Junkspace with Running Room – Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster
Junkspace with Running Room by Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster / ISBN 9781907903762 / small 96-page hardback published in 2024 by Notting Hill Editions
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Junkspace first appeared in the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2001), a vast compendium of text, images, and data concerning the consumerist transformation of city and suburb from the first department store to the latest mega mall. The architect Rem Koolhaas itemized in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is updated here and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from the cultural critic Hal Foster. Junkspace describes the bleak and featureless world of capitalism, while Running Room seeks to find a space within the junk in which the individual might still exist.
‘Junkspace is the most important piece of writing on architecture of the 21st Century. The stream of Koolhaas’s prose is akin to a visionary dream, a structureless sequence of crystalline insight and enfolding opiate fog. . . It is distinctly literary, and there are moments of outright genius.’ —Icon
‘Foster responds to Koolhaas with an argument for autonomy—both disciplinary (from one art to the next) and (by implication) personal—in order to find space (or the running room of the title) within the junk in which Koolhaas suggests we have drowned. And whether you are at an airport an art fair, that’s something we all need.’ —Art Review
‘Rem Koolhaas’s luminescent essay Junkspace decries the mall as the slagheap of America…Koolhaas illuminates the dark underbelly of the kind of advanced capitalism living in the mall.’ —Columbia Review Magazine
