Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

Rem Koolhaas

The rules for changing rules

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 19:12, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:27

Paul Romer presents his solution to the problem of underdevelopment in this TED video.

Stanford economist Paul Romer believes in the power of ideas. He first studied how to speed up the discovery and implementation of new technologies. But to address the big problems we'll face this century -- insecurity, harm to the environment, global poverty --  new technologies will not be enough. We must also speed up the discovery and implementation of new rules, of new ideas about how people interact.

The Urban Country: Holland

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 08/06/2008 - 21:17, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:35

Rem Koolhaas once described the urban as pervasive. It took a tour of Holland for me to grasp quite what he meant. While Paris is mocked as a museum-city due to its protected urban tissue, in Holland it is the farmland that is protected, the rural tissue that cannot be modernized. This makes the experience of moving in the country, which is about the same size as the Dallas-Fort-Worth metropolis and has more people, utterly surreal.

Fake Complexity - CCTV Headquarters

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Tue, 06/24/2008 - 19:06, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:42

Engineering firm ARUP provided the complexity for this project.

From time to time I happen upon an attempt to "do" complexity that completely misses the point. In this first installment of many "Fake Complexity" topics, the culprit is Rem Koolhaas and his CCTV Headquarters for Beijing.

They can't work as a team

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Fri, 11/23/2007 - 20:10, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:59

From John Massengale comes word that Rem Koolhaas continues to make desperate cries to rescue architecture, while missing what's right in front of his nose.

"The work we do is no longer mutually reinforcing, but I would say that any accumulation is counterproductive, to the point that each new addition reduces the sum's value," - Rem Koolhaas

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