Photo: Benoit Pailley, courtesy the New Museum.

Rem Koolhaas has a knack for coining words, a skill evident in the name of his and his architecture firm OMA’s current show at New York City’s New Museum:  “Cronocaos”. Catchy and primitive at once, the title drops the “h” from “chronos” and “chaos” respectively.  It’s a classic Koolhaasian move, visually and viscerally dramatizing the notion of a world confused about the relation of past to present and what this means for architecture—particularly for preservation.  “Architects—we who change the world—have been oblivious or hostile to the manifestations of preservation,” Koolhaas writes.  The result, he argues, is that an already large and ever-increasing part of the globe displays the same bad sort of preservation:  commoditized, sanitized, and individualized.  In turn, buildings and the life they sustain suffer, even as “preservation does not quite know what to do with its new empire.” 

Enter Koolhaas, who purports to stand outside this empire.  He takes aim at the preservation industry and its use of history, leading us on a tour of ideas that ultimately promotes the work of OMA instead.  Preservation done right is thus what Koolhaas claims to offer, and a “‘unified field’ theory” is where he says preservation should begin.  But as viewers wend their way through “Cronocaos” they are apt to find a manner of gallery prospectus that raises as many questions as it answers.  Whether Koolhaas operates apart from preservation’s “new empire” remains open to debate. Read more…