The architect Rem Koolhaas has said one of the signifiers of the contemporary ‘global city’ is the ‘absence of a utopian drive’. 

‘Utopia is not a state, not an artist’s colony. It is the dirty secret of all architecture, even the most debased: deep down all architecture, no matter how naïve and implausible, claims to make the world a better place’  – Rem Koolhaas 

The uniformity of a contemporary city grows into a fusion of identical boundaries and conformities, the idea of utopia since the end of the 1970’s has been conspicuously absent. The pace of growth and change we experience today is a formulaic mindset that is created by inescapable modern elements; a repetitive sameness and cloning of the capitalist city ideals around the world within the boundaries of escaping terror which emerged globally after 2001. The expression of change is dominated by a rule of forensic surveillance, curation and manipulation of a global symbolism of capitalist ideology. Within a ‘commercial pressure’ to design and negotiate the city under this formulae and dominant rule; morphing cities that develop at rapid rates and displacing borders through the manipulation of the city into a private terrain that is curated to perform a dogmatic uniformity of exploring and living within the global city. The denunciation of utopian architecture in modern urbanism has been held liable for jeopardising qualities of life in order for a progressive society. In his 1973 essay ‘Architecture and Utopia’ historian Manfredo Tafuri argued the utopia in modern architecture was delusionary on the premise that Capitalism needed architectural utopianism to function. He stated that, ‘basic principles of contemporary architectural ideology does not pretend to have any revolutionary aims’, this is precisely what capitalist development and ideology has taken away from architecture, one that has returned to a ‘pure architecture’ forming without utopia to create generic cities that can survive the influx of population and an architecture that can maintain a  continuum of stabilisation in society. 

What resonates today was written by Lud wig Hilberseimer in his ‘Grosstadtarchitektur’ published in 1928, it echoes the present rigid processes of capitalism within the cells of the city causing architectural design to loose its progressive dimension. He exclaims, ‘the necessity of moulding a heterogeneous and often gigantic mass of material according to a formal law equally valid for element involves a reduction of architectonic form to its most modest, necessary and general requirement’, it is an architecture stripped back to its essential form of production. To assess the ‘absence of utopian drive’ that Rem Koolhaas projected in 2007 of ‘Dilemmas in the Evolution of the City’ created in response to the Global cities exhibition at Tate Modern, states that through the regeneration of global cities we stand to loose a city where the experience upon arrival is no longer unpredictable, exciting or visionary.  Koolhaas states the city has become ‘scripted and forms a scenario’, the sense of these spaces that he believes ‘used to be a big piece of machinery and the public realm used to territory for confrontation, exchange and perhaps adjustment’; the reality of the city space Koolhaas describes is one that is contained and fixed. In this present to analyse the ‘absence of utopia drive’ signaled by Koolhaas in 2007 could not be a more interchangeable, politically unpredictable or chaotic time to unravel this; marking a time where people are finally beginning to imagine radical alternatives against an emotion of fear, memory and spectacle within our city landscapes.

The Global cities exhibition addresses major factors cities face, covering speed, size, density, diversity, form and the ‘dangers of over-regulating cities’ as Rem Koolhaas declares. In Christopher Lindner’s 'Globalisation, Violence and the Visual Culture of cities' he addresses the most significance is to be taken in the advertisement of the exhibition itself. This was the use of alarming shock statistics posters that were placed around the city. They represented the poverty, congestion and runaway development of the contemporary city stating: ‘poverty: one out three city dwellers currently lives in a slum; growth: 95% of urban growth in the next 20 years will be in Africa and Asia; pollutions: cities produce 75% of the worlds carbon dioxide emissions’. Spreading these statistics around the body of the city of London is an act ‘functioning as a wakeup call to a new and possibly frightening urban reality’, it signifiers the spiralling of the global city to the anxieties of these forces. The exhibition locates the membrane of the societal body in the city that has become a ‘source of both fear and enthralment in the popular imagination'. An interconnecting theme throughout the city addressing fears of its dwellers, an example is the prison like urbanism of Sao Paulo, it is a relationship between architecture and the global economies over ‘globalisation’s profound reshaping of our cultural imagination’, in the country of Brazil in the early 2000 the condition of the city was described as ‘undeclared civil war’. Societies fear then translated into the build environments extending the Brutalist modernist tower blocks of the city. A secured gated community named ‘Alphaville’ encompassed with its own skyscrapers, police force and surveillance system marking, ‘a militarisation of urban space but also represent a concrete manifestation of the middle-class city’s fear of violence’, as Rem Koolhaas discusses the effects of globalisation ‘leads to two completely different conditions’. We can critique here not what he calls ‘exploding city’, but an escapism to safety through enclosure away from the shrinking city of danger, uncertainty and violence. 

