Project by Connor Wollenzier, 2017
"This thesis is based on the premise of digesting and organizing thoughts surrounding two figure-head architects during a pivotal and controversial time in Urban Design: The 1970’s. The idea is to create a platform for the investigation of each of their theoretical and built works, and ultimately pull out an understanding of their perspectives while applying them to the contemporary laboratory of a “metropolis.” The interest of investigating this relationship between OM Ungers and Rem Koolhaas began while reading Rem Koolhaas’ Berlin Stories passage within the critical edition of Ungers’ republished manisfesto on The City in the City: Berlin as a Green Archipelago. Rem began by discussing how he discovered Ungers work in a bookstore in 1971:
“In a bookstore I found maybe 15 to 20 cahiers. What Ungers had done was to take the city (Berlin) and declare it the single, obsessive subject for years, of his students: a degree of inspired narrowness unimaginable today. He divided the agenda into seemingly simple subjects and had been able to use his student’s architecture as an inventory of potentials.”
That next year Rem would move to Ithaca, NY (Cornell) to study and work under Ungers on studio and competitions projects. There, Rem began understanding the’ “subtle probing of Ungers’ formation, the resonance, rhymes, contrasts and repetitions, revisiting earlier work, debriefing him about his career.” This is what interested me, the willingness as a student at the pinnacle of a Masters level study. The ability to learn more under someone more situated and established to do so."