Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By Katrina Heron
Koolhaas:
With globalization, we all have more or less the same future, but
Asia and Africa feel much more new. I've been doing research in
China recently, investigating cities that emerge suddenly, in eight
years or so, seemingly out of nothing. These places are much
more vigorous and representative of the future. There, building
something new is a daily pleasure and a daily occurence.
We've been looking at the average time that goes into designing
a building in China and the average number of people who work
on it. We discovered that in the area we were in it takes 10 days
- and it's three people and three Apple computers. And it's a 40-
story building. Others are done in two days. The work definitely
becomes more diagrammatic, but maybe more pure at the same
time.
Yes and no. What's interesting is that the book form itself has
been threatened by a succession of media - film, TV, now
electronics. It has survived, but each of these media has
profoundly influenced it, changed its nature forever. So, in its
physicality, S,M,L,XL is counter, but in its conception, it is
analog: it is "against" the other media, but at the same time
unthinkable without them.
You've also said, "I like thinking big. I always have. To me it's
very simple: If you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as
well think big."
It's too early to say, but what interests me is that Universal City
is a site of production - films are actually being made there - and
of consumption - a vast theme park, hotels, et cetera. The
"work" legitimizes the "pleasure." And since moviemaking is the
driving theme, there is the suggestion of ever new additions to
the canon. In that sense, Universal is fundamentally different
from a place like Disney, where a fixed repertoire of ancient
inventions is endlessly, morosely recycled. This project has to,
and can, symbolize real vitality, real creativity.
For a long time, you didn't believe that building was the
necessary outcome of designing, and in fact you've built only
about 20 projects so far.
The most romantic example of this is the story you tell about a
house that the young Mies van der Rohe was commissioned by a
wealthy woman to build. After having him design and construct a
1:1 scale model in canvas she abandoned the project. The story
seemed to make a deep impression on you: "I suddenly saw him
inside the colossal volume, a cubic tent vastly lighter and more
suggestive than the somber and classical architecture it
attempted to embody. I guessed - almost with envy - that this
strange 'enactment' of a future house had drastically changed
him Š was this canvas cathedral an acute flash-forward to
another architecture?"