The role of the architectonic manifestos was used to establish a clear theoretical foundation and to break the status quo, transforming ideas of architectural revolution into a dialogue of transformation between the architect, society and the city.  The manifesto’s framing modernity were written in the years of the 1920’s, allowing for Le Corbusiers 1923 essay ‘Towards an Architecture’ that was a dogmatic form of what a society needs to become and for a new future order. During the 1950’s there was a declaration of the ending of utopias, with the last Manifestos inspired by the uprising of new technologies that imagined a new and ideal world such as Archigram’s ‘Universal Structure’ of 1964 and Cedric Price, ‘No-Plan’ of 1969.

The first manifesto that had detached itself from the concept of Le Corbusiers Utopia’s was, ‘Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan’ in ‘Delirious New York’ by Rem Koolhaas. The visionary states that, ‘The fatal weakness of the manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence. Manhattan’s problem is the opposite: it is a mountain of evidence without manifesto’, Koolhaas is educating and dealing with the realities of Manhattan, but also to enable the city of New York to be considered as Manifesto within itself as a portrayal of his theories of a contemporary city and society, a utopia that is not just about the future but an effective renewal of the present. Koolhaas argues that the urbanistic advance the skyscraper represents, ‘the skyscraper was a utopian formula which could be used as an instrument for a new form of unknowable urbanism’, this transformation for Koolhaas is filled with possibility, ‘an act of moving between worlds’, a formulae that is opposed to Le Corbusiers pure city. Koolhaas develops the failure of what are traditional utopianism ideals and the abstract thought that Le Corbusier created, ‘ his urban form removed congestion, offering only the efficiency of banality in exchange. This congestion, in a realm divorced from reality, forces the metropolis ever upward into the speculative.’ what Le Corbusier created and enclosed within society was a ‘complete cultural void’. Within the contemporary city of New York the radical issue of ‘globalization, violence and cultural memory’ are produced and relate to the post 9/11 devastations. It is violence of the impermanence of the city that is becoming more radical through the global disruption of terror as Koolhaas stated that people can ‘no longer bear emptiness’. The reclaiming of urban space is displayed in the Project ‘Lifescape’ to transform Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island into an earthwork monument of a public recreation site. This site connected the ‘material and symbolic ways of the lived space’ within the global city as 9/11 wreckages were transported to this landfill. The project is a manifestation on how the Twin Towers are the ‘most notorious and conflicted architectural symbols of globalisation of the contemporary imagination’, engaging in the rehabilitation of the landfill is a renew and recycling of the very city itself.

 Koolhaas begins to tap into a utopia, which effectively is a narrative of the sublime. To think of the manifesto in relation to Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas links two explicit times of uncertainty and unknowing, as Koolhaas describes, ‘at most they write portraits of particular cities, in the hope, not of developing a theory of what to do with them, but of understanding how cities currently exist’, it this void that’s creates a period itself that is devoid of identity.  Rem Koolhaas curated the exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, named Elements, it is conclusive of a single theme representing a world where the fast-paced absorption of modernity has triggered a cycle of cities that resemble equaled and consistent versions of each other, ‘but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.’, encompassing the grouped identities of the buildings and elements that of interiors which uniform and cement this direction in the copying and morphing cities. A reflection of an architect implicated by the time he creates in is that which is progressively obsessive in a phenomenon of recreating and amassing interior and exteriors around the globe on a mass scale of production. The standardisation of elements such and windows and staircases are removed of aesthetic beauty and intricacies instead becoming restricted and formulated on a fear of health and safety and endurance in materials and design for a society that operates at a pace of life which excels materials, trends and form.

The act of a repetitive looking and living experience of modern mass-produced buildings in contemporary society, just the act of building rather than the creation of architectural form is an answer to the excess of style and solution to fast life in this modernity which is an inescapable and formulaic rhythm of a thread that is creating identical cities. An age of standardisation is presented by Rem Koolhaas that collides machine age elements with the exhausting system of contemporary living with the fundamentals of building that from the Enlightenment have been, ‘turned into machines – a staircase turning into an escalator, a ceiling into a complex service duct – and these elements went global’, it is a political theory of critically analysing a production of fixed and secure digital system of building creation. The complex fusion of architecture and technology is the potency that has caused continuous creations of the banal in creating what has been lost in the sacred and meaningful forms in traditional design against global development and construction.

