Paper Is Out, Cellphones Are In

Paper Is Out, Cellphones Are In (NY Times 18-Mar-08)

The mobile check-in may well be the first step in direct communications between airlines and passengers as they travel. Ultimately, Henry H. Harteveldt, a vice president with Forrester Research, said he expected airlines would use mobile messaging to communicate with passengers about on-board services, rebooking options, baggage pickup and ticket purchases.

Goethe

Found at Varieties of Unreligious Experience

In Rome not a stone was looked at that wasn't shaped. Form had driven out all interest in matter. Now a crystal formation is becoming important again, and a shapeless stone is something. Thus does human nature cast about for help when there is no help left.
Goethe, The Italian Journey, 1788.

Form and formlessness. Human-made forms and natural forms. The fatigue of a world of human-made forms.
Is there a drive to escape human-made symmetry by searching for the formless or by looking for or even using natural forms to shape the human?
Is formlessness the ultimate goal to which we aspire, when we are too surrounded by form? In a structured space, do we seek to avoid yet more structure in trying to create place?

Deyan Sudjic on the city of the future | Art & Architecture | guardian.co.uk Arts

Deyan Sudjic on the city of the future | Art & Architecture | guardian.co.uk Arts:

In New York I listened to Rem Koolhaas behaving badly and blaming our inability to face up to the realities of the contemporary city on our sentimental attachment to Jane Jacobs and the rose-tinted views on street life she expounds in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Ever since the 60s, Jacobs ideas about protecting traditional neighbourhoods from planners trying to carve urban motorway through them have made her a heroine to generations of urban activists.

Is Koolhaas right? Do we have to face the reality of a new city, where community has moved elsewhere--to the computer-mediated realm? But, as an architect he must be concerned with making spaces where places can exist and flourish, even if they have the changing structure of events in the space of flows.

Rem Koolhaas - Dubai - Architecture - New York Times

Rem Koolhaas - Dubai - Architecture - New York Times:

"It has been 12 years since the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas unleashed his concept of “the generic city,” a sprawling metropolis of repetitive buildings centered on an airport and inhabited by a tribe of global nomads with few local loyalties. His argument was that in its profound sameness, the generic city was a more accurate reflection of contemporary urban reality than nostalgic visions of New York or Paris."

This seems an example of the rise of placelessness in the hybrid city. When one is connected to flows of information disconnected from place and to intimate private networks of co-workers or friends, then the place one is in might as well be anywhere.
It is interesting, however, that the architect should take this view of the space he creates, as if celebrating the placelessness that will exist in that space.