“The urban condition has been changing for a long time, and this change is irrevocable. Confronted with this mutation, this new urban condition, we refuse to recognize that we are powerless to forestall it. We are so traumatized by our own inability to recreate recognizable conditions, by the apparent impossibility of aligning ourselves with forces that seem beyond our control, that we have become like amputees, fixated on what we have lost, wracked with phantom pain.”
         -Rem Koolhaas, Understanding the new Urban Condition in The Harvard architecture review,  1995 (edited)

Rem Koolhaas’s appointment as a Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the GSD in 1995 came under his own requirement that he would not teach design, but research. He defined an agenda of looking at ignored realities that were nonetheless severely impacting the profession: the rampant modernization of China, how shopping was dramatically reshaping the public sphere, attempting to understanding the planning of the Nigerian capital of Lagos, amongst others. Research that faced severe scrutiny from the faculty, which largely considered it journalism instead-yet it still had its eye set on challenging canonical architectural theoretical constructs. In the spirit of French intellectual Roland Barthes, Koolhaas sought not to defend, but to invert the discourse by learning from what was considered ‘bad’, the banal, the unconsidered, with a new globalized student body who should teach the teacher, instead of the other way around. To start new narratives exploring these worlds, adding meaning, finding the right words, and where needed inventing new ones.

The Harvard Project on the City resulted in two published books, several exhibition contributions, and a DVD. For different generations of architects and designers, the work has had a profound impact on the way architecture is considered and the agency of the architect.

There are three unfinished manuscripts that are part of the Project on the City from the same moment — the late 90s — covering three vastly different sections of an architectural spectrum: interpreting the brilliance of ancient Roman architecture as a system, a speculative reconstruction of Soviet rhetorical power, and reinterpreting (Western) planning through the lens of Lagos.

This course has the ambition to ‘finish’ (some of) the unpublished works, while simultaneously critically examining the roles, powers, and reach they can have and where they can be most effectively positioned in and outside of the architectural discourse. At the time, it was logical that The Harvard Project on the City was primarily a printed publishing program. While books remain important, a wide range of other media formats have been added, which have not yet been fully theoretically and practically explored in architecture to their fullest extent. In the light of increasingly accessible alternatives like podcasts, AI modeling, (serious) gaming, speculative performances, film, and other formats, the initial publishing strategy is reconsidered and the project’s output(s) extended and explored as a tool to reach more audiences in times when raising global curiosity to our world is profoundly needed.