[00111] Rem Koolhaas * The paranoid urbanism / The Manhattanism and the Machine of Well-being / Bigness, Amnesia, and the Generic City

Koolhaas redefines architecture not merely as the structural design of edifices, but as the strategic management of metropolitan "delirium." In his seminal thesis on New York, he identifies "Manhattanism" as an ideology of congestion, where sheer density and technological acceleration forge a novel culture of the fantastic. To Koolhaas, the skyscraper functions as a "machine of well-being," an introverted monolith that disregards its external context to synthesize intense, artificial realities within. He advocates for an architecture of unstable programming, where a building’s utility fluctuates as rapidly as the currents of global capital. Eschewing classical harmony, he seeks to capitalize on chaos, transforming shopping malls, terminals, and high-rises into experimental laboratories for a modernity that has definitively surrendered its claim to stability. His concept of "Bigness" posits that beyond a certain threshold of scale, a structure enters a state of programmatic amnesia: the facade no longer betrays the complexities of the interior, and architecture dissolves into pure logistics and circulation. At this magnitude, the architect’s role shifts from artist to a high-level traffic controller of human and digital flows. Koolhaas celebrates the "Generic City"—an urban landscape stripped of historical identity to become a globalized, interchangeable infrastructure. Through this lens, architecture serves as the software managing the friction between individual autonomy and systemic control. It transfigures physical space into a permanent, mutant event, where the only constant is the relentless flux of a functionalist, hyper-modern existence. [00093] * [00092] * [00104]