Archigram's Walking City and Rem Koolhaas's Generic City are conceptual models of modern societyÆs 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 individualÆs 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 around a variety of more local and subcultural ideologies that can be overturned at will whenever any contradicting evidence is presented. This stands in stark opposition to the absolute and unchangeable truths of religion and promotes the individual to the stature of self-god (ôPostmodernismö). Existentialism, while not synonymous with postmodernism, reflects the same departure from established standards and a focus upon the individual as the central source o...