The Views of Rem Koolhaas on Generic Phenomena

The term "generic" occurs in the end of the last century and it become related to different discourse about architecture and modern urban planning. The cultural, historical and social aspects of the local ideogram, as well as the character of the city is exponentially more changeable. These features are importantly interchangeable and could be located worldwide. Only by repeating the same aspects and forms we can purchase the fast expansion of the city.

For the Architect Rem Koolhaas one of the main reasons of the generic phenomena is the globalization and the increasing mobility. In his remarkable essay of 1994 ‘The Generic City’, he put on world architectural scene many hypothesis about the global model city. He doubted whether the modern city has begun to look like a modern airport. "In the completeness of their capacities, airports are like quarters of the general city, sometimes even its cause for existence, with additional attraction to be hermetic systems from which there is no escape, except to another airport. Koolhaas looked more globally on different functions of the modern metropolis with its enormous airports, shopping centers, hotels, theme parks, air-conditioned offices and skyscrapers with glass. He describes it "urban identity is like bathing in which more and more mice need to share an original bait, and which, after closer inspection, may have been embroidered for centuries. The most important elements of the city become the infrastructure of bridges, tunnels and highways rejecting the relation with its historical identity. The public segment is becoming less represented and the city take a shape of a ‘patchwork’ divided by private sector. The distances between center and periphery increased and the people became victims of transport and circulation. For Koolhaas a city with a strong identity became too static, fixed and unacceptable.

Loosing the collective memory which can be recognized in the action of constant changing the urban entity, as well as the possibility to use it as a mechanism for its transformation: the various marks of the physical structure are part of the act of actualization of the city architecture in the same way as their displaced meaning. It seems that, at certain times, the city is more a product of anxiety than a process of cause and effect. Physical marks, the urban elements, on the previous layer are always read through a new layer. That way, in the existence of the city, forgotten marks are still readable.