Occupation without matter

Until recently, functional and economic considerations indicated that high density in central areas was desired, when not inevitable. But a density explosion can occur, today, in any place of the city. This phenomenon is independent of the traditional interpretation of the city as a continuous field. In any place immense architectural structures can abruptly be installed, that accommodate a great variety of almost-urban functions, becoming itself into a density point. 

The city today is a constellation of densities, preventing definitively the condition of critical mass. Density now only exists with the condition of being surrounded by the emptiness. The occupation of immense areas by a self-contained, isolated megastructure, isolated from the remainder of the city, as preview by the urban development projects in global scale, would be the only possible alternative in the current process of urban reorganization? It would be another way to think the large-scale city, not based in the large container? 

Projects as the SP Tower are inevitable in a large reconfiguration process of the East Zone? The urban restructuring in global scale of São Paulo has necessarily to happen according to standards established by real estate speculation and the international financial capital? Which other intervention strategies could be proposed in this large and complex context? 

Can global urban strategies produce local urban mutation? Local situations turn more complex through the intensification of multiple connections. Local intensities can engage vaster urban systems, through the development of relations between multiple scales and locations. 

The metropolitan condition of the East Zone: a terrain vague between the historical center and the periphery. An emptiness full of potential. Demanding therefore a program that does not impose it form, but answers to its constitutive instability. Proposals of continuously mutant configurations, that keep a programmatical indetermination, allowing to modification and substitution. Only program, without structure. Creation of fields that accommodate processes reactive to crystallize in definitive forms. Manipulation of infrastructure for infinite intensifications and diversifications, short-circuits and redistributions. To explore the condition metropolitan: density without architecture. 

Reference
R. Koolhaas. Congestion without matter. In S. M.L.X.L 010 Publishers, Rotterdam. 1995