typical plan

so i'm sitting here writing my paper on marshall field additions, and i'm reading an SMLXL. and it's about the "typical plan:"


The typical plan is an American invention. It is zero-degree architecture, architecture stripped of all traces of uniqueness and specificity. It belongs to the New World.

Typical plan is Western. There is no equivalent in any other culture. It is the stamp of modernity itself.

Typical plan is neutral, not anonymous. It is a place of worship. More austere than a Cistercian monestary, it accommodates infinately greater numbers, a 20th century church without doctrince.

Although the domoinant emphasis of the Typical Plan is on abstraction, there is plumbing. It doesn't deny those residual features that make humans animals still.

The cumulative effect of all this vacancy - the systematic lack of commitment - is, paradoxically, density.

Concentrations of the Typical Plan have produced the skyscraper: unstable monolith; accumulations of skyscrapers, the only "new" urban condition: downtown, defined by sheer quantity rather than as a specific formal configuration. The center is no longer unique but universal, no longer a place but a condition.

and i'm sitting here trying to write about my plan for the new marshall field, and thinking: this is such a rare expression of hierarchy for OMA. it's like sort of this defining statement of how they approach programs. and i realize, it's like fractal chaos theory - the deeper and closer you go, the pattern keeps multiplying. near or far, the chaos of the narrative is equaled. I know this sounds crazy but it's actually very simple. in simpler words, i don't know if i'm gonna do this for a living but now at least i can see that it's not linear: it won't get boring in the way some things do. if anything it's in danger of black holing, rather than brick walling like art will. which is so cool.