555-1171: Cover for Art Journal by Sarah Oppenheimer

• Published in: Art journal (New York. 1960) Vol. 66; no. 1; p. 112
• Main Author: Phillips, Patricia C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Taylor & Francis 01-03-2007; College Art Asssociation; College Art Association, Inc
• Subjects: Architecture; Building materials; Buildings; Diminutives and augmentatives; Koolhaas, Rem; Navigation; Perception; Space; New York
• ISSN: 0004-3249; 2325-5307
• DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2007.10791246

In his passionate rant "Junkspace," the architect Rem Koolhaas laments the determined and indeterminate, draining and drained character of globalized contemporary space.
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Driven only marginally by design, form, plan, and program, Junkspace is formless and endlessly adaptable. The generic character of building materials in Junkspace creates a bland, featureless, and numbing homogenization whose oppressive ubiquity creates disorientation and dislocation. Sarah Oppenheimer uses generic materials to construct her architecture-scaled interventions. She is committed to a mutable, adjustable, and revisable architecture. But Oppenheimer is in no way an author or advocate of Junkspace; instead, she offers a modulated position regarding the impact of everyday architecture on human experience. While her ideas and applications share affinities with Archigram's plug-in architecture and instant cities, Robert Smithson's often-eccentric architectural ideas, and Gordon Matta-Clark's sublime interventions in doomed buildings, she is deeply invested in the unconscious navigations, measures, and meanings derived from ordinary buildings and spaces. Rather than lament the conformity of architecture, she is fascinated by the ways in which people develop unarticulated, somatic knowledge of conventional spaces. Oppenheimer's adaptability and common materials are driven by ideas of individual autonomy and agency within a commonplace built environment.