Junkspace: palavra, imagem e experiência na cidade contemporânea

Abstract

The essay Junkspace (2001), by Rem Koolhaas, brings to the mind of those who read it a generic contemporary landscape filled with subliminal and ideological messages and diluted in a chaotic amalgam which is apparently ordered through the ubiquity of globalization.The essay, circular in its structure, seeks to describe through allegorical operations of rhetoric, the spaces that, in their forms, express the process of contemporary modernization - therefore, Junkspace is adopted in this investigation not only as a concept, but as a theoretical piece that emulates a specific language related to the spatial production of the 21st century. It is on the basis of these findings that it becomes possible to use Junkspace as a reading and understanding lens, through which one can glimpse the logics of the present time inscribed in the spatial forms of our cities. There is, therefore, the object of study of this thesis: Junkspace as concept and language and the understanding of the urban phenomenon, its questions and logics, currently. As a consequence, the aforementioned essay is used as the primary source of this research, setting up a theoretical and methodological nature for this work: on the one hand, we try to investigate the possibilities of questioning, in the light of an urban cultural debate, the contemporary city through the reading keys found in Junkspace and on the other hand, to anchor, from the discussion engendered by the essay and its relationship with the selected theoretical frameworks, a vision that identifies and problematizes the existing Junkspace. Therefore, the general objective of this work is to understand Junkspace under the prism of a theoretical and practical discussion about contemporary cities in order to contribute to the academic debate on the theme of spatial dynamics, related to the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. To achieve this goal, a critic was built in a way that clarifies conflicts and parallels in the contemporary urban phenomenon from Junkspace, based on authors such as Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Hal Foster, Susan Buck-Morss, Gilles Lipovetsky and Vladimir Safatle, among others. In addition, Junkspace’s method of reading the urban environment was carried through the elaboration of workshops and with an exercise of perception about the factual dimension of contemporary cities. In the end, this paper intends to contribute to the theoretical field of architecture and urbanism, as well as offer other ways of discussing and apprehending the current urban question.