Image.source#2 Textsource: Rem Koolhaas The Generic City "1.1 Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport-”all the same”? Is it possible to theorize this convergence? And if so, to what ultimate configuration is it aspiring? Convergence is possible only at the price of shedding identity. That is usually seen as a loss. But at the scale at which it occurs, it must mean something. What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness? What if this seemingly accidental - and usually regretted- homogenization were an intentional process, a conscious movement away from difference toward similarity? What if we are witnessing a global liberation movement:”down with character!” What is left after identity is stripped? The Generic? 1.2 To the extent that identity is derived from physical substance, from the historical, from context, from the real, we somehow cannot imagine that anything contemporary - made by us - contributes to it. But the fact that human growth is exponential implies that the past will at some point become too “small” to be inhabited and shared by those alive. We ourselves exhaust it. To the extent that history finds its deposit in architecture, present human quantities will inevitably burst and deplete previous substance. Identity conceived as this form of sharing the past is a losing proposition: not only is there - in a stable model of continuous population expansion - proportionally less and less to share, but history also has an invidious half-life - as it is more abused, it becomes less significant- to the point where its diminishing handouts become insulting. This thinning is exacerbated by the constantly increasing mass of tourists, an avalanche that, in a perpetual quest for “character”, grinds successful identities down to meaningless dust."...(excerpt of the text embedded in the image) from: S,M,L,XL, O.M.A. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, The Monacelli Press, Inc. 1995. Image.source#1 Textsource: Saskia Sassen Die neue Zentralität - Auswirkungen von Telematik und Globalisierung Image.source#3 Textsource: Walter Gropius Die soziologischen Grundlagen der Minimalwohnung Image.source#4 Textsource: Mike Davis The Mercenaries, Epilogue: Gramsci vs Blade Runner	.
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