I need to let you in on a little secret. I love reading essays. The right essay, at the right time, brews a perfect dopaminergic storm between my ears. Each sentence, each turn of phrase takes me deeper down the rabbit hole. I can almost feel the neurons in my brain rewiring as fresh browser tabs pop up like mushrooms with texts I haven’t read, words I don’t know the meaning of. Each new window shines onto a gap in my understanding, opened by the central piece.

I believe the world would be a better place if we spent more time reading essays, discovering the thinking and the thinkers before us. The bold ideas buried in JSTOR archives. The thought leaders who existed before the term thought leadership existed. Pre-social media influencers exploring concepts that don’t fit into a LinkedIn post.

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is one such thinker. And his 2001 piece Junkspace is one such essay. 

“If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junkspace is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.” Koolhaas’ thesis is that “air-conditioning has launched the endless building.” And that’s when everything started to go wrong in the world.

Across 16 sprawling pages, presented in a single, relentless paragraph, Koolhaas takes aim at the forces he sees shaping life in the early part of the 21st Century. Junkspace is a disorienting journey across the realms of architecture, the digital world and the human condition.

You can read Koolhaas’ full essay here (or listen to me read it here) before continuing. Note: It may make your head spin. Scroll on if you want the highlights.

Here’s where things get a little meta. Let’s unpack Junkspace as a text, as a piece of thought leadership and ultimately as a piece of typographic Junkspace.

Koolhaas penned Junkspace 3 years before the launch of Facebook and 6 years before the arrival of the iPhone. Yet the insights remain so relevant, it feels like he wrote it yesterday. “Each screen is a substitute for a window; real life is inside, while cyberspace has become the great outdoors…”

Koolhaas blends deep architectural insight with some poignant reflections on modern life that hit a little too close to home: “because we spend our life indoors (like animals in a zoo) we are obsessed with the weather.”

There’s even a scarily clear-eyed prognosis of the reward-hacking content our world is now flooded with, and how it preys on our fundamental wiring: “Through our ancient evolutionary equipment, our irrepressible attention span, we helplessly register, provide insight, squeeze meaning, read intention; we cannot stop making sense out of the utterly senseless...”

The prescience of the ideas makes Koolhaas’ exploration as fresh, thought-provoking and entertaining as ever. 

Koolhaas is a thought leader who critiques his industry while being a product of it. In some  ways, he’s an active participant in, even a beneficiary of, Junkspace. Though he rails against consumerism, Koolhaas’ firm OMA designed the Prada flagship store in Las Vegas, one of the epicentres of Junkspace he lampoons in the essay. 

Throughout Junkspace, Koolhaas feels like the anti-architecture architect. He recognises architecture’s function as a mirror, a reflection of society but at the same time he regrets its powerlessness to influence change. There’s an underlying powerlessness to the writing; Koolhaas doesn’t offer any answers, merely critiques. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 2002, Koolhaas said: “architects are important, but I don’t think they have influence.” Why? “architecture is an unbelievably slow and implausible mechanism because our current system needs immediate responses, immediate reactions, immediate reflexes and immediate analysis.”

Koolhaas’ response isn’t to provide data or solutions. It’s to raise hell.

The piece itself feels the way one might feel after spending extended time in the conditioned, conditional Junkspace Koolhaas describes.

Koolhaas’ lucidity meanders, devolves and ultimately unhinges through the essay. The piece starts with air-conditioning and the pyramids, and ends with strange kindergarten memories and botox. Koolhaas descends the reader into a kind of madness. The breathless, staccato feel, the ellipses, superlists and rhetorical questions start to weigh heavy, like trying to find the exit in a Junkspace shopping mall.

It’s a classic example of medium as message: Koolhaas architects the essay as an endless building on paper; a typographic Junkspace.

As I barrelled through the essay, I found myself waiting for ‘the turn’, the moment when Koolhaas would flip from problem to solution, from question to answer. It never came. The piece doesn’t leave us with answers, or a solution, or a feather of optimism. It finishes, tellingly, with an ellipsis, an trailed-off statement with no hope of a response: “the cosmetic is the new cosmic…”

It’s a little bit sad. And perhaps that’s exactly the point.

If you made it this far, I’d love your perspective. I think there’s a place in our collective media diet to revisit more longform nonfiction. Stuff from a bygone era that still holds water. Stuff to remind us that most big ideas don’t fit into a social media post.

I’m thinking of curating these longer reads and sharing them - like I did in this piece - more regularly.

Would you like to read more of that kind of thing?

PS if you have a great essay to recommend, my inbox is wide open!