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Rem Koolhaas y la nueva Babel. De la torre metropolitana al monumento al vacío

2015; redfundamentos SL; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.24192/2386-7027(2015)(v3)(03)

2386-7027

José Antonio Tallón,

Urban Planning and Landscape Design

A first approach to the reflections of Rem Koolhaas about the tower typology leads us to New York skyscraper, which is the perfect metaphor for “automonument”: a monumentalized construction essentially designed to reaffirm its mere presence, which can be distinguished from the rest by its height. The legend of the Tower of Babel is an unwavering symbol of the building construction at heights, which dramatizes a full story of erection and destruction that is inevitably linked to Rem Koolhaas critical thinking about the discredited typology of the tower. A reading through the different “Babel” definitions catalogued by Rem Koolhaas and included in the glossary of terms in the text SMLXL provides a discourse on the destruc­tion of the biblical tower and the subsequent construction of the Koolhaasian New Babel, which begins its journey with skyscrapers and ends up claiming a new way of monumentality: absence in its purest form represented by the wall, which is the ultimate example of absence and the highest way of represent the monumental presence. That critical view begins with the Metropolitan Tower and the New Babel and finishes with the wall and the monument to the void.