Logan Airport: A World-Class Upgrade
for the Twenty-first Century
— Late Twentieth Century Billboard
Rabbit is the new beef... Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have
condemned ourselves to a lifelong immersion in the arbitrary... LAX: welcoming—possibly flesh-eating—orchids at the check-in counter...
"Identity"is the new junk food for the dispossessed, globalization's fodder for the disenfranchised ...
If space-junk is the human debris that litters theuniverse, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.
The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more
precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.
Modernization had a rational
program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown... Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions,
lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment,
its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory...Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built
more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids.
According to a new gospel of
ugliness,there is already more Junkspace under construction in the twenty-first century than has survived from the twentieth... It wasa mistake to invent modern architecture for the twentieth century.
Architecture disappeared in the twentieth
century; we have been reading a footnote under a microscope hoping it would
turn into a novel; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People's
Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing...
the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning,
conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock (all three missing from the historybooks).
