---
title: Junkspace
categories:
- culture
content-tags: [design, architecture, quotes]
---

Rem Koolhaas's 2001 [_Junkspace_](https://oma.eu/publications/junkspace) is very quotable diatribe, lamenting the state of architecture. It reads as a warning to anyone building "design systems".

Here are some choice quips:

> Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications.

> Polarities have merged, there is nothing left between desolation and frenzy.

> Earthlings now live in a kindergarten grotesque.

> Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish and embrace manipulation.

> In Junkspace, the tables are turned: it is subsystems only, without superstructure, orphaned particles in search of framework or pattern.

> Instead of development, it offers entropy.

> The young instinctively avoid the Dantesque manipulations/containers to which Junkspace has condemned their elders in perpetuity.

> In this war, graphic designers are the great turncoats: where once signage promised to deliver you to where you wanted to be, it now obfuscates and entangles you in a thicket of cuteness that forces you past unwanted detours, turns you back when you're lost.

> Half of mankind pollutes to produce, the other pollutes to consume.

> Comfort is the new Justice. Entire miniature states now adopt Junkspace as political program, establish regimes of engineered disorientation, instigate a politics of systematic disarray. Not exactly 'anything goes'; in fact, the secret of Junkspace is that it is both promiscuous and repressive: as the formless proliferates, the formal withers, and with it all rules, regulations, recourse.

> The subject is stripped of privacy in return for access to a credit nirvana. You are complicit in the tracing of the fingerprints each of your transactions leaves; they know everything about you, except who you are.

> A shortage of masters has not stopped a proliferation of masterpieces. 'Masterpiece' has become a definitive sanction, a semantic space that saves the object from criticism, leaves its qualities unproven, its performance untested, its motives unquestioned.

> Minimum is the ultimate ornament, a self-righteous crime, the contemporary Baroque. It does not signify beauty, but guilt. Its demonstrative earnestness drives whole civilizations into the welcoming arms of camp and kitsch.

> Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us: we cannot stop noticing: no sequence too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting.