Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have condemned ourselves to a life-long
immersion in arbitrariness... The average contemporary lunch box is a microcosm of
junkspace: a fervent semantics of health - slabs of eggplant, topped by thick layers of
goat cheese - cancelled by a colossal cookie at the bottom... Polarities have become
equatorial, nothing left in between. There is nothing between desolation and turmoil,
between beauty and crassness. LAX: welcoming - possibly flesh-eating - orchids at the
check-in counter...
'Identity' is the new junkfood for the disposessed, globalization's fodder for the
disenfranchized.
If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue
mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is
not modern architecture but junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization
has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress,
its fall-out. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science,
universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown... Although its individual parts are
the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by
infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a
low-grade purgatory... Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have
built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we do not register on the
same scales. We do not leave pyramids. According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is
already more junkspace under construction in the 21st century than survived from the
20th...
It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the 20th century; architecture
disappeared in the 20th century; we have been reading a footnote under a microscope
hoping it would turn into a novel; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People's
Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is essence, the main thing... product
of the encounter between escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of
sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of
junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of
seamlessness: escalator, air conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain... It is
always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by
any means (mirror, polish,echo)... Junkspace is sealed, held together not by structure, but
by skin, like a bubble. Gravity has remained constant, resisted by the same arsenal since
the beginning of time; but air conditioning - invisible medium, therefore unnoticed - has
truly revolutionized architecture. Air conditioning has launched the endless building. If
architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them. Air conditioning has dictated
mutant regimes of organization and coexistence that leave architecture behind. A single
shopping center now is the work of generations of space planners, repairmen and fixers,
like in the middle ages; air conditioning sustains our cathedrals. (Unwittingly, all architects
may be working on the same building, so far separate, but with hidden receptors that will
eventually make it cohere.) Because it costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space
inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns into
junkspace.
When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is
invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation
with its opposite: substance and objects, i.e., architecture. Architects could never explain
space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications. OK, let's talk about spacethen. The beauty of airports, especially after each upgrade. The luster of renovations.
The subtlety of the shopping center. Let's explore public space, discover casinos, spend
time in theme parks... Junkspace is the body-double of space, a territory of impaired
vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness. Junkspace is a Bermuda triangle of
concepts, a petri dish abandoned: it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses
intention with realization. It substitutes hierarchy with accumulation, composition with
addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at
the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of
seduction... Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of
your best friends... A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight
and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed.
Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal
hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of
building, possibly forever...
Space was created by piling matter on top of matter, cemented to form a solid new whole.
Junkspace is additive, layered and lightweight, not articulated in different parts but
subdivided, quartered the way a carcass is torn apart - individual chunks severed from a
universal condition. There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently
covered in mirror or gold. Structure groans invisibly underneath decoration, or worse, has
become ornamental; small shiny space frames support nominal loads, or huge beams
deliver cyclopic burdens to innocent destinations... The arch, once the workhorse of
structures, has become the depleted emblem of 'community', welcoming an infinity of
virtual populations to non-existent there's. Where it is absent, it is simply applied -
mostly in stucco - as ornamental afterthought on hurriedly erected superblocks. 13% of all
junkspace's iconography goes back to the Romans, 8% Bauhaus, 7% Disney - neck and
neck - 3% Art Nouveau, followed closely by Mayan...
Like a substance that could have condensed in any other form, junkspace is a domain of
feigned, simulated order, a kingdom of morphing. Its specific configuration is as furtuitous
as the geometry of a snow flake. Patterns imply repetition or ultimately decipherable rules;
Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code... Because it cannot be grasped, junkspace
cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal
to freeze insures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection,
only interest. Its geometries are unimaginable, only makable. Although strictly nonarchitectural,
it tends to the vaulted, to the Dome. Sections seem to be devoted to utter
inertness, others in perpetual rhetorical turmoil: the deadest resides next to the most
hysterical. Themes cast a pall of arrested development over interiors as big as the
Pantheon, spawning stillbirths in every corner. The aesthetic is Byzantine, gorgeous and
dark, splintered into thousands of shards, all visible at the same time: a quasi-panoptical
universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split-seconds around the dizzy eye
of the beholder. Murals used to show idols; Junkspace's modules are dimensioned to
carry brands; myths can be shared, brands husband aura at the mercy of focus groups.
