 |
Rem Koolhaas Professor in Practice Department of Architecture |
Research
|
The Harvard Project on the City, an undertaking which researches the
effects of modernization on the contemporary city, was founded upon the
realization of a double crisis. The first is the academic and professional
bewilderment with urban conditions that seem to defy traditional description:
specifically, new forms of accelerated urbanization in developing regions
of the world and the maelstrom of redevelopment in existing urban areas.
The second crisis is the failure of the design professions to adequately
cope with these changes. As cities modernize beyond professional control,
no longer is the architect/urbanist/landscape architect able to sufficiently
describe, let alone influence, large areas of the urban realm as even in
the recent past. This double crisis of runaway development and disciplinary
paralysis warrants the urgent need to study the evolving agents, relationships
and consequences of contemporary urbanization.
The five-year Harvard Project on the City is now in its third year. Each year Koolhaas selects a topic to be researched by eight to fourteen GSD thesis students from all three of the schools disciplines. In the first semester, Koolhaas and the students collectively travel and research; in the second, the students work independently to flesh out their individual inquiries. From January 1996 to January 1997, the focus was the Pearl River Delta area of China, the site of extremely rapid urbanization. "New urban conditions" were sought in the relations between the forces that are shaping cities (money, politics, ideology, etc.) and major urban components (architecture, landscape, infrastructure, etc.). In Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Macao, and Hong Kong, students interviewed planners, architects, politicians, professors, scholars, and students. The results were summarized in a collection of images and excerpts shown in the "Documenta X" exhibition in Kassel, Germany. According to Koolhaas, in an interview published in The Critical Landscape (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1996), "The thesis is that the entire area will become a new urban entity but that its unity is premised on constant exaggeration of the differences between each element." From January 1997 to January 1998, the research focused on shopping and the organization of shopping environments, particularly on intensive retail developments in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Students catalogued the different realities created by, among other things, marketing strategies, existing urban contexts, and new combinations of building programs (cultural, entertainment, recreational, and retail), speculating on the value the concepts and spaces of shopping might have for design thinking and practice. The next focus of the project will be urbanism in Africa. |