The idea that cities around the world are becoming identical is not exactly new. Romans, Chinese and Ottomans all dispatched masons with official design manuals around their far-flung empires. There might have been regional variations in materials, yet imperial officials travelling from one city to another across icy mountains, blazing deserts and pirate-infested seas surely would have felt as comfortably at home in any one of these, just as jet-setting corporate executives do today while checking in to identical chain hotels.

The feeling that there is something wrong with the sheer pace and seeming inevitability of change today, when, for example, you might genuinely mistake the brash new City of London skyline for that of Dubai, was expressed with chilling precision in Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities. In it, Marco Polo, the Venetian adventurer, describes to the emperor Kublai Khan cities he has imagined during his travels. Towards the end of his story, Polo talks of Trude:

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. “You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they say to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.

This formulaic and inescapable modern world has been researched, notated and pinned down in fresh and forensic detail by Rem Koolhaas, the globally fêted Dutch architect, in Elements, a compelling exhibition at the heart of next month’s Venice Architecture Biennale – the Olympic Games of architecture – which he is curating. This year’s show is the first devoted to a single theme, that being the ways in which countries around the world (65 represented in Venice) have absorbed modernity – and, as a result, how their architecture and cities have come increasingly to resemble one another.

Visitors to Elements will be presented not with the usual array of the latest, show-off “iconic” buildings, but the bits and pieces, the elements of buildings – floors, doors, ceilings, stairs, windows and even lavatories – that, drawn from around the world and across the centuries, aim to demonstrate ways in which we have come to live increasingly in Calvino’s Trude....Continue Reading

> via The Telegraph