Why is rabbit the new beef? How to explain Rem Koolhaas’s 16 page 1 paragraph ruminations about “Junkspace” to kindergartners through a story about strawberry milk, toys, airports, and too much stuff.
“Imagine yesterday everyone in class loved chocolate milk. It was the best and everyone drank it.
Then today the teacher says, “Chocolate milk is out. Now everyone drinks strawberry milk because it’s new and cool.”
So everyone switches — not because chocolate was bad, but because people like new things.
You know how sometimes your room gets so full of new toys and drawings and stickers and Lego pieces that you can’t even see the floor anymore? And when your parents say “clean up,” you don’t really clean — you just move things around so it looks okay from far away?
That’s kind of what grown-ups have done with the world.
People used to build things that meant something, like pyramids or temples or castles. They were special, and they lasted a long time. But now we just keep building more and more stuff — malls, airports, hotels, office towers — all stuck together, shiny and huge but sort of empty inside.
All that extra, messy, meaningless building “Junkspace.” It’s like space made out of junk — not garbage, but stuff that doesn’t have a soul.
Airports, for example, all look kind of the same, right? Big glass walls, escalators, fake plants, weird smells. You could be in Boston or Tokyo or Paris and not really know where you are. That’s Junkspace: a place that has everything but still feels like nowhere.
Junkspace happens when humans keep trying to make life faster, easier, and cooler — but forget to make it beautiful or important. Instead of making buildings that mean something, we make buildings that just work. Like when you eat candy instead of dinner — it tastes good for a second but doesn’t fill you up.
So Junkspace is like the candy version of architecture: shiny, exciting, and everywhere… but kind of empty.
Brown Sugar Factory
DnA
Xing Village, Songyang County, China 2015–2016
a+u 24:11
Feature: DnA
Renewing the Chinese Countryside
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Japanese architect and advocate Riken Yamamoto @RikenYamamoto has been selected as the 2024 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate 🎖️ #pritzkerarchitectureprize https://t.co/JcnSHRPYRd