Doing Almost Nothing

W.I.P. by J.Y.Ooi


part i

  1. Preface
  2. Kurfürstendamm
  3. Prehistory
  4. Dichotomy of Ku’damm

part ii

  1. Aggregate and Adler
  2. Crisis
  3. Brief

part iii

  1. Precarity
  2. Emancipation
  3. Plans
  4. Trajectory
  5. Outcome(?)

PART IV

  1. References
  2. Credit

Preface



“It’s not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.”

— Marilyn Monroe 


This proposal is an elegy for the unfinished — a meditation on a building that is perhaps best left incomplete.

It began with a question that haunts architects like a shadow: What is our role in a world ablaze with crises? The answers, I found, are as fragmented as the concrete carcass that inspired this work — a half-built monolith on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, abandoned to time and indecision (and financial fuckups). Despite its exposed piers and hollow floors, it is neither artifact nor ruin.

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, R. Buckminster Fuller — polymath, futurist, and self-proclaimed “comprehensivist” — challenged architects to transcend their obsession with objects and become stewards of systems. To him, the discipline was never about buildings alone, but about “anticipatory design science”: weaving geometry, ecology, and ethics into a practice that serves all humanity. Yet architectural education remains tethered to a perverse creed: to build is to exist. Students are drilled in the alchemy of materials and codes, but rarely taught to question whether construction is even the answer.

I rebelled. If the Kudamm ruin teaches us anything, it is that our compulsion to build often outpaces our capacity to think. Rem Koolhaas, in his trademark provocation, once argued that architecture needs “an arm concerned with not doing anything.” This booklet is that arm — a refusal disguised as a treatise.

Within these pages, you will find no renders, no seductive façades. Instead, I am constantly throwing out more questions than answers. Why fetishize form when the polycrisis demands unbuilding — deconstruction, rewilding, redistribution? Through this proposal, I test a heresy: that the most urgent act of architecture today is to withhold, to listen, to remain.

To my friends who warned me this was “not architecture”: you were probably right. This is more than that.  

The Kudamm skeleton, in its raw imperfection, is my collaborator. It is a relic of capitalist hubris, yes — but also a tabula rasa for imagining what architecture might become if we stopped conflating building with care. What if we designed policies instead of campuses? Data poems instead of offices? Alliances instead of galleries?

This short proposal distills a journey of resistance — against the cult of construction, toward the vast, uncharted terrain of comprehensivist practice. What if we don’t build, but think like architects anyway?