ABSTRACT
Given the constant flux of Biennale news, exhibition openings, and magazine launches, this perhaps is a story too old to recall. But it is worth reciting, for neither its subject nor its impulse has left us. On November 22, 2006, a lecture by the famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas at MIT was turned from slide show to a “conversation with faculty and students” when his PowerPoint presentation refused to work. 1 It must have been some failure of technology that the entire tech support apparatus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology couldn’t summon up a solution to make the event unfold as planned. For Koolhaas, however, this was a fortune in disguise, which proved the point of his lecture. We have to plan on the go, not beforehand. This was the topic Koolhaas intended to discuss in light of his eleven-year study of Lagos, the city where, the architect maintained, nothing works as planned and everything is an exercise in constant re-strategizing. For these reasons, Lagos presented, Koolhaas argued, a model for the megacities of the future the world over where planning solutions will have to be improvised on the run.
