Neokoolhisms

Skyscraper collectives, tower agglomerations, mixed-use developments, high-rise housing developments, marinas and luxury condominiums; airport hubs, office enclaves, industrial parks, hotel complexes, conference centers, financial centers; satellite cities, theme parks, thematic cities, branded cities, central districts, gated communities: what is the potential latent in extraordinarily large urban typologies currently restricted by the typological tradition of urbanism and by the predominant segregation of disciplinary domains? What is the reach of such potential to think aggressively about the contemporary metropolitan condition and to imagine future developmental models? Following on the previous experiences of neonatures (2010) and ‘overurbanism (2011), The Generic Sublime Series undertakes the project of radical typological integration in a single post-urban cybernetic universe: large-scale machines that nurture unpredictable organizations through paradoxical programmatic coexistence, radical systemic inclusiveness and through the mutual intensification between architectural events. The Generic Sublime incarnates the ultimate post-systemic megalomania: a territorial organization made of a multitude of systems interacting in the synthetic field of competition and synergy of a single building. The Generic Sublime upgrades the potentials of urbanism after the skyscraper, exploring the self-surmounting form that urbanism takes when assembling anti-urbanisms in a larger collective. Instantaneous cities made of ‘cities within the city’. Through proliferation, The Generic Sublime magnifies the idea of the skyscraper as a condition that surpasses urbanity by multiplying its logics. If the skyscraper is a laboratory for new modes of collective life and explodes the texture of normal life to offer an aggressive alternative reality that discredits all naturalistic urban realities*, The Generic Sublime is a laboratory of the potentials of these alternative realities when operating in a condition of multiplicity. Its discipline assumes the challenge of assembling contemporary large-scale types, whole worlds of their own, in a manifold singularity, a monstrous globalized commune. If the skyscraper incarnates the metropolitan unconscious in a self-evident medium for the thoughtless constitution of theories, architectural theory without representation* that breeds the fantastic and the irrational out of the pragmatic and the rational, The Generic Sublime consciously develops meta-rational models to amass sublime potentials out of generic types, architectural power beyond ideology. Restricted, austere, stringent, and even simple, but plentiful, excessive, expansive, magnanimous and grand a priori, The Generic Sublime is unbound of any dependence or even care for reason, which it uses as a means for the propagation of its canon: brutal indifference. The straightjacket of the urbanism of good intentions*, untied by the skyscraper through sheer congestion, is here reconfigured with the blunt force of an artistic invention. The Studio will explore this renewed opportunity through the investigation of extraordinarily-large forms of development currently taking place around the globe through the lens of concepts introduced by Rem Koolhaas since ‘Delirious New York’, now reconfiguring their fertile tradition into we will call neokoolhisms: operative neologisms for the generation of new territorial-scale anti-urban models, or Generic Sublimes.