Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis [with the collaboration of Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis], 1973:

"Once, a city was divided into two parts.
Of course, one part became the ‘good' half, the other part the ‘bad' half. The inhabitants of the ‘bad' half began to flock to the ‘good' part of the divided city, rapidly swelling into an urban Exodus.
But after all the actions to interrupt the undesirable migration had failed, the authorities of the ‘bad' part made desperate and savage use of Architecture; they built a wall around the ‘good' part of the city, making it completely inaccessible for their subjects.
The wall was a masterpiece.
Originally, no more than some pathetic strings of barbed wire, abruptly dropped on the imaginary line of the border; its psychological and symbolic effects were infinitely more powerful than its physical appearance.
Those trapped, left behind in the gloomy ‘bad' half, became obsessed with vain plans for escape.
And as often before in the history of mankind, Architecture had been instrumental in bringing this despair about.
This would be a force as intense and devastating, but applied to positive intentions."

"The allotments
In this part of the strip, the inhabitants can have a small piece of land for private cultivation; they will need these to recover in privacy from the demands the intense collectivism and the communal way of life makes on them.
The houses on these allotments are built from the most beautiful and expensive materials - marble, chromium steel (small palaces for the people).
Papers are banned, radios mysteriously out of order, the whole concept of "news" ridiculed by the patient devotion with which the plots are ploughed, scrubbed, polished, and embellished."

"'Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture', [...] was produced in 1972 when 'nice' architecture - preferably invisible - was at its zenith. Inspired by a documentation/interpretation of the 'Berlin Wall as architecture' (1971 - unpublished), it proposes the creation of a strip that runs east-west through the centre of London, ‘protected' from the existing city by two walls along its perimeter. Inside, the zone is subdivided in a series of identical squares, each with their own programme/scenario - ranging from celebrations of total privacy to intensely communal facilities.

Together, these 'stories' intend to wake up the sleepwalking Metropolis - London - from its slumber and to insert in its inarticulate organism a zone where the debased ideal of the Metropolis is restored to a sparkling intensity that would tempt the inhabitants of the subconscious London to escape into the strip in an impulsive exodus - and to become its Voluntary Prisoners."

"[...] Intrinsically an ideal city, Exodus is a dropped-in deus-ex-machina which forces London into a gradual but sure extinction. The tips of this ideal urban strip are the points of ideological friction between the old and the new, while the nine squares of the city proper refer to its collective ideological rituals: the ideology of private property (the Square of the Private Allotments), of ceremonial festivities (the Ceremonial Square), of civic initiation (the Reception Hall), of historical consciousness (the preservation of Nash London), of sensuous pleasurability (the Baths), of the artificial alternative to nature (the Park of the Four Elements), of cure and immortalisation (the Hospital), and of scientific knowledge (the University Square)."

There is, of course, nothing new featuring in the permissive ideological coexistence of these squares of bourgeois reification. The old dream of Ledoux for erecting a city comprising Temples to Love, Memory, Knowl-edge, etc., or that of Fourier for founding an ideal brotherhood, or that of Jules Borie for allowing the traditional city to wither away while its inhabitants escape to the crystalline dropped-in aerodomes, or that of Le Corbusier for the perpetual warfare that the Plan Voisin would initi-ate, or that of Archigram for an overnight physical transformation of the world, or that of Superstudio for an uninterrupted crystalline monument meandering around the globe-all these dreams and still many others are present in Exodus, yielding with their superimposition a Freudian tableau of contemporary urban memory."

"Archigram was at the height of its power and groups like Archizoom and Superstudio were conceiving architectural stories supposing a vast expansion of the territory of the architectural imagination. [...] 'Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture' was a reaction to this innocence: a project to emphasize that the power of architecture is more ambiguous and dangerous. Based on a study of ‘The Berlin Wall as Architecture,' Exodus proposed to erase a section of central London to establish there a zone of metropolitan life - inspired by Baudelaire - and to protect this zone with walls from the old city, creating maximum division and contrast. The people of London could choose: those who wanted to be admitted to this zone of hyperdensity became 'The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture.'"

"Koolhaas and OMA developed their theories in 1972 with a study of the Berlin Wall (walls again), and their scheme for London called ‘Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture'. When I pointed out to [John] Hejduk the remarkable similarity in wall obsession he drew back in disdain. Obviously there's no place for two King Rats occupying the same territory, bur the similar obsessions turn out, in this case, to be fortuitous (although perhaps psychologically connected).

Is it true that people, not only designers, love to be ‘voluntary prisoners of architecture'? Can the history of architecture really be seen as the self-imposed incarceration into walls, skyscrapers, globes and needles? In a dream-sense, yes, and it's this unwritten dream which Koolhaas whishes to record, and reinforce."