Junk Space: Business Tool

Junk Space

Architecture since the early beginning had hold its great success in being a tool to help promotes, convey and enhance people believes, actions, or decision.

According to Rem Koolhaas, an architect, the author of the book 'Junk Space' and the creator of the term, “If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.”

Junk space is not as junk as it sound, in fact, from a business perspective, it is rather wondrously amazing. It is brain provokingly interesting how something so big, huge, massive and very prominent can makes the user lost in time, trapped in the space and came out not remembering a lot about the architecture at all but rather what is inside it. This is basically what junk space is.

From the description, most of us would picture this in their mind, of a simple large void or cube with not a lot of architecture features so that it does not stand out and make it way into our memory and so that it stays in the background and emphasis the special-ness of the objects in the inside. Precisely the opposite. Junk space refer to the space in most if not all commercial malls, shopping complex, and other in the category. Junk space works by having minimised window to cut out any connection of user and the outside world, trapped user inside as long as possible. Also having a very complex pathway, making confusing circulation where user actually have to go on a detour to get to their destination, this not only forced people to see more than what they should actually see in their circulation but also make them confuse and lost track of time so that they would spend more time in the space. This can be clearly seen in the Maboonkrong (MBK) shopping centre where one has to around the whole floor to get to another forcing us to see as much as possible of each floor.

In some cases, it tries to create endless circulation so instead of making confusing circulation it made the circulation from floor to floor very clear provoking people to go from one floor to another and only has the path to the exit is unclear. A good example is paragon where the elevator of every floor is group together in each zone so user can know instantly how to get from one floor to another, just come back to the same place.