“The urban vernacular, Living City claimed, made fussing with the detailing of urban facades or interior lobbies irrelevant, as the experience of the street was more influenced by ambient, immaterial, and kinetic forces than by the detailed formal articulation of space and material.”

Comparing the Living City to the idea of the Sentient City, he suggests that both have the same impact on Architecture in that the formal details become less important, instead it is the relationships between the moving or living parts that governs the “feel” of the city. But do you agree with Koolhaas claim that “People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that Architecture has nothing to do with it?”

“Regardless of the formal geometries and material arrangements of a space as defined by Architecture, and irrespective of the normative activities or uses encoded (or elicited) by its program, these devices and the ways in which we use them have perhaps become as important as – if not more important than – architecture in shaping our experience of urban space.”

To what extent do you agree that we are more influenced by the devices we use as to how we experience the space around us, than by the actual Architecture that encompasses that space?

“As we have grown accustomed to navigating the city with our smartphones and our print-outs from Google maps, we have come to know it from above, as a two-dimensional, planimetric experience. Instead of seeing ourselves as part of the city fabric, inhabiting a three-dimensional urban condition, we dwell in a permanent out-of-body experience, displaced from our own locations, seeing ourselves as moving dots or pins on a map.”

I thought this perspective was very interesting as I had never really realized that this is how I experience the world around me most of the time, especially in new places that I have never visited before. It’s interesting to note how an increasingly data-driven city geared towards efficiently collecting, storing, and using more precise data about ourselves, is actually leading us toward a more out-of-body experience like the quote says, because of how we interact with the system. We are increasingly zooming out to understand the whole, rather than zooming in to understand the parts. Is this at all related to the process of globalization?