If space junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junkspace is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built… product of modernization is not modern architecture but junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown. … Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, hypertechnical, lucidly planned by human intelligence, imagination, and infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory… Junkspace is the sum total of our current architecture: we have built more than all previous history together, but we hardly register on the same scales. Junkspace is the product of the encounter between escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). … It substitutes accumulation for hierarchy, addition for composition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth.
Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing…the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock…. Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness…. It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means….
—Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace
In reading Koolhaas’s polemic against the physical manifestation of consumer capitalism, I realized that the Saint Paul skyway system is its epitome. A hermetically sealed pastiche of halfhearted architectural and historical references, an interiority so expansive and byzantine that it sheds all reference to the world outside. A place where plants inhabit windowless rooms.
As a barista within the skyway, I have a privileged view of its psychological effects. Space takes on a different logic in the semi-planned indoor sprawl, simultaneously obscuring immediate environs and suggesting such extensiveness as to appear infinite.
The most common question I’m asked by lost denizens of the skyway is how to find the restroom—an essential bit of infrastructure that’s both nearby and almost impossible to find without insider knowledge. Language fails to articulate its location at least fifty percent of the time. I watch people take a wrong turn despite my best efforts to explain, their gait slowing until they lose all certainty and find themselves adrift between food courts. I’ve gotten in the habit of walking restroom-seekers to the very edge of the coffee shop so I can physically indicate their destination. Better to point and grunt than to waste words in the skyway.
The system is poorly designed and nowhere near as extensive as, say, the Minneapolis skyway, but it is nevertheless a total system that implies infinity and denies the existence of anything outside. I’m often asked how to take the skyway to the capitol or some other far-flung destination. It doesn’t occur to the directions-seeker that getting to the capitol would require a comically long bridge across an interstate and sparsely developed dead land. It also doesn’t occur to people that they can traverse sidewalks open to the sky. When I answer the perennial question and tell someone that the nearest Starbucks is a few blocks away but not accessible via skyway, their eyes glaze over and they either drift away aimlessly or settle for the coffee I sell.
Map of the Saint Paul skyway system. Source
Of course, I only point them in the direction I think leads to Starbucks. I’m about seventy-five percent sure I know the cardinal directions from within the skyway. Inside and outside are disconnected realities.
“Because it costs money,” Koolhaas writes, “conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space.” The skyway offers some refuge for the homeless and dispossessed, some room for human contact and pursuits in its variety of spaces; but humanity is kept within strict parameters. Eventually the seating areas are closed and the bathrooms locked. Coffee shop seats are for customers only, and a cup of water costs just enough to withhold patron status from the penniless. A racist security guard patrols his zone in dark sunglasses and black gloves that look like they might have reinforced knuckles.
The Town Square skyway junction at night, when security guards are likely to ask questions
Aside from the actual bridges connecting buildings, skyway space is predicated on and solely in service to capitalism. Many visitors to the city, unfamiliar with the concept of connecting downtown buildings to defend against the extreme cold, venture out of the hotel near the coffee shop and ask me in confusion if they are in a mall. Or they assume they are in a mall and ask where they can find a clothing store.
Like the nation’s malls, the Saint Paul skyway is languishing. Some retail spaces are perpetually empty. The mezzanine level above where I work has supposedly been closed for a decade or more, temporary-looking signs permanently blocking its dormant escalators. Décor in many spots is at least a decade or two old, which in the fast-moving world of branded interior design is hopelessly tacky. Melting snow reveals leaks in the roof. An unpredictable drip from a pipe above the entrance to my store is received by a five-gallon bucket guarded by a wet floor sign.
Escalator to Purgatory
I have a feeling the Saint Paul skyway system will mirror the fate of downtown Saint Paul, hobbling along while the urban fabric remains somnolent and maybe seeing a rejuvenation if the area livens—after all, the network of bridges serves the practical function of shielding city workers and inhabitants from the bitter Minnesota winter. But what is the future of the rest of Junkspace now that its poster child, the mall, is dying? Some thoughts on that in another post.
Defined by Art in America as the “world's most avant-garde shopping centre”, the Palais Metro is a multilevel labyrinth devoted to commerce, fairs and leisure activities. Quoted in Reyner Banham's Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, 1976.
Junkspace is the body double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness. Junkspace is a Bermuda Triangle of concepts, an abandoned petri dish: it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction.
