Ramblin' On My Mind

Creating cities the Philip K. Dick way

I went to the OMA Progress exhibition at the Barbican which was a great insight into, in my opinion, the best contemporary architecture practice going. Having been tutored by the director of OMA France during my study period in Copenhagen, their way of viewing the city and it’s complex urbanity has been ingrained into my DNA as a designer of urban space. I came back from Copenhagen a different designer, I am scornful of what I once was and returned to my education establishment in the UK with a new vigour and ethos of how to approach urban design. Unfortunately they didn’t get it, and it is for that reason I find it hard to be proud of the work I completed under their tutorage. This quote from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, which opens the exhibition, underpins the way OMA sees the city.

“It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall about two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it.  Do not believe – and I am dead serious when I say this – do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”

- Philip K. Dick, ‘How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later’, 1978