Martha Rosler_In the Place of the Public; Observations of a Traveler
Via a series of ‘airport as’ metaphors, in which increasingly more facilities not connected to travel are included as being part of the airport, Rosler renders an interesting depiction of the composition of this contemporary architectural typology. The airport is depicted as ‘modern corporate space’ which utilizes information to organize and control individual people, as a ‘shopping mall’ (which Rosler find as the only apparent model to which an air terminal is able to aspire), as a ‘museum (both art and natural history), as a colonizer of land, and as well as a multi-functional information/transportation system with primarily operational concerns (for example, the efficient routing of passengers). Are these metaphors simply the beginning of what will become an ‘airport as’ phenomenon? Have we seen other ‘airport as’ metaphors emerge since this article was published over a decade ago (for example, airport as hotel/residence)? Can a theory of ‘mega-architecture’ which utilizes ‘programmatic alchemy’ as a structural and organizational mechanism (such as Koolhaas’s Bigness) be viewed as a positive phenomenon? If we extend the logic of the ‘airport as’ metaphor, we arrive at ‘airport as city’. If the airport begins, as Koolhaas would say, to compete with, represent, preempt, even become a city, what would be the relationship between such a mega-structure and it’s surrounding urban tissue/physical context? Should we be concerned about the move towards ‘mega-structures’ as cities, or embrace it as a cultural/societal/architectural evolution? Furthermore, will mega-structures such as airports, if capable of becoming autonomous ‘city-containers’ in our post-industrial landscape, denote the end of truly democratic public space (where anything goes and almost anything is allowable)? Will Rosler’s ‘non-private space’ be the hygienic simulation of public space which supplants (and I hesitate to use the word) ‘authentic’ public space?
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