Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
particularly high quality global magazine.
It begins by cataloguing ‘urbicide’ – violence in urban
environments – from the “subversion by mass transit”
of Los Angeles to “cyclical construction, restriction,
and destruction” in Jerusalem; West Bank and Gaza
settlements. The articles here are urgent, sometimes
playful, always serious. Koolhaas finds “the greatest
concentration of Utopias ever known” in Moscow; the
idea and practice of a museum is challenged in articles
on LACMA (LA’s big all-round gallery) and the
Hermitage in relation to the market influence; Prada is
seen askance in ‘Prada Yada’ and other pieces. There’s
a long and excited, er, presentation (full of maps and
figures and ideas about the need to build a “Eurasian
arc”) on the EU and its political possibilities. Koolhaas
has designed a new flag which consists of all the EU
national flags squashed into strips and presented from
west to east: a kind of United Colors bar-code, a strong
‘ID’ to stand next to the US Stars and Stripes and the
blue and white of the UN. Britain’s tabloids got hold of
that one and The Sun soon launched an attack: “nutty”,
“batty”, they said while reporting how “expert opinion”
had deemed the flag to be “a deckchair.”
Elsewhere, we look forward to Expo 2010 in
‘Shanghai Exponential’ and consider what makes
a successful World Expo. London’s 1851 Great
Exhibition showcased the advances of industrial
revolution in all nations, and made a mark on popular
BUY Rem Koolhaas books online from and
imagination as did New York’s World Fair of 1939
and Osaka’s 1970 Expo: tying into Content’s theme
of ‘going East’, the forthcoming Expo 2010 is seen
as an opportunity to reorient the world’s idea of itself
and its designs for the future. I particularly enjoyed
a piece on libraries and the search for civic space –
“The library represents, maybe with the prison, the
last of the uncontested moral universes. The moral
goodness of the library is intimately connected to the
conceptual value of the book” – and the Koolhaas
solution, in Seattle, is a large honeycombed building
of huge spaces and screens showing the arrival and
exit of books complete with a new “continuous ribbon”
numbering system from 000 to 999 to replace
the “much-compromised” Dewey Decimal.
Whether one likes the idea of a central Mixing
Chamber and a Book Spiral or not, the energy and
scope of his plans and ideas are exhilarating. Every
regular user of public libraries can relate to the search
for biblio perfection. My personal favourites are the
beautifully lit Berlin City library and the pod-interior
at Peckham. Turn the page and Content moves on to
plywood minimalism, perfume flasks to mix your own
male-female smells while on the go, and a short history
of post-Berlin wall world politics (‘The Second
Empire’).
That’s not to mention the 1km high Hyperbuilding
or ‘Red Radio’, the story of how Communists in the
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