Literary Dose #26

"The words 'memory' and 'public space' are almost coincidental. Currently we have a very tortured relationship with that coincidence, particularly in the West. Our anxiety -- about the past, about memory -- is in direct proportion to our success in destroying it. This is exemplified in Hitler's former headquarters at the Berchtesgaden in Germany, which has recently been turned into a wellness center. A western culture that makes such drastic and thoughtless site and function transformations, driven by the private sector, is seriously dysfunctional in what is public. It shows a tendency towards indulgence in vast projects of artificial memory that often occur at the expense of the original memory. The Berlin Wall is another staggering example: a monument itself would have shown louder and harder what the former tragedy had been on this site. Instead it has literally been dismantled and replaced by a series of more professional memory fabricators that now dedicate vast territories to a memory that could have been kept in its original form. It is a cliché that public space is not what it once was, that it has increasingly been contained. Less evident is the fact that we allow ourselves to be lulled into a false privacy, in which privacy is in fact traded for security, where we become willing participants in a regime of constant surveillance. We live on a curious diet of harmlessness alternating with catastrophe."

- Rem Koolhaas, "In Search of Authenticity," in The Endless City, edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (Phaidon, 2008).