The Border Complex

Abstract

Probably one of the better historical examples illustrating Barbieri’s claimed possibility that a particular “border condition” can produce “an architectural language” is Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, also known as Rem Koolhaas’s graduation project at the Architectural Association in London in 1972. It constitutes an intriguing example of an architectural project in which the characteristics of an architectural element (in this case “the wall”) are conceptualized as a spatial condition, thus influencing, if not determining, the basic idea of an architectural project. Influenced by his 1971 visit to the Berlin Wall, Koolhaas projected a large wall-system, Superstudio style, onto contemporary (yet exaggerated) London, in order to play a dialectic game of good and bad, of inclusion and exclusion, imprisonment and freedom, and so on. As a result the benefits, blessings, and heroisms of architecture are on full display in an experiential retreat of spatial incarceration. [...]