Overurbanism

\”that the destiny of humanity depends upon the attainment of its highest type.\” Friedrich Nietzsche, \’The Will to Power\’Skyscraper collectives, tower agglomerations, bundles, clusters, and twins; waterfront developments, mixed-use developments, high-rise housing developments, housing marinas and luxury condominiums; airport hubs, corporate office enclaves, industrial parks, hotel complexes, conference centers, commercial and financial centers; satellite cities, theme parks, thematic cities, branded cities, new central districts, gated communities: what is the potential latent in extraordinarily large urban typologies -collectives, manifolds and multiples- currently restricted by the typological tradition of urbanism and by the predominant segregation of disciplinary domains? What is the reach of such potential to think aggressively about the contemporary metropolitan condition and to imagine determinedly its future developmental models? \”Rockefeller Center is Vertical Schism = Beaux-Arts + Dreamland + the Electronic Future + the Reconstructed Past + the European Future.\” Rem Koolhaas, \’Delirious New York\’Overurbanism is the discipline that undertakes the project of radical typological integration in a single post-urban cybernetic universe: a large-scale machine with its own laws that propagates unpredictable organizations through paradoxical coexistence, radical inclusiveness and mutual intensification. Overurbanism incarnates the ultimate meta-systemic megalomania: a plural organization made of a multitude of systems interacting in a synthetic field of competition and synergy. It is pure urban-territorial exteriority enveloped in a ubiquitous architectural interiority, a tightly self-contained system where the exponential discrepancy between the organizational complexity of the interior and the tightness of the containing envelope engenders an altogether unprecedented potential: the over-urbanity of anti-urban collectives.Overurbanism is urbanism after the skyscraper: the form of urbanism that results of assembling anti-urbanisms. It replicates and supersedes the idea of the skyscraper as a condition that surpasses urbanity by swallowing its logics and multiplying them. If the skyscraper is a laboratory for new modes of collective life, which explodes the texture of normal life to offer an aggressive alternative reality that discredits all naturalistic urban realities*, Overurbanism is the multiplicitous assembly of contemporary types, whose systemic integration engenders a manifold singularity, a monstrous globalized commune. It is an abstract medium that breeds higher forms of architectural value, fueled with the escalating vitality of a collective of collectives: a newborn ecology that withstands as a high, vigorous and consistent life-form.If the skyscraper is the unconscious and self-evident medium for the thoughtless constitution of theories,* architectural theory without representation, Overurbanism is the conscious and self-concealed medium for the courageous constitution of meta-rational models of ubiquity, architectural power beyond ideology. Restricted but plentiful, excessive but austere, stringent but magnanimous, abundant but severe, grand but veiled, ascetic but expansive, voluptuous but disciplined, Overurbanism is unbound of any dependence, any reliance, or even any care for reason, which it uses as a means for the propagation of its canon: brutal indifference. The straight-jacket of redeeming urbanism, untied by the skyscraper through sheer congestion and intensive coexistence, is here reconfigured with the blunt force of an artistic invention.The Overurbanism Design Studio will explore this renewed opportunity through the investigation of various forms of extraordinarily large contemporary development and the unfolding of new models of Overurbanism. Students