Messages from Room City

Beep (silence).

Hi, Architecture. This is Room City.

You may not know us yet. We are the entity that precludes absolute conditions. We are both historical and contemporary. We are the didactic apparatus that rejects the totality of spaceless urbanism and formless interiors. This call is an audacious attempt to reintroduce ourselves to you Architecture: the spatial armature bridging the growing chasm between Interior and Urbanism. We would like to reclaim the significance of form as a scaffolding of spatial positivities.

Over the centuries, Interior and Urbanism have migrated to divergent poles of spatial practice. Acting as a mediator, you, Architecture, have always been called to restructure the divide. The last century has witnessed the rapid construction of vast interior spaces revolutionized by mechanical technologies. With the transcendent capacity to traverse the limits of dimension and orientation, the territory of the Interior began to swell, expand, and interconnect, rendering legible a new, spatio-political urban model and overwriting the autonomous convictions of conventional urbanism. With its powerful apparatus pumped by the machine of capitalism, the grand Interior has preceded and superseded Architecture by dissolving its boundaries and collapsing its appearance. By removing the role of Architecture from the equation, the emergence of Interior became the new world of infinite projection and subjection—an overarching, spatial machine unleashed to exacerbate the increased polarities of Interior and Urbanism.

The massive proliferation of Interior is senseless, formless, and endless. It engulfs and integrates every project of the capitalist world—shopping malls, airports, and galleries—into a seamless whole. Diagnosed by Rem Koolhaas as “Junkspace,” these spaces are curated, immersed in the pure enclosure of laissez-faire consumerism, molded into a pernicious network that rejects any legible logic and framework of urbanism. One of the most conspicuous cases is the Penn Station complex located in Manhattan. The iconic building, once monumentally constructed as a major transportation hub for the public, was demolished under the tyranny of the implosive Interior, and replaced by an underground network.

Room City seeks to address the precarious violence between Interior and Urbanism. We would like to reintroduce you, Architecture, back to the equation as a productive armature. By examining your historical relevance, such as the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, you are expected to reproduce a system of urban rooms that give a new shape to the configuration of urban spaces. It is imperative to redefine the convoluted relationship between the sheltered interior and the exterior world. Room City aims to deploy technology to supplement classical and formal geometries. How can we detach you from the hurdle of historical heaviness and modernistic cliché? Our intention will manifest itself in how we navigate the tensions between old and new, formal and tectonic, generic and specific, “ducks” and “decorated sheds,” and most importantly, interiority and exteriority.

Hi, Architecture. This is Room City.
Please call us back.