan ever before conceived, with a parallel potential for the reorganization of the social worlda vastly richer programmation.

theorems
Fuelled initially by the thoughtless energy of the purely quantitative, Bigness has been, for nearly a century, a condition almost without thinkers, a revolution without programme. Delirious New York implied a latent Theory of Bigness based on five theorems. 1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures. This impossibility triggers the autonomy of its parts, but that is not the same as fragmentation: the parts remain committed to the whole.

2. The elevatorwith its potential to establish mechanical rather than architectural connectionsand its family of related inventions render null and void the classical repertoire of architecture. Issues of composition, scale, proportion, detail are now moot. The art of architecture is useless in Bigness. 3. In Bigness, the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the faade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The humanist expectation of honesty is doomed: interior and exterior architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic and iconographic needs, the otheragent of dis-informationoffering the city the apparent stability of an object. Where architecture reveals, Bigness preplexes; Bigness transforms the city from a summation of certainties into an accumulation of mysteries. What you see is no longer what you get. 4. Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good or bad. Their impact is independent of their quality. 5. Together, all these breakswith scale, with architectural composition, with tradition, with transparency, with ethicsimply the final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context

maximum
The absence of a theory of Bignesswhat is the maximum architecture can do?is architectures most debilitating weakness. Without a theory of Bigness, architects are in the position of Frankensteins creators: instigators of a partly successful experiment whose results are running amok and are therefore discredited. Because there is no theory of Bigness, we dont know what to do with it, we dont know where to put it, we dont know when to use it, we dont know how to plan it. Big mistakes are our only connection to Bigness. But in spite of its dumb name, Bigness is a theoretical domain at this fin de sicle: in a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, disclamation, the attraction of Bigness is its potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility. Only through Bigness can architecture dissociate itself from the exhausted artistic/ideological movements of modernism and formalism to regain its instrumentality as vehicle of modernisation. Bigness recognizes that architecture as we know it is in difficulty, but it does not overcompensate through regurgitations of even more architecture. It proposes a new economy in which no longer all is architecture, but in which a strategic position is regained through retreat and concentration, yielding the rest of a contested territory to enemy forces.

beginning
Bigness destroys, but it is also a new beginning. It can reassemble what it breaks.

A paradox of Bigness is that in spite of the calculation that goes into its planningin fact, through its very rigiditiesit is the one architecture that engineers the unpredictable. Instead of enforcing co-existence, Bigness depends on regimes of freedoms, the assembly of maximum difference. Only Bigness can sustain a promiscuous proliferation of events in a single container. It develops strategies to organise both their independence and interdependence within a larger entity in symbiosis that exacerbates rather than compromises specificity. Through contamination rather than purity and quantity rather than quality, only Bigness can support genuinely new relationships between functional entities that expand rather than limit their identities. The artificiality and complexity of Bigness release function from its defensive armour to allow a kind of liquefaction; programmatic elements react with each other to create new elementsBigness returns to a model of programmatic alchemy. At first sight, the activities amassed in the structure of Bigness demand to interact, but Bigness also keeps them apart. Like plutonium rods that, more or less immersed, dampen or promote nuclear reaction, Bigness regulates the intensities of programmatic co-existence. Although Bigness is a blueprint for perpetual intensity, it also offers degrees of serenity and even blandness. It is simply impossible to animate its entire mass with intention. Its vastness exhausts architectures compulsive need to decide and determine. Zones will be left out, free from architecture.

team
Bigness is where architecture becomes both most and least architectural: most because fo the enormity of the object; least through the loss of autonomyit becomes instrument of other forces, it depends. Bigness is impersonal: the architect is no longer condemned to stardom. Even as Bigness enters the stratosphere of architectural ambitionthe pure chill of megalomaniait can be achieved only at the price of giving up control, of transmogrification. It implies a web of umbilical cords to other disciplines whose performance is as critical as the architects: like mountain climbers tied together by life-saving ropes, the makers of Bigness are a team (a word not mentioned in the last forty years of architectural polemic). Beyond signature, Bigness means surrender to technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers; to politics; to others. It promises architecture a kind of post-heroic statusa realignment with neutrality.

bastion
If Bigness transforms architecture, tis accumulation generates a new kind of city. The exterior of the city is no longer a collective theatre where it happens; theres no collective it left. The street has become residue, organisational device, mere segment of the continuous metropolitan plane where the remnants of the past face the equipments of the new in an uneasy stand-off. Bigness can exist anywhere on that plane. Not only is Bigness incapable of establishing relationships with the classical city__at most, it co-eixts__but in the quantity and complexity of the facilities it offers, it is itself urban.

Bigness no longer needs the city: it competes with the city; it represents the city; it pre-empts the city; or better still, it is the city. If urbanisation generates potential and architecture exploits it, Bigness enlists the generosity of urbanism against the meanness of architecture. Bigness = urbanisation vs. architecture. Bigness, through its very independence of context, is the one architecture that can survive, even exploit the now-global condition of the tabula rasa: it does not take tis inspiration from givens too often squeezed for the last drop of meaning; it gravitates opportunistically to locations of maximum infrastructural promise; it is, finally, its own raison dtre. In spite of its size, it is modest. Not all architecture, not all programme, not all events will be swallowed by Bigness. There are too many needs too unfocused, too weak, too unrespectable, too defiant, too secret, too subversive, too weak, too nothing to be part of the constellation of Bigness. Bigness is the last bastion of architecturea contraction, a hyper-architecture. The containers of Bigness will be landmarks in a post-architectural landscapea world scraped of architecture in the way Richters paintings are scraped of paint: inflexible, immutable, definitive, forever there, generated through superhuman effort. Bigness surrenders the field to after-architecture. Bigness or the Problem of Large first published in S, M, L, XL by O.M.A., Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (New York: Monacelli Press, Inc, 1995) TANK, Issue 10, July 2000, pp92-101