Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

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Pieter Breughel the Elder,
Tower of Babel.
(Collection Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.)
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inhabitants can drift around in search of adventure and challenging atmospheres.
Like Constant’s “spatiovores,” the space helmet forms an exception within an otherwise
uniform network. But while in Constant’s work the tension between utopia
and reality is mainly to be seen in the graphic elaboration of sketches and paintings,
in the OMA project it is given an architectural articulation. The tension is transformed
into a caesura between shell and infill. This caesura is the result of the fact
that architecture draws on different registers that do not match each other perfectly:
the outer form that conforms to a preconceived image of unity and anchoring,
the inner volume that itself forms an “outside” for the specialized parts of the
program that serve as a pretext for different infrastructures and buildings. This
means that form is given to the strange encounter between a high-performance processing
of traffic flows and a sublimation of the experience of passage. The project
represents a constellation of spectacle and poetry, without, however, any clear distinction
being drawn between the one and the other. One cannot distinguish any
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