ON A KNIFE-EDGE, by Enric Llorach
05/05/2013.
FOUNDATIONAL IMAGE FOR A POETICS OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE. [Investigation]
metalocus, ENRIC LLORACH
metalocus, ENRIC LLORACH
Manhattanism is, therefore, the expression of a capitalist system in an extremely heighten state. According to David Harvey (9), the supreme precept of capitalism is a 3% compound growth rate which causes the system to permanently subsist "on a knife-edge" producing crisis after crisis, which become the "irrational rationalisers": the very description of Dalí’s paranoid-critical method.
The paranoid nature of New York’s congestion can, thus, be said to be analogous to the paranoid-critical method, which is represented in Millet’s L’Angélus, more concretely, in the figure of the woman who is poised for the sexual act and cannibalism. For RK, and in a foundational way in his work, this woman symbolises the economic and urban processes that define the city. Such processes are paranoid and have a formal effect on architecture. RK’s buildings offer a murderous sensuality; they offer the posture of the praying peasant woman in L’Angélus.
In another RK publication, Content (10), our attention is drawn to the subheadings: Perverted Architecture, Homicidal Engineering, Sweatshop Demographics, Slum Sociology, Big Brother Skyscrapers, Al Qaeda Fetish, Martha Stewart Urbanism and Paranoid Technology. They constitute a set of notes on what is both pathological and spectacular; of paranoid states and cannibalistic sensuality. This is where RK’s architecture germinates and grows, under the auspices of a woman resembling a praying mantis i.e. Millet’s peasant. RK’s buildings are erected with difficulty, with a suffering more insect than human, reflected almost always in the leaning posture.
Content provides numerous examples, like the illustrations of the OMA buildings that have come to life as anthropomorphic villains poised for sexual and criminal acts by Simon Brown and Jon Link at &&&. It also contains an article by Fenna Haakma Wagenaar (FHW) titled Astorology. Protect us from what we want (11) which gives an account of OMA’s paranoid activity. FHW exposes the many conflicts between OMA (Rotterdam) and Herzog & de Meuron (Basel) in terms of ideology and methodology. She describes OMA's activity as a febrile, verging-on-delirious production which Rem Koolhaas occasionally tries to rationalise. Though never excessively, as there is no room for complacency at OMA, just like the knife-edge instability of our capitalist system.
Enric Llorach, Barcelona 2012.
NOTES.-
(1)_Crane.tv, Shohei Shigematsu, OMA member. In New York, format: video, Metalocus Architectural Journal, On-line version, 21.12.2012.
(2)_Salvador Dalí, Le mythe tragique de L’Angélus de Millet, Société Nouvelle des Éditions Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, 1963. Spanish version: El mito trágico de “El Ángelus” de Millet, Tusquets Editores, Barcelona, 2004. 1st edition in Marginales collection: March 1978. 1st edition in Esenciales collection: January 2004.
(3)_In the prologue to the French edition in 1963, Dalí wrote: "I, personally, firmly believe that this book is proof that the human brain, and in this case Salvador Dalí's brain, is capable of functioning as a cybernetic, viscous and extremely artistic machine thanks to the paranoid-critical activity (paranoid: soft; critical: hard)” idem Tusquets edition, pg. 20.
(4)_In the essay The uncanny (1919), Freud describes the uncanny as: “…every affect of an emotional impulse, whatever its nature, is converted into fear by being repressed, thus, from among the fears there must be one group in which it can be recognised that this is something repressed which returns. This type of anxiety would then constitute the uncanny, and it would then be irrelevant if this anxious nature was innate or if it was brought out by another affective tone. Secondly, if this is really the essence of the uncanny, then we understand that the current language passes insensibly from the Heimlich to its opposite, the Unheimlich; the latter, for which the uncanny is not actually anything new, but something that was always familiar to the psyche and was estranged only by being repressed. And this link with repression now enlightens us to Schelling's definition of the uncanny as something that should have been hidden has come out into the open" (Italics from original text). Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche, Imago 5 (5-6), 297-324, 1919. First publication in Spanish in 1943, Ed. Americana, Buenos Aires. The Uncanny is also included in the prologue to E.T.A. Hoffmann, El hombre de arena (The Sandman), José J. de Olañeta, Palma de Mallorca, 2008, pg. 28. The Sandman is one of a collection of short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann titled Nachtstücke (Night Pieces) and published in 1917.
(5)_Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 1978. Spanish version: Delirio de Nueva York. Un manifiesto retroactivo para Manhattan, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2004.
(6)_Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. Ibidem (3), pp. 263-264.
(7)_Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. Ibidem (3), p. 160.
(8)_The soft melting pocket watch in Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) also plays the role of a foundational image in OMA-Rem Koolhaas architecture. On this occasion, the resemblance is found in the soft slabs that abound in RK’s work, which Dalí would have referred to as “edible architecture”.
(9)_Such structural features of the capitalist system are described in the following pages of David Harvey’s book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, 2010. Spanish version: El enigma del capital y las crisis del capitalismo, Ediciones Akal, Madrid, 2012, pages 64-65. Harvey explains how financialization periods like the present always precede a change of hegemony. The US National Intelligence Council published at the beginning of the Obama era that the world's economic centre will have moved to Asia by the year 2025, due to the relentless flow of capital from West to East. RK has already directed his attention to this part of the planet, as well as managing to conquer Manhattan, the city that inspired his architectural dream and which had eluded Le Corbusier.
(10)_AMOMA/Rem Koolhaas/&&&/Simon Brown/ Jon Link, Content. Perverted Architecture. Homicidal Engineering. Sweatshop Demographics. Slum Sociology. Big Brother Skyscrapers. Al Qaeda Fetish. Martha Stewart Urbanism. Paranoid Technology, Taschen, Köln, 2004.
(11)_Fenna Haakma Wagenaar, Astorology. Protect us from what we want, Ibidem, pg. 204-207.
Enric Llorach is a PhD architect (ETSAB, 2007) and university professor. He has published the book En el filo de la navaja. Arte, arquitectura y anacronismo (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2017). He has directed the dance piece Dona a contrallum (Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2017) and has co-directed its filmed version (Fundació Mies van der Rohe / 15.L-FILMS, 2019). He has as well developed the sculpture project Modernité Noire (2014) and has curated the lectures cycle Converses d’Arquitectura (AxA / Trespa Design Center Barcelona, 2015-2016).