OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Brand Europe, 2001

Postmodern resignation saw the planet as a tamed stage of a conflict between comercial logos. After the essential conflict between capitalism and socialism ended with the implosion of the former Soviet block and the unanimous extension of the market economy, the dollar sign was left without the symbolic competence of the hammer and sickle, and its ideological opposition came to be replaced by a series of business rivalries: the world was now divided between Coke and Pepsi, and the most fierce battle was the one that Nike and Reebok fought in successive Olympic Games. However, the light and optimistic forecast that gleefully announced with Francis Fukuyama the approaching end of history and encouraged to invest wisely the dividends of peace was dramatically denied by a turn of the century of unexpected convulsions: the new wars and the new terrorisms, the new epidemics and the new environmental risks created a landscape of threat and conflict that could no longer be understood as a friendly collage of corporate identities, joined by the eager ¥E$ to the global economy and by the unanimous support of the syncretic religion of spectacle and consumerism...[+]