Brands in junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: essences
through which meaning disappears... The shiniest surfaces in the history of mankind
reflect humanity at its most casual. The more we inhabit the palatial, the more we seem to
dress down. A stringent dress code - last spasm of etiquette? - governs access to
junkspace: short, sneaker, sandal, shell suit, fleece, jean, parka, backpack. As if the
People suddenly accessed the private quarters of a dictator, junkspace is best enjoyed in
a state of post-revolutionary gawking. Polarities have merged, there is nothing left between
desolation and turmoil. Neon signifies both the old and the new, interiors refer to the stoneand
the space age at the same time. Like the deactivated virus in an innoculation, Modern
architecture remains essential, but only in its most sterile manifestation, High Tech (it
seemed so dead only a decade ago!). It exposes what previous generations kept under wraps: structures emerge like springs from a mattress, exit stairs dangle in didactic
trapeze, probes thrust into space to deliver laboriously what is in fact omnipresent, free air,
acres of glass hang from spidery cables, tautly stretched skins enclose flaccid events.
Transparency only reveals everything in which you cannot partake. At the sound of
midnight it all may revert to Taiwanese Gothic, in three years segue into Nigerian Sixties,
Norwegian Chalet or default Christian. Earthlings now live in a kindergarten grotesque.
Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in junkspace. There is no form, but
proliferation... Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish
and embrace manipulation... Superstrings of graphics, transplanted emblems of franchise
and sparkling infrastructures of light, LED's, and video describe an authorless world
beyond anyone's claim, always unique, utterly unpredictable, yet intensely familiar.
Junkspace is hot (or suddenly artic); fluorescent walls, folded like melting stained glass,
generate additional heat to raise the temperature of junkspace to levels where you could
cultivate orchids. Pretending histories left and right, its contents are dynamic yet stable,
recycled or multiplied as in cloning: forms search for function like hermit crabs for a vacant
shell... Junkspace sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins, is reborn every Monday
morning. In previous building, materiality was based on a final state that could only be
modified at the expense of partial destruction. At the exact moment that our culture has
abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more
Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have condemned ourselves to a life-long
immersion in arbitrariness... The average contemporary lunch box is a microcosm of
junkspace: a fervent semantics of health - slabs of eggplant, topped by thick layers of
goat cheese - cancelled by a colossal cookie at the bottom... Polarities have become
equatorial, nothing left in between. There is nothing between desolation and turmoil,
between beauty and crassness. LAX: welcoming - possibly flesh-eating - orchids at the
check-in counter...
'Identity' is the new junkfood for the disposessed, globalization's fodder for the
disenfranchized.
If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue
mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is
not modern architecture but junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization
has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress,
its fall-out. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science,
universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown... Although its individual parts are
the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by
infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a
low-grade purgatory... Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have
built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we do not register on the
same scales. We do not leave pyramids. According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is
already more junkspace under construction in the 21st century than survived from the
20th...
It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the 20th century; architecture
disappeared in the 20th century; we have been reading a footnote under a microscope
hoping it would turn into a novel; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People's
Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is essence, the main thing... product
of the encounter between escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of
sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of
junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of
seamlessness: escalator, air conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain... It is
always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by
any means (mirror, polish,echo)... Junkspace is sealed, held together not by structure, but
by skin, like a bubble. Gravity has remained constant, resisted by the same arsenal since
the beginning of time; but air conditioning - invisible medium, therefore unnoticed - has
truly revolutionized architecture. Air conditioning has launched the endless building. If
architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them. Air conditioning has dictated
mutant regimes of organization and coexistence that leave architecture behind. A single
shopping center now is the work of generations of space planners, repairmen and fixers,
like in the middle ages; air conditioning sustains our cathedrals. (Unwittingly, all architects
may be working on the same building, so far separate, but with hidden receptors that will
eventually make it cohere.) Because it costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space
inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns into
junkspace.
When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is
invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation
with its opposite: substance and objects, i.e., architecture. Architects could never explain
space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications. OK, let's talk about spacethen. The beauty of airports, especially after each upgrade. The luster of renovations.
