Junkspace

Definition

Junkspace (Rem Koolhaas) names the built residue of modernization — "what remains after modernization has run its course, or … what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout." It is the endless, air-conditioned, brand-saturated, and largely unmemorable space of airports, malls, terminals, lobbies, and mega-infrastructure: "the body double of space," sustained by escalator and air-conditioning, "a reverse typology of cumulative, approximative identity," in which brands function "as black holes … essences through which meaning disappears." Junkspace is contrasted with (and is the failure of) modern architecture.

Key Thinkers

• Rem Koolhaas — originator of Junkspace (and the "generic city").
• (Related: Marc Augé on non-places — the anthropological sibling; Taylor's chapter works the supermodern interior (airports, malls) that both concepts describe.)

Related Concepts

• Consumerism — Junkspace as the shopping/consumption environment.
• Spectacle — the image/brand-circulation Junkspace sustains.
• Iconic Architecture — the would-be-unique icon set within (or against) Junkspace.
• Everyday Life — the quotidian experience of Junkspace.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Logan Airport / Junkspace (Koolhaas 2002)
• Phantasmagoria and the Architecture of the Contemporary City (Lahiji 2015) — the "junk-space" that lies at the margins of the hyper-mediated city
• Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — the terminal state: the "dead mall" condition amid "an estimated one billion square feet" of vacant retail/commercial space; Koolhaas (via the Project on the City Guide to Shopping) cited for shopping as the essential means to understand urbanity despite the dead mall; the mall's shells as Junkspace awaiting reuse.
• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the artistic counter-program to junk's resignation: Kienholz's maxim "the self-concept of our society can be inferred from its garbage" reads the same disposable object-world diagnostically — the garbage as society's self-portrait — and then answers it with the readymade's salvage: "Rather than dismissing (throwing away) those things, the challenge is how to discover alternate and poetic meanings in them." Where Koolhaas's Junkspace is modernization's coagulated fallout to be described, the tableau treats junk as material to be displaced into "alternate and poetic meanings" — the artistic practice between diagnosis (junk as symptom) and reuse (junk as resource). See readymade, tableau, adaptive-reuse.
• Inside-out and outside-in (Vanucci 2018) — the envelope response: Vanucci reads Junkspace as the condition that made the skin matter. In 2001 Koolhaas "pointed his critique to the soulless, 'mallified' spaces spreading across the planet… the generic spaces that blended shopping malls, airports, hotels, convention centers, and art galleries into seamless uniformity"; "The junk space, he argued, is the true product of modernization." The consequence for the interior disciplines: "interior spaces became increasingly generic, while the building envelope gained a new centrality in contemporary architectural discourse," becoming "more and more sophisticated and actively responsive to external stimuli as well as internal needs." Junkspace here is the interior-side void — the generic interior — that the performative envelope is proposed to answer; whether hyperarticulation escapes the generic or perfects it remains the concept's open question. (Vanucci also reports Koolhaas's antecedent "bigness" thesis from S,M,L,XL — "beyond a certain scale, 'old' architectural principles (composition, scale, proportion, and detail) no longer apply" — see log for PAGE NEEDED.) See performative-envelope.
• source-notes/buchanan-lambert-2005-deleuze-and-space
• source-notes/luna-yim-2023-language-of-contemporary-architecture
• source-notes/proto-2023-spectacle-and-the-screen
• source-notes/taylor-2018-shape-shifting-dynamic-design
• source-notes/teston-2018-politicizing-the-interior

Open Questions

• Is Junkspace a resigned description or a critique — and can the "iconic"/starchitect object genuinely escape it, or only become its most spectacular symptom?
• Qureshi proposes the dead mall as prime material for interior-architectural reinvention — can Junkspace be "therapeutically" reused at all, or is its brand-saturated, placeless condition precisely what resists "retention of the existing context, both physical and spiritual"?
• Vanucci's envelope response raises the sharpest version of the first question: if "interior spaces became increasingly generic, while the building envelope gained a new centrality," is the hyperarticulated, performance-driven envelope the cure for junkspace — or junkspace's most sophisticated costume, differentiation as the generic interior's latest finish?