The essay reflects on Rem Koolhaas’s approach to the city that incubated his first projects of the late 1960s and was eventually emblematized in his psychoanalytical, retrospective tale about New York. Long before it offers a solution to the “problems” of the city, Koolhaas’s discourse focuses on (literally) overturning its clichés, its ordinary “commonplaces.” His story of New York, then, is the expression of a fact, of what the city might be when one begins by considering what it already is. Koolhaas’s “secret” is this. The intrinsically tautological nature of his discourse belongs to what Barthes called the “rhetoric of the bourgeois myth”.
Modernity and Myth: Rem Koolhaas in New York
MASTRIGLI, GABRIELE
2013-01-01
Abstract
The essay reflects on Rem Koolhaas’s approach to the city that incubated his first projects of the late 1960s and was eventually emblematized in his psychoanalytical, retrospective tale about New York. Long before it offers a solution to the “problems” of the city, Koolhaas’s discourse focuses on (literally) overturning its clichés, its ordinary “commonplaces.” His story of New York, then, is the expression of a fact, of what the city might be when one begins by considering what it already is. Koolhaas’s “secret” is this. The intrinsically tautological nature of his discourse belongs to what Barthes called the “rhetoric of the bourgeois myth”.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