In 1963 this time period was labeled by Reyner Banham as the ‘year of megastructures’, a period of drastic desecration of utopias in the mainstream. The Pompidou Centre building represents the ‘supreme moment of technological euphoria in Western society’, the high point of society and technological freedom, the building presents the ‘complete realisation of the megastructure dream’, an ideological beacon of exceeding real ‘possibilities suggested by its hyper-flexibility’ through the hyper objectification of its form. The idea of the Pompidou had the nature of a hypothesis what Rem Koolhaas describes as a building that it is the last moment of a ‘degree of abstraction, radically and that degree of newness, the last time that a hypothesis won and for me it was a totally euphoric moment, the euphoric evidence of what was possible in architecture’, this was a tectonic moment between state and culture in design at a precise time when these unions were losing power among their relationship.

The design of the Pompidou identified, ‘the programme for the monument of the future’ that is within the vast open spaces in the now decaying areas of our cities, in these spaces monumental architecture will find its appropriate setting, as critiqued by Reyner Banham. The presence of the building is menacing against the status quo of the Parisian city, ‘What could have been an instrument for opening up new territory became a monument to a mentality that was unsustainable’, Koolhaas believes that this functioned to signify the end of a period rather than initiating a new one. This doesn’t stand however to undermine the potential and significance that Koolhaas gave the Pompidou as it refers to a high point and effectively the last point of urban architectural imagination at it greatest potential by ‘turning the modernistic interest in functionality into the de-materialised aspects of urban fetishism’. As Koolhaas argues nostalgically, ‘we have an overwhelming intricacy around how cities are organized’, Koolhaas questions the rhetoric that no longer exists in architecture, that only exists in words around the city. The district of Le Marais in Paris gained recognition from the building of the Centre Pompidou, the area seen as Reyner Banham’s calls, ‘what comes next’, in his critique the centre is seen as a monument to the kinds of architectural imaginations which thought that buildings could become formless machines ‘inaugurated a new ear for the dogmatic myth of self-empowerment by means of self-learning and mass jouissance’ this intern harnessing urban desire.

Museum buildings have become ever more increasingly monumental in scale since the creation of the Centre Pompidou. This idea of the Museum as a monument is serving the kind of capitalist functions of global city ideals with the concentration of real estate, luxury consumption and urban exclusivity that begins to surround the museum. Koolhaas exemplifies this describing the ‘The YES Regime’, it is a regime of private power that in intensively negotiating the city, whilst the power of the public is depleting. This is turn leads into an urban paranoia where the metropolis of the modern city opens up. Urban generation and its relation to culture and ideology ‘fuse selective histories with future trajectories to convey renewal’, acting as knowledge zones producing economy and innovation, transforming spaces into cultural nucleus. In the case of Tate Modern property developers have been invading further into the space surrounding the gallery.

The extension of the Tate’s infrastructure with the opening of The Switch house has been created to claim the public space, ‘Tate Modern had to grow upwards. The faceted form of the extension is a result of the forces acting on I from all side’, any aspiration to seek utopian vitality is critically countered by the suppression of its surrounding, ‘ a land print, that prevents the gallery from being hemmed in by adjacent new-build commercial and residential projects arising from the area’ through the intensified gentrification in this area currently. The bricks of the Switch House hang like an armour around its skeleton, ‘their bricks are hung like chainmail, stacked in double-bond and threaded on steel rods, Whereas the original Tate Modern was about revealing existing infrastructure, the extension is about building infrastructure’, the design is a continuum and evolution of the existing Tate Modern power station, formulating in harmony as an organism that can challenge the on-setting environment in the city outside. The ‘multiplier effect’, through the employment and consumerism is creating the surrounding area of the museum of Tate Modern representing ‘a new instrumentalism in cultural policy’, creating an attraction and facilitating capitalist production. The cultural re-coding of Britain’s, ‘Cool Britannia’ saw the Tate Modern as an integral part to this transformation within the New Labor regime of 1997 as the museum ‘became universalised emblems for the cities in which they stand; they achieve this now within an ideological shift governed by marketisation and co-option of cultural mediation to consumption’, an image of pro-growth to the counter outside space city environment. The Switch house is currently being identified with as a ‘defensive watch tower’, there to ward off property develops from encroaching any further’, the public space of the gallery acts upon a dialogue between the private and the public, as Roolhaas identifies in his own projects, ‘I try to find ways in which change can be mobilised to strengthen the original identity’, through the memory of the past progress of architecture that looks towards the future as instruments of freedom utopias can be attained. City spaces have been negotiated through the source of spectacle; trauma, mourning and memory that are representations of ‘globalised city space’ reshaping profoundly our cultural imagination with an underlying retort of urban paranoia as opposed to urban utopia.

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