Junkspace/Running Room

Junkspace first appeared in the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2001), a vast compendium of text, images, and data concerning the consumerist transformation of city and suburb from the first department store to the latest mega mall. The architect Rem Koolhaas itemized in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is updated here and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from the cultural critic Hal Foster. Junkspace describes the bleak and featureless world of capitalism, while Running Room seeks to find a space within the junk in which the individual might still exist.

Rem Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist, and Professor in the Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He has published works on the evolution of the contemporary metropolis and been responsible for landmark urban projects such as the Euralille development in northern France and the CCTV Tower in Beijing, and has designed master plans for, among other places, suburban Paris, the Libyan desert, and Hong Kong.

Hal Foster is Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of many books, including Design and Crime, Prosthetic Gods, The Art-Architecture Complex, and The First Pop Age. He writes regularly for October (which he co-edits), Artforum, and the London Review of Books. He was the 2013 recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. He lives in Princeton.