08 Feb 2011, Posted by charlie in EXHIBITIONS, 3 Comments.

TRUE CITIES

Architectural Association, London, January 2011

True Cities book launched this autumn, published by Lars Muller Publications, Zurich.

The January 2011 True Cities exhibition at the Architectural Association, London, was a photographic and text installation, a collage from a vast collection of images and words that have been collected from around the world and the three-dimensional preview of the upcoming True Cities publication.

The True Cities book is a photographic publication, a portrait of five global cities: Dubai, Guangzhou, Houston, Lagos and London, viewed through Charlie Koolhaas’ own sociologically-guided perception of what is a true representation of today’s global cities. Multi-faceted and complexly layered, these insights and images have been gathered during Charlie’s time spent living and working within the cities’ different ideologies, cultures and economies. True Cities is a summary of ten years’ research into global cities, a collage created from a vast collection of images and words that seek to intimate the soul of the city.

It is a comparison of different historical centres of finance. London (East London in particular); Guangzhou, China, (formerly Canton), one of the oldest trading centres of the world and China’s (and the world’s) production hub today; and also Houston, Texas, the financial and political stronghold of the oil-producing American-right, are old bastions of trade and innovation. Comparing these to future-oriented cities like Lagos and Dubai, which are inventing new political ideologies, markets and global cultural trends due to the shifts in global power, leads to arresting visual and media manifestations. The book describes the many lives and dimensions of these five places, to give a true representation of cities as global centres of cross-cultural inhabitation and exchange, places for collaboration across fields and specialism, beliefs and cultures.

Fragments from an extensive archive of interviews, quotes and anecdotes are brought together, giving humorous and honest insights into the complex and sometimes conflicting demands and aspirations of those living in today’s cities. Using phrases from lifestyle magazines gathered in each city, the aspirations, ideals, idylls and impossible wishes are all juxtaposed with the realities people conform with. Charlie can be said to take ‘psychic readings’ of the urban environment, the text in the book communicates like a broadcast from the cities’ antennae.

True Cities is essentially an abstract form of storytelling, letting visual elements become words, the cities becoming a series of sentences. A photographic patchwork of urban life, the surfaces of the urban environment, its architecture, its media and the voices of the people who populate theses five cities are used to tell five parallel but intersecting stories. They contain many moments that are individually unique, interesting or beautiful, but when brought together these create a multi-layered picture of an intricately connected world. True Cities is an attempt to make a rigorous yet creative research that will seek to expand the vocabulary with which the ‘life’ of architecture is described.

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