Archigram's Walking City & Koolhaas' Generic City

Archigram's Walking City and Rem Koolhaas's Generic City are conceptual models of modern society's transition from estrangement to event. In the evolution of modern thought, the progression from estrangement to event has been synchronized with a parallel and related progression from individuality to detachment. At the heart of this development has been a shift from reliance upon traditional values long heralded as standards in society, such as religion, morality, and culture, to new self-generated standards that answer to no other authority but the individual who formed them. The individual has departed from honoring God, government, and other authorities above himself and has become his own authority and the final arbiter of any concept he chooses to embrace. This new identity forged in self has precipitated the estrangement that differentiates the individual from his culture, his fellows, and his history and has manifested in an event, detachment, that is the outworking of the inner estrangement. This detachment is a double-edged sword that not only severs the individual's ties with what might be regarded as difficult moral conflicts and weighty religious issues but also with the comfort, direction, and sense of meaning that were associated with them.

This estrangement and event, manifested as individuality and detachment, can be traced to the rise of postmodernism and existentialism. Postmodernist thought rejects conventional thought and organizes cultural life arou

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who lived in the new Walking City. As the old city became vacant and faded, the new Walking City would become the place to be. Urban life would fall from favor, and mobile life would step up into its place. And then, just as in so many centuries before, there would be another type of class conflict: the old traditional city with its stationary buildings and permanent neighborhoods would become the slum that no one wants to live in, and the new Walking City would become the "happening" place to be. The lonely, unwanted stationary buildings would become the rejects of the current society. The detachment of individuals with no internal anchor would become the event where individuals detached from their location and became nomads without any permanent address. The Archigram � set itself the task not of revolutionizing architecture, but rather of the way of thinking about it. The limits of its investigation were the relationship between cities and the new technologies of information, movement and perception. Fun, play and pleasure were the rationale for archigrams projects, not as recreation, the pause that refreshes, between stretches of productive labour, but as an epistemology and an end in itself ("Peter Cook"). Archigram'

Category: Psychology - A