Mutations / Rem Koolhaas

Analyzing a city according to the roman structure and logic of construction is a good base to begin with. But societies over the globe have changed throughout the years their process of progression and expansion in different and unique ways, each society according to its own environmental, cultural and trade exchange/consuming preferences.
The matrix to build a city upon and the rest of consequences that a grid structure determines are but a recipe or a formula on which a certain society will build their necessities and design its most comfortable way of life. New York is one of our world’s best example of a grid structure, not only because of the grid of streets itself, but by the numeration given to the streets and avenues, while the 5th avenue divides the city to two, almost equal halves of west and east. Like New York many of the US cities were built with the grid system, and even in Europe, the newly renovated or built from scratch parts of the cities are using the grid method, for example Barcelona, Vienna, etc.
One of the major differences between the ancient Roman society and the 20th century one is the addictive, continuous urge and desire for “shopping”, modern society most active action. The act of shopping, which obviously started as an actual physical need for groceries and clothing, slowly became a strong psychological need as well, and maybe this addiction of consuming is even overlapping the physical need of purchasing items.
Is shopping good or bad for human societies? This is a very complicated question to ask in our present situation. On one side, shopping malls seem to make our lives easier by uniting our cultural needs all together under one roof, providing us a relaxing environment, nature-imitating scenes (smells, sounds, looks, etc.) and a gathering place to meet other people, whom we probably share the same interests, or else we wouldn’t be spending so much time at the same place. But then on the other side what shopping malls do is taking us away, isolating us from the “real world” of nature, problems that need solutions, fresh air, other human beings… and placing us in an artificial environment that slowly blur our human senses and become our urban natural scene .
If we like it or not, this massive psychological addiction for shopping is changing the structure and identity of cities and suburbs. There is still a big difference between European cities and American cities by the fact that the center of an American city, its core is the business/shopping area, where money transaction is occurring, while European city’s center is the historical ruins site, that defines that city’s history, and the shopping areas are surrounding this historical core. Although, slowly the shopping areas are invading the historical core, and cover up those roots by the new modern addiction.
A good example for this new conception, from the same author of “mutations”, Rem Koolhaas, is the building of the Guggenheim museum in Las Vegas (Venetian hotel). Considering Las Vegas as one of the world’s biggest host for consumers, and less for art lovers, Koolhaas, designed this building in an opposite concept to the usual concept of museums. Museum are usually a place where you look at art most of the time, out of personal interest and then finish your tour in the museum shop for some souvenirs, but not in Vegas….in Vegas you come first to shop for souvenirs and maybe look at some art if time and patience permit. Basically what Koolhaas did is instead of building a big building for the museum and a small shop; he built a big museum shop and a small museum to address to specific visitors of Las Vegas.
In order to establish my opinion on modern civilization and its density, mostly created by shopping and consuming, and how to deal with the transformation we are going through, I quote Bruce Mau from his book “Massive Change” (Phaidon publishing, 2004) – “density offers hope: with nearly half of the world’s population living in cities, density is increasingly becoming the global condition. The denser we make our cities, the more we can sustain ecosystems…..now imagine if we stacked the world’s population vertically. We take up dramatically less space. As the world urbanizes, we need to acknowledge the ever growing condition of urban sprawl, design it better and simultaneously look to density as a solution, which will liberate territory for the production of nature. If people live in cities, they don’t destroy the country. As we create density, we simultaneously open up the surrounding rural space”.

"Chair One" - designed by Konstantin Grcic/ by Oz Etzioni

Is modern design really about function or form? The endless debate and the amount of opinions amongst designers and consumers regarding the “right” way to approach design are probably infinitive. In different countries, between different design methods approaches one can find several different opinions, but lately it is quite safe to declare that ergonomics and user’s comfort are of the leading objectives in furniture design in the 21st century. In that case, the famous thesis of architect Louis H. Sullivan “form follows function” was actually one of today’s design visions.
The “Chair one” designed by Konstantin Grcic (Germany) in 2004 for Magis (Italy), created a twist in that main stream of modern mass productive chairs market. Using aluminum casting that is mainly used to produce structural components for furniture, and making the whole chair, or rather most part of it was cast as one piece of aluminum. The result as Grcic describes it is “like a large basket, the seat shell, which is mounted on four extruded legs or other types of support, like cement.” The final form of the “Chair one” is a very unique and unusual structure in the common furniture design modern line, while most objects turn to new polymers that adjust the human body form and allows long lasting and comfortable sitting, this innovative chair takes us back to a natural material, aluminum, combined with a rough industrial element, cement, that together create an odd, unusual, and “main stream rebel” form of a chair.
The chair one does not seem to be comfortable, or too stable with its small cement diameter base. It does not possess any arm, back or head supporting elements, so what does give it the fame and success that he received, becoming one of the most famous chairs in modern furniture design? Is it a case of “function follows form” and Sullivan’s thesis is only a suggestion? Are we as human beings desire the image of the form more than its function?
“Chair one”, as I see it, is an experiment, the use of the triangular form, the strongest form as a structural element, a very brutal and aggressive shape, and to use this shape in an object that needs to be comfortable, and usually organic shaped. The choice of materials, colors and combination of triangular shapes, all contradict the product basic usage – an object to sit on comfortably for a period of time, and hopefully lives in harmony with the rest of the elements surrounding it (inside a house or a public place). The “Chair one” is considered to be a major success as a chair, both in the private consuming market, each individual for his own house, and also in the industrial market (airports, hotels, bars.etc.). But its success is greater than the visual aspect of where it is situated and how many of it was sold, this chair opened a new way of looking at forms, materials and exiting the fast highway of the modern design mainstream that easily pulls you in. “Chair one” gives us the opportunity to see how connections become the main part, how we can involve the industrial materials in the ergonomic conception and how modern design is not to be defined this way or the other.