Junkspace/Running Room

In Junkspace (2001), architect Rem Koolhaas itemised in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is here updated and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from architectural critic Hal Foster. ‘The manifesto is a modernist mode, one that looks to the future – Junkspace makes no such claim: «Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century,» states Koolhaas matter-of-factly. Junkspace does a harder thing: it «foretells» the present, which is to say that it calls on us to recognize what is already everywhere around us.’ Hal Foster Is there a future for architecture? If so, it might begin with the meditations – by turns elegant and frantic – of Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster: ‘even if there is no outside to Junkspace, there is still running room to be made in its cracks – ‘ ‘Junkspace is the new flamboyant, flexible, forgettable face of architecture, rendered by Rem Koolhaas in a visceral and rampantly analytical essay.’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture