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Why is Rem Koolhaas the Worlds Most Controversial Architect? | ArchDaily

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Why is Rem Koolhaas the Worlds Most Controversial Architect?

by Nicolai Ouroussoff Articles Editor's Choice Rem Koolhaas

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In honor of Rem Koolhaas birthday today, we are printing a fascinating piece on his life and work written by Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for The New York Times from 20042011. Rem Koolhaas has been causing trouble in the world of architecture since his student days in London in the early 1970s. Architects want to build, and as they age most are willing to tone down their work if it will land them a juicy commission. But Koolhaas, 67, has remained a first-rate provocateur who, even in our conservative times, just cant seem to behave. His China Central Television headquarters building, completed this past May, was described by some critics as a cynical work of propaganda and by others (including this one) as a masterpiece. Earlier projects have alternately awed and infuriated those who have followed his career, including a proposal to transform part of the Museum of Modern Art into a kind of ministry of self-promotion called MoMA Inc. (rejected) and an addition to the

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Whitney Museum of American Art that would loom over the existing landmark building like a cat pawing a ball of yarn (dropped). Koolhaas habit of shaking up established conventions has made him one of the most influential architects of his generation. A disproportionate number of the professions rising stars, including Winy Maas of the Dutch firm MVRDV and Bjarke Ingels of the Copenhagenbased BIG, did stints in his office. Architects dig through his books looking for ideas; students all over the world emulate him. The attraction lies, in part, in his ability to keep us off balance. Unlike other architects of his stature, such as Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, who have continued to refine their singular aesthetic visions over long careers, Koolhaas works like a conceptual artistable to draw on a seemingly endless reservoir of ideas.

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Yet Koolhaas most provocativeand in many ways least understoodcontribution to the cultural landscape is as an urban thinker. Not since Le Corbusier mapped his vision of the Modernist city in the 1920s and 30s has an architect covered so much territory. Koolhaas has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles in search of commissions. Along the way, he has written half a dozen books on the evolution of the contemporary metropolis and
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Why is Rem Koolhaas the Worlds Most Controversial Architect? | ArchDaily

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CCTV/OMA Partners-in-charge: Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, designers, David Gianotten, photographed by Iw an Baan

designed master plans for, among other places, suburban Paris, the Libyan desert and Hong Kong. His restless nature has led him to unexpected subjects. In an exhibition first shown at the 2010 Venice Biennale, he sought to demonstrate how preservation has contributed to a kind of collective amnesia by transforming historic districts into stage sets for tourists while airbrushing out buildings that represent more uncomfortable chapters in our past. He is now writing a book on the countryside, a subject that has been largely ignored by generations of planners who regarded the city as the crucible of modern life. If Koolhaas urban work has a unifying theme, it is his vision of the metropolis as a world of extremesopen to every kind of human experience. Change tends to fill people with this incredible fear, Koolhaas said as we sat in his Rotterdam office flipping through an early mock-up of his latest book. We are surrounded by crisismongers who see the city in terms of decline. I kind of automatically embrace the change. Then I try to find ways in which change can be mobilized to strengthen the original identity. Its a weird combination of having faith and having no faith.

Tall and fit in a tapered dark blue shirt, with inquisitive eyes, Koolhaas often seems impatient when talking about his work, and he frequently gets up to search for a book or an image. His firm, OMA, for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, employs 325 architects, with branches in Hong Kong and New York, but Koolhaas likes the comparative isolation of Rotterdam, a tough port city. Housed in a brawny concrete and glass building, his office is arranged in big, open floors, like a factory. On the Sunday morning we met, a dozen or so architects sat silently at long worktables in front of their computers. Models of various projects, some so big you could step inside them, were scattered everywhere. Unlike most architects of his stature, Koolhaas participates in many competitions. The

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Why is Rem Koolhaas the Worlds Most Controversial Architect? | ArchDaily

process allows for creative freedom, since a client isnt hovering, but its also risky. The firm invests an enormous amount of time and money in projects that will never get built. To Koolhaas, this seems to be an acceptable trade-off. Ive absolutely never thought about money or economic issues, Koolhaas said. But as an architect I think this is a strength. It allows me to be irresponsible and to invest in my work. Koolhaas first test of his urban theories came in the mid-1990s, when he won a commission to design a sprawling development on the outskirts of Lille, a rundown industrial city in northern France whose economy was once based on mining and textiles. Linked to a new high-speed rail line, the development, called Euralille, included a shopping mall, conference and exhibition center, and office towers surrounded by a tangle of freeways and train tracks. Seeking to give it the richness and complexity of an older city, Koolhaas envisioned a pileup of urban attractions. A concrete chasm, crisscrossed by bridges and escalators, would connect an underground parking garage to a new train station; a row of mismatched office towers would straddle the stations tracks. For added variety, celebrated architects were brought in to design the various buildings; Koolhaas designed the convention hall.

Maison Bordeaux, Hans Werlemann, courtesy OMA

More than a decade after its completion, Koolhaas and I meet in front of Congrexpo, the convention hall, to see how the development looks today. An elliptical shell, the colossal building is sliced into three parts, with a 6,000-seat concert hall at one end, a conference hall with three auditoriums in the middle and a 215,000-square-foot exhibition space at the other. On this Saturday afternoon the building is empty. Koolhaas had to notify city officials to get access, and theyre waiting for us inside. When Koolhaas was hired to design the building, he was still perceived as a rising talent; today he is a major cultural figurea Pritzker Prizewinning architect who is regularly profiled in magazines and on televisionand the officials are clearly excited to meet him. His presence seems to bring cultural validity to their provincial city. Koolhaas is polite but seems eager to escape. After a cup of coffee, we excuse ourselves and begin to navigate our way through the halls cavernous rooms. Occasionally, he stops to draw my attention to an architectural feature: the moody ambience, for instance, of an auditorium clad in plywood and synthetic leather. When we reach the main concert space, a raw concrete shell, we stand there for a long while. Koolhaas sometimes seems to be a reluctant architectsomeone who is unconcerned with conventional ideas of beautybut he is a master of the craft, and I cant help marveling at the intimacy of the space. The room is perfectly proportioned, so that even sitting at the back of the upper balcony you feel as though you were pressing up against the stage. Yet what strikes me most is how Koolhaas was able to express, in a single building, bigger urban ideas. Congrexpos elliptical, egg-like exterior suggests a perfectly self-contained system, yet inside is a cacophony of competing zones. The main entry hall, held up by imposing concrete columns, resembles a Roman ruin encased in a hall of mirrors; the exhibition space, by contrast, is light and airy. The tension created between them seems to capture one of Koolhaas principal preoccupations: How do you allow the maximum degree of individual freedom without contributing to the erosion of civic culture? The rest of Euralille is a bit of a letdown. The development lacks the aesthetic unity that we associate with the great urban achievements of earlier eras and that, for better or worse, give them a monumental grandeur. Because of a tight budget, many of the building

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Taipei Performing Arts Center. Approach from north OMA

materials are cheap, and some havent worn well. The high-speed train station, designed by Jean-Marie Duthilleul, feels coarse and airless despite vast expanses of glass. The addition of metal cages above the stations bridges and escalators, to prevent people from throwing refuse onto the tracks, only makes the atmosphere more oppressive. With time, however, I discern a more subtle interplay of spaces. The triangular plaza acts as a calming focal point at the developments heart, its surface sloping down gently to a long window where you can watch trains pulling slowly in and out of the station. By contrast, the crisscrossing bridges and escalators, which descend several stories to a metro platform behind the station, conjure the vertiginous subterranean vaults of Piranesis 18th-century etchings of imaginary prisons. Up above, the towers that straddle the station, including a striking boot-shaped structure of translucent glass designed by Christian de Portzamparc, create a pleasant staccato effect in the skyline. Best of all, Euralille is neither an infantile theme park nor a forbidding grid of synthetic glass boxes. It is a genuinely unpretentious, populist space: Streets filled with high-strung businessmen, sullen teenagers and working-class couples pulse with energy. This difference is underscored later as we stroll through Lilles historic center a few blocks away, where the refurbished pedestrian streets and dolled-up plaza look like a French version of Disneys Main Street. Koolhaas achievement at Euralille is not insignificant. In the time since the developments completion, globalization has produced a plethora of urban centers that are as uniform and sterile as the worst examples of orthodox Modernismminus the social idealism. What was once called the public realm has become a place of frenzied consumerism monitored by the watchful eyes of thousands of surveillance cameras, often closed off to those who cant afford the price of membership. In this new world, architecture looks more and more like a form of corporate branding. Those who rose through the professional ranks once thinking they would produce meaningful public-spirited workthe libraries, art museums and housing projects that were a staple of 20th-century architecturesuddenly found themselves across the table from real estate developers and corporate boards whose interests were not always so noble-minded. What these clients thirsted for, increasingly, was the kind of spectacular building that could draw a crowdor sell real estate. Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944, during the Allied bombardment, and grew up in a family of cultured bohemians. A grandfather was an architect who built headquarter buildings for the Dutch airline KLM and the state social security administration; his father wrote magical realist novels and edited a leftist weekly paper. After the war, the family moved to Amsterdam, where Koolhaas spent afternoons playing in the rubble of the state archive building, which had been blown up by the resistance during the German occupation. His first experience with a mega-city and all of its moral contradictions was as a boy in Jakarta, Indonesia, where his father ran a cultural institute under the revolutionary Sukarno, who had led the countrys struggle for independence. I had never seen such poverty, Koolhaas said. And I almost instantly understood that it was impossible to pass judgment on what you saw. On some level you could only accept it as reality.

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Seattle Central LIbrary. OMA

Back in Amsterdam in his early 20s, Koolhaas avoided radical politics, joining a small group of Dutch Surrealist writers at the fringes of the European cultural scene. There were two kinds of 60s, he said to me. One was avant-garde, highly modernist Antonioni, Yves Klein. The other was the Anglo-Saxon, hippie-ish, political side. I associated with the avantgarde tendency. Koolhaas worked briefly as a journalist, writing a profile mocking a vision by the artist-architect Constant Nieuwenhuys for a post-capitalist paradise suspended hundreds of feet above the city on a huge steel frame. A later story satirized the Provosa group of young Dutch anarchists whose actions (planning to disrupt a royal wedding with smoke bombs) were intended to goad the Dutch authorities. Koolhaas even co-wrote a screenplay for the raunchy B-movie king Russ Meyer. (The film was never made.)

Rothschild Bank Headquarters, Forecourt and St Stephen Walbrook at night OMA by Philippe Ruault

By the time Koolhaas got to Londons Architectural Association, in the late 1960s, he had established himself as an audacious thinker with a wicked sense of humor. The drawings he produced for his final project, which are now owned by MoMA, were a brash sendup of Modernist utopias and their afterbirths. Dubbed The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, the project was modeled partly after the Berlin Wall, which Koolhaas described as a masterpiece of design that had transformed the western half of the city into an irresistible urban fantasy. Koolhaas tongue-in-cheek proposal for London carved a wide swath through the center to create a hedonistic zone that could fully accommodate individual desires. As the citys inhabitants rushed to it, the rest of London would become a ruin. (Galleries and museums ask to borrow the Koolhaas drawings more often than anything else in MoMAs architecture and design collections.) Koolhaas book Delirious New York cemented his reputation as a provocateur. When Koolhaas wrote it, in the mid-1970s, New York City was in a spiral of violence and decay. Garbage was piling up on streets, slumlords were burning down abandoned tenements in the South Bronx to collect on insurance and the white middle class was fleeing to the

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suburbs. For most Americans, New York was a modern Sodom. To Koolhaas, it was a potential urban paradise. With his new wife, the Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp, he saw a haven for outsiders and misfits. Manhattans generic grid, he argued, seemed capable of accommodating an intoxicating mix of human activities, from the most extreme private fantasy to the most marginal subculture. The books positive spin was underscored by the cover: an illustration by Vriesendorp of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings lying side by side in a post-coital slumber. It was geared against this idea of New York as a hopeless case, Koolhaas told me. The more implausible it seemed to be defending it, the more exciting it was to write about. These early ideas began to coalesce into an urban strategy in a series of projects in and around Paris. In a 1991 competition for the expansion of the business district of La Dfense, for instance, Koolhaas proposed demolishing everything but a few historic landmarks, a university campus and a cemetery; the rest would be replaced with a new Manhattan-style grid. The idea was to identify and protect what was most precious, then create the conditions for the urban chaos that he so loved to take hold.

Coolsingel mixed use building, OMA

More recently, Koolhaas has responded to what he termed the excessive compulsion toward the spectacular by pushing his heretical work to greater extremes. Architecturally, his recent designs can be either deliciously enigmatic or brutally direct. The distorted form of his CCTV building, for examplea kind of squared-off arch whose angled top cantilevers more than 500 feet above the groundmakes its meaning impossible to pin down. (Martin Filler condemned it in the New York Review of Book s as an elaborate effort to impart a bogus semblance of transparency on what is essentially a propaganda arm of the Chinese government.) Seen from certain perspectives its form looks hulking and aggressive; from others it looks almost fragile, as if the whole thing were about to tip overa magnificent emblem for uncertain times. By contrast, the Wyly Theatre in Dallas (2009) is a hyperfunctional machinea gigantic fly tower with movable stages and partitions encased inside an 11-story metal box. At the same time, his urban work has begun to seem increasingly quixotic. In a 2001 development plan for Harvard University, which was expanding across the Charles River into nearby Allston, Koolhaas proposed diverting the path of the river several miles to create a more unified campus. The idea seemed preposterous, and Harvards board quickly rejected it, but it carried a hidden message: Americas astonishing growth during the first threequarters of the 20th century was built largely on the hubris of its engineers. (Think of the Los Angeles depicted in Roman Polanskis Chinatown, a city that diverted water across 250 miles of desert to feed the growth of the San Fernando Valley.) Why, Koolhaas seemed to be asking, arent such miracles possible today? In a 2008 competition for a site off the coast of Dubai, Koolhaas went out on another limb, proposing a development that resembled a fragment of Manhattan that had drifted across the Atlantic and lodged itself in the Persian Gulfa kind of authentic urban zone made up of generic city blocks that would serve as a foil to Dubais fake glitz. His most convincing answer to the vices of global urbanization was a proposal for the West Kowloon Cultural District, a sprawling 99-acre cultural and residential development to be built on landfill on a site overlooking Hong Kong Harbor. Koolhaas traveled to Hong Kong every month for more than a year to work on the project, often wandering up into the surrounding mountains. Inspired by the migrant dwellings and rural marshlands that he found there, he proposed three urban villages arranged along a spacious public park. The

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The Interlace. OMA

idea was to create a social mixing bowl for people of different cultural, ethnic and class backgrounds. In spite of its metropolitan character Hong Kong is surrounded by countryside, Koolhaas said. We felt that wed discovered a really wonderful prototype. The villages were not only a very beautiful urban model, but they would be sustainable. The experience ended in disappointment. After more than a year of work on the proposal, Koolhaas lost to Norman Foster, whose projects are known for high-tech luster. More troubling perhaps to Koolhaas, the architectural climate has become more conservative, and hence more resistant to experimental work. (Witness the recent success of architects like David Chipperfield, whose minimalist aesthetic has been praised for its comforting simplicity.) As someone who has worked closely with Koolhaas put it to me: I dont think Rem always understands how threatening his projects are. The idea of proposing to construct villages in urban Hong Kong is very scary for the Chineseit is exactly what they are running away from.

Chu Hai College campus, OMA

Yet Koolhaas has always sought to locate the beauty in places that others might regard as so much urban debris, and by doing so he seems to be encouraging us to remain more open to the other. His ideal city, to borrow words he once used to describe the West Kowloon project, seems to be a place that is all things to all people. His faith in that vision doesnt seem to have cooled any. One of his newest projects, a performing arts center under construction in Taipei, fuses the enigmatic qualities of CCTV with the bluntness of the Wyly Theatre. And he continues to pursue urban planning projects: Sources in the architecture community say he recently won a competition to design a sprawling airport development in Doha, Qatar (the results have not been made public). If it is built, itll become his first major urban project since Euralille. Koolhaas first thought of writing a book about the countryside while walking with his longtime companion, the designer Petra Blaisse, in the Swiss Alps. (Koolhaas separated from his wife some years ago and now lives with Blaisse in Amsterdam.) Passing through a village, he was struck by how artificial it looked. We came here with a certain regularity and I began to recognize certain patterns, Koolhaas said. The people had changed; the cows in the meadows looked different. And I realized weve worked on the subject a lot over the years, but weve never connected the dots. It has sort of been sublimated.

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Milstein Hall at Cornell University. Matthew Carbone

In the mock-up of the book, images of luxuriously renovated country houses and migrant teenagers in dark shades are juxtaposed with pictures of homespun Russian peasants from a century ago. Achart shows the decline in farming over the past 150 years. In a tensquare-kilometer rural area outside Amsterdam, Koolhaas finds a solar panel vendor, bed and breakfasts, souvenir shops, a relaxation center, a breast- feeding center and a sculpture garden scattered amid land that is farmed mostly by Polish workers. Robots drive tractors and milk cows. Koolhaas says the book will touch on a vital theme: how to come to terms with the relentless pace of modernization. The countryside has become more volatile than the accelerated city, Koolhaas writes in one of the mock-ups. A world formerly dictated by the seasons is now a toxic mix of genetic experiment, industrial nostalgia seasonal immigration. Its hard to know whether you regard this as nightmare or opportunity, I tell him. That has been my entire life story, Koolhaas said, Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesnt preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs. In fact Koolhaas urbanism, one could say, exists at the tipping point between the world as it is and the world as we imagine it. Reprinted with permission from the author. Originally appeared in SMITHSONIAN September 2012.

Cite:
Nicolai Ouroussoff. "Why is Rem Koolhaas the Worlds Most Controversial Architect?" 17 Nov 2012. ArchDaily. Accessed 17 Nov 2013. <http://www.archdaily.com/?p=294302>

2 comments
AB
Koolhaas is classical but an elitist. Leon Krier is controversial but a humanist.
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reality checkr
Do your realize how Ouroussoff alw ays says Koolhaas is designing this, Koohlhaas is designing that, though almost 100% of w hat comes out of OMA is designed by somebody else but Koolhaas. Ouroussoff is a disgusting brow nnoser and a phony.
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