What the Author of Junkspace Told Mies in the Jungle

Abstract

There are a series of parallels between Ludwig Mies van de Rohe in the post-World War II era and Rem Koolhaas after the Cold War. One is that both dismiss the city as lost. “The city is no longer,” Koolhaas concludes in his essay “Generic City” from 1994,[1] while Mies asserted in 1955 that: “There are no cities, in fact, anymore. It goes on like a forest. That is the reason why we cannot have the old cities any more [sic]; that is gone forever, planned city and so on. We should think about the means that we have to live in a jungle, and maybe we do well by that.”[2] At the time, Mies thought he had found a way to come to terms with the jungle. The idea was a uniform, culture-wide type of architectural production that would match its epoch: “What I am driving at is to develop a common language. … We have no real common language. If we can do that, then we can build what we like and everything is all right.”[3]

1. Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” 1264.

2. Quoted in: Detlef Mertins, “Living in a Jungle: Mies, Organic Architecture, and the Art of City Building,” 618.

3. Quoted in: Mertins, “Living in a Jungle,” 633.