@karimrashid: How is life man? long time no see, let me know when you are back in NYC
@remkoolhaas: We'll see but not a lot of opportunity there right now.
Are they who they claim to be? Fo us, it doesn't really matter. We could go either way.
If he's a Fake Karim and he's a Fake Rem and they keep on tweeting (and maybe a Fake Zaha enters the fray), we could really be in for a bit of fun, something recalling the heady days of 2005 when The Gutter peaked in hilarious awesomeness.
But if that's really them, Rem's response says quite a lot. One could conceivably imagine him actually saying, “No way is my haute condominium gonna get built there now. Jacques, Pierre and Jean are totally fucked, too.” Or: “For really interesting stuff, i.e., my brand of architecture, look elsewhere outside Manhattan.” In which case, both aren't terribly shocking news. But if we consider Karim's question as something less quotidian than it looks, that it's actually the question that the entire architecture world this week has been clamoring an answer for, then we really have something interesting here. Many have asked the same question in articles, op-eds, blog posts and tweets: “How are you holding up after what happened to the TVCC, man?” But it was Karim who got a (public) answer back, and judging from Rem's reply, he wasn't rattled by it. (Or was he? Is his evasiveness a sign of inexpressible hurt and sorrow? Tough to crack that one.)
In other words, there's enough in those two tweets — less that 140 characters each — that a glossy architecture or design magazine could just publish them, mark off a couple of spreads as done, and then call it a day. An exclusive, privileged, intimate micro-look into the real-time personal and professional lives of the upper class.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/koolhaas.html
Wired: Beijing Manifesto Issue 12.08
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/beijing.html
This is the concluding paragraph to Bert de Muynck's article on the TVCC fire for Arbitare:
At the same I can only think about the “fighting the flames”-spectacle Rem Koolhaas’ described in Delirious New York. “Fighting the Flames” was a daily event on New York’s Coney Island and consisted of burning the same city block over and over again. The block as actor.” Rem Koolhaas wrote, “The entire spectacle defines the dark side of Metropolis as an astronomical increase in the potential for disaster only just exceeded by an equally astronomical increase in the ability to avert it. Manhattan is the outcome of that perpetual neck-and-neck race.” Without any question CCTV has defined the dark spectacle of the Metropolis. It was his little strange brother who didn’t posses the ability to avert the disaster and paid the price for Beijings’ neck-and-neck race with architecture.
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