Space-Junk
Have you seen Wall-E? The 2008 Pixar movie about the little waste allocation and load lifter earth class robot “with a personality”? That movie to me and Empire Magazine was one of the best movies of the last twenty years. It deservedly won the Academy Award for best animated feature. Its message was very eery and prescient. It is the Pixar version of Blade Runner.
There’s a scene in the movie, where Wall-E clings to the spaceship when it leaves earth, and while it passes earth’s orbit, it traverses a belt of space debris, a piece of which adheres to Wall-E.
This is now and this is the future. There’s a gigantic Pacific Garbage Patch in Space. It’s called Space Debris or Space Junk.
For my book I wrote to the Disney legal team to ask permission to use that still of Wall-E with space junk as an image. Well, Disney don’t like you using their images, stills and embedded content, as they insist on sole copyright ownership of their artwork. So I got a letter declining my request and hence didn’t publish that still. Not sure if I would have been allowed to publish that image had Pixar remained at Apple. If you don’t yet know the movie, you can google that scene.
Why am I mentioning Wall-E in this context? Because said scene is visually so powerful. And because there’s a lot of junk surrounding us and a lot of junk in architecture.
Junk-Space
The famed architect-provocateur Rem Koolhaas (he deconstructs the importance of the city center, the history and culture that we cultivate in architecture, in favor of newly erected modern structures) calls modernization’s fallout (= our infrastructural residue) junk space.
Junk space / junk-space is the sequence of consumerist brands which render city centers ubiquitous, and continuity is their essence: air-conditioning, escalators, hot air curtains. It is feigned, simulated order. Junk has become colloquial for any kind of superfluous material possession of ours. Architectural junk thus is the quintessential material obscenity we create. And architectural junk comes with the excesses of supermodernism.
“Through junkspace, old aura is transfused with new luster to spawn sudden commercial viability: Barcelona amalgamated with the Olympics, Bilbao with Guggenheim, 42nd (Street, Broadway) with Disney. Masterpiece has become a definitive sanction, a typology: it saves the object from criticism with qualities unproven, its mission is precarious with its exterior surfaces bent and too much of its square footage dysfunctional, with centrifugal components held together by the pull of the atrium.” – Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace”
Koolhaas also deconstructs himself with these statements, as he has designed flagship stores for luxury brands all over the world.
Architectural branding is the measure of our society: I still laugh at Tom Wolfe’s often-cited expression of “row after Mies van der row of glass boxes” when decrying the cold, ubiquitous International Style of skyscrapers on Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas in his ingenious treatise on American architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House (1981).
Airports are brands. Koolhaas claims that their meaning and their identity disappear, and they become part of the “sparkling infrastructures of light and superstrings of graphics and emblems in an authorless world beyond anyone’s claim”. And he goes even further with: “Architects thought of junkspace first and named it megastructure”. Now that’s so honest of him!
Despite those devastating statements about airport architecture by Koolhaas, in this storytelling site I am trying to present airports which are far beyond junk. They might be sparkling megastructures, but there’s certainly bigger junk out there (let’s don’t insult).
Speaking of honesty, kudos to the great Andy Warhol, his self-deprecating humor is the best:
“I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. So on the one hand I really believe in empty spaces, but on the other hand, because I’m still making some art, I’m still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty …” – Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
And that’s all I have to say about junk.
Sources:
Space Debris / Space Junk, courtesy of NASA employee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace”, in: October. Obsolescence, Vol 100.
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and back again), 1975.
Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, 1981.
