Junkspace with Running Room by Rem Koolhaas

Author:Rem Koolhaas [Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910749326
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

HAL FOSTER

– Running Room –

Autonomy

Autonomy, or the notion that each art stands apart, in its own area of competence, is the first principle of modern aesthetics, in place at least since the time of Kant, and it is a bad word for most of us informed by the hybrid style of postmodern practice, not to mention the interdisciplinary moves of postmodern theory. We tend to forget that autonomy is always provisional, situated historically and politically, and that the arts are always defined in relation to one another, never absolutely; in short, we tend to forget that autonomy is always semi. This is all the more true for architecture, of course, bound up as it is with constraints of purpose and program.

Enlightenment thinkers advocated political autonomy in order to resist the absolute power of the ancien régime, while modernist artists advocated aesthetic autonomy in order to counter the persistent demand for illustrational meanings (illustrational as in ideological or commercial). Like essentialism in debates about identity, then, autonomy might be a bad word, but it is not always a bad strategy, especially at a time when the hybrid and the interdisciplinary have become almost the routine: call it ‘strategic autonomy’. In Junkspace, Rem Koolhaas uses the term only once, and he qualifies it as ‘quasiautonomy’; nevertheless, at least implicitly, it is a value he wants to reassert, even a position he wants to reclaim. Is this possible in a world of Junkspace?

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