Exodus

As far as I have to bring back the S, M, L, XL to its owner (honestly, it pisses me off, how insistently she askes me for it, although the book was drowned in a dust before I took it), I decided to fix some info and pages scan here. The book is a hyper-density of information, I'm obsessed with the layout idea (done by Bruce Mau) and it's impossible to digitalize the whole one, so I'm concentrated on Exodus then.

 

 The title of the project alludes to Cold War West Berlin, a restricted enclave encircled by a forbidding wall—in effect, a prison on the scale of a metropolis, and one in which people sought refuge voluntarily. Exodus proposes a walled city in a long strip, with tall barriers that cut through London's urban fabric—an intervention designed to create a new urban culture invigorated by architectural innovation and political subversion. Here collaborators use collage to create vivid scenes of life within these visionary urban confines. Animated by a text that reads as a simultaneously factual and fictional scenario for the contemporary metropolis, this dense pictographic storyboard reflects Koolhaas's earlier stints as a journalist and screenwriter.(MoMA website).

 The graphics for Exodus are located in The Museum of Modern Art and the images here are the courtesy of MoMA indeed. Koolhaas completed a series of eighteen drawings, watercolors, and collages in his last year of study at the Architectural Association in London, a virtual incubator for radical architectural theory in the 1970s. Presented at his final thesis review, Exodus was a collaborative effort that was also submitted jointly to an Italian urban design competition and, ultimately, served as a catalyst for the formation of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in 1975.

There's a thought, that Rem organised his office according to this model. I reread the text and found out some proofs. The next step is to approve it myself. Here we go.

 ..The inhabitants of this architecture, those strong enough to love it, would become its Voluntary Prisoners, ecstatic in the freedom of their architectural confines.

..This will be an architecture that generates its own successors, miraculously curing architects of their masochism and self-hatred.

..On arrival a spectacular welcome is given to all.

The activities inside the Reception Area require minimal training for new arrivals, which is only accomplished be overwhelming previously undernourished senses.

..The sole concerns of the participants are the present and the future of the Strip: they propose architectural refinements, extensions, strategies. Excited groups elaborate proposals in special rooms. while others continuously modify the model. The most contradictory programs fuse without compromise.

..Life in building barracks at the Tip of the Strip can be hard, but the ongoing creation of this object leaves its builders exhausted with satisfaction.