The subtlety of the shopping center. Let's explore public space, discover casinos, spend
time in theme parks... Junkspace is the body-double of space, a territory of impaired
vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness. Junkspace is a Bermuda triangle of
concepts, a petri dish abandoned: it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses
intention with realization. It substitutes hierarchy with accumulation, composition with
addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at
the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of
seduction... Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of
your best friends... A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight
and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed.
Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal
hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of
building, possibly forever...
Space was created by piling matter on top of matter, cemented to form a solid new whole.
Junkspace is additive, layered and lightweight, not articulated in different parts but
subdivided, quartered the way a carcass is torn apart - individual chunks severed from a
universal condition. There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently
covered in mirror or gold. Structure groans invisibly underneath decoration, or worse, has
become ornamental; small shiny space frames support nominal loads, or huge beams
deliver cyclopic burdens to innocent destinations... The arch, once the workhorse of
structures, has become the depleted emblem of 'community', welcoming an infinity of
virtual populations to non-existent there's. Where it is absent, it is simply applied -
mostly in stucco - as ornamental afterthought on hurriedly erected superblocks. 13% of all
junkspace's iconography goes back to the Romans, 8% Bauhaus, 7% Disney - neck and
neck - 3% Art Nouveau, followed closely by Mayan...
Like a substance that could have condensed in any other form, junkspace is a domain of
feigned, simulated order, a kingdom of morphing. Its specific configuration is as furtuitous
as the geometry of a snow flake. Patterns imply repetition or ultimately decipherable rules;
Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code... Because it cannot be grasped, junkspace
cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal
to freeze insures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection,
only interest. Its geometries are unimaginable, only makable. Although strictly nonarchitectural,
it tends to the vaulted, to the Dome. Sections seem to be devoted to utter
inertness, others in perpetual rhetorical turmoil: the deadest resides next to the most
hysterical. Themes cast a pall of arrested development over interiors as big as the
Pantheon, spawning stillbirths in every corner. The aesthetic is Byzantine, gorgeous and
dark, splintered into thousands of shards, all visible at the same time: a quasi-panoptical
universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split-seconds around the dizzy eye
of the beholder. Murals used to show idols; Junkspace's modules are dimensioned to
carry brands; myths can be shared, brands husband aura at the mercy of focus groups.
Brands in junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: essences
through which meaning disappears... The shiniest surfaces in the history of mankind
reflect humanity at its most casual. The more we inhabit the palatial, the more we seem to
dress down. A stringent dress code - last spasm of etiquette? - governs access to
junkspace: short, sneaker, sandal, shell suit, fleece, jean, parka, backpack. As if the
People suddenly accessed the private quarters of a dictator, junkspace is best enjoyed in
a state of post-revolutionary gawking. Polarities have merged, there is nothing left between
desolation and turmoil. Neon signifies both the old and the new, interiors refer to the stoneand
the space age at the same time. Like the deactivated virus in an innoculation, Modern
architecture remains essential, but only in its most sterile manifestation, High Tech (it
seemed so dead only a decade ago!). It exposes what previous generations kept under wraps: structures emerge like springs from a mattress, exit stairs dangle in didactic
trapeze, probes thrust into space to deliver laboriously what is in fact omnipresent, free air,
acres of glass hang from spidery cables, tautly stretched skins enclose flaccid events.
Transparency only reveals everything in which you cannot partake. At the sound of
midnight it all may revert to Taiwanese Gothic, in three years segue into Nigerian Sixties,
Norwegian Chalet or default Christian. Earthlings now live in a kindergarten grotesque.
Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in junkspace. There is no form, but
proliferation... Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish
and embrace manipulation... Superstrings of graphics, transplanted emblems of franchise
and sparkling infrastructures of light, LED's, and video describe an authorless world
beyond anyone's claim, always unique, utterly unpredictable, yet intensely familiar.
Junkspace is hot (or suddenly artic); fluorescent walls, folded like melting stained glass,
generate additional heat to raise the temperature of junkspace to levels where you could
cultivate orchids. Pretending histories left and right, its contents are dynamic yet stable,
recycled or multiplied as in cloning: forms search for function like hermit crabs for a vacant
shell... Junkspace sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins, is reborn every Monday
morning. In previous building, materiality was based on a final state that could only be
modified at the expense of partial destruction. At the exact moment that our culture has
abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more
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