BATIK, BIENNALE

AND THE DEATH OF

THE SKYSCRAPER.
INTERVIEW WITH
REM KOOLHAAS
24 February 2014 | By Andrew Mackenzie

The majority of so-called modern architecture now is

really a kind of gimmicky Modernism. Andrew Mackenzie
discusses influences, national identities and the future of
the profession with OMA founder Rem Koolhaas

Your proposition for this years Venice Architecture

Biennale asks whether national identity has been, as you
say, sacrificed to modernity. Some might view this as a
project of reclamation, not unlike Framptons regionalism.
How would you differentiate your proposition from
Framptons?

Well, Kenneth Frampton is a smart guy, but the problem is that he

looked at regionalism as an antidote to cosmopolitan development.
In so doing he perverted the cause of regionalism, because suddenly
regionalism was mobilised as a private cause that it couldnt sustain.
However, the question of national identity is an open one. For
instance, at first sight the Netherlands is a very internationalist
country, but looking closely you can see an enormous return of, not
vernacular, but quasi-vernacular architecture and quasi-old
fortresses that are newly built with a national flavour.
Look at Zaandam, and that huge assemblage of so-called vernacular
buildings.

I understand this moment very well, because the vast majority of so-
called modern architecture now is really a kind of gimmicky
Modernism, and this creates space for traditionalism to be gimmicky
too. Its like a set of communicating vases, where movement in one
translates directly to movement in the other. I see this less from an
architectural perspective than from a social or anthropological one.
Recent years have seen an extraordinary growth in what I would call
quasi-vernacular, particularly across Europe.

Hotel in Zaadam by WAP architects

If Zaandam represents a kind of quasi-vernacular, what
qualities, quasi or otherwise, would you ascribe to you as a
Dutch architect?

Its at the same time a simple and a complex question. In its most
blatant sense I have a huge sympathy for orthogonal organisations,
and this, at some level, is very visible in the work. But at the same
time there is a counter force, as a result of my early years in
Indonesia. My parents took me to Jakarta when I was eight. I was
transplanted from a ruin to an extremely chaotic tropical city that
was in a state of euphoria because of its recent independence. There
I went to an Indonesian school, spoke Indonesian and behaved more
or less like an Asian child.

When I returned to a totally reordered Netherlands at the age of 12, I

never felt comfortable in that state of completion. From there many
of my interests are clear. I was exposed to Dutchness as a young
child, then its counterpart. So, I would say that I am slightly less
dogmatic than the Dutch. You might say that I am as attracted to
Mondrian as to batik and, in this, I would say that the work is an
oscillation between the two.
Exhibition in Osaka, 1970s. Midoni-Kan (Astrorama) - Architect:
Yoshiro Ohbayashi

Exhibition in Osaka, 1970s. Toshibia IHI pavilion - Designed by Kisho

Kurokawa

Is this also why you are interested in Asia? Im thinking

particularly of your collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist
on the book Project Japan: Metabolism Talks ?

Yes, in particular China and Japan are very important countries for
me. Japan, for being the first non-Western country where there was
an architectural avant-garde. My interest in Metabolism is an
interest in how globalisation rearranged architectural areas of
initiative, in the sense that you can no longer claim that the Western
city is the model that fits all. I was interested in how this end of the
Western hegemony was already announced in Japan in the 60s.

Your work in China has been somewhat controversial, due

mainly to assumptions that are made in the West about
what might be called the clients values. How do you
respond to criticism regarding your engagement with
communist China?
The CCTV Building, OMA
Of course we do not participate in any project where we
fundamentally reject the values of the client. We interpret the
clients values, not always in a literal way.

In the case of China, I had visited it for the first time in 1995, years
before the CCTV competition in 2002. Working with Harvard
students, I had developed more or less an understanding of what
was going on and where the country was moving. This led me to the
political conviction that all of us have a huge stake in how things
develop in China. It is incredibly stupid for Europe to point fingers
and insist on Europe as the only model of democratic behaviour.

After the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there were a lot of
expectations that the world would turn into a seamless tapestry of
market economy and liberalism, which to me was clearly not going
to happen. On the contrary, what became obvious was that the
market economy would be joined by a very diverse patchwork of
different systems and different degrees of democracy. So essentially
I said yes, not so much to CCTV, but to participation in the
development of China.

I was confident that the Chinese media would, in parallel, change a

lot as well. Now CCTV has an English channel, which in itself means
that it has to be more global and engage meaningfully in a global
English-speaking world. Interestingly, the fire that happened in the
adjacent TVCC building contributed to the modernisation of the
media, because for the first time they apologised to the Chinese
public and they had no choice but to convey their own disaster as a
news story.
Rotterdam building by OMA
Photographer: Ossip can Duivenbode
You mention research, and how it preceded and informed
your approach to CCTV. With regards to De Rotterdam,
can you describe the connections between it and research,
perhaps even back toDelirious New York?

I am hesitant to claim that the connections are direct. I write for

myself, whereas the projects are of course a collective endeavour. I
also dont want the work to be an illustration of a theory. However it
is true that New York alerted me to some of the potentials of vertical
organisation and to some extent this has informed this building. The
massing of De Rotterdam would be unthinkable without the
buildings of such architects as Wallace Harrison.
The RockefellerCenter, to name one example, also shares the sense
of uniformity, which is a key element in De Rotterdam.

The site on Wilhelmina Pier is obviously deeply historical.

I am happy you say that because very few people realise that
emptiness can be deeply historical. So yes, context is very important
in relation to this building. Of course only 60 years ago Rotterdam
was effectively a three-kilometre crater of nothingness in the centre
of the city. This has created a unique situation, where now the
periphery is old and the centre is new.

Contrary to many other cities across Europe that simply had to

repair things that still existed, Rotterdam had to start from scratch.
This explains why Rotterdam is the city of architects, because there
was so much work to be done after the war. It is also the reason why
Rotterdam is, for a modest-sized city, a city of large scale.

At first, after the war, Rotterdam was a model, as they built an

entirely modern city according to the architecture of the moment,
consisting of slabs of fairly regular modern typologies, with a lower
weaving of retail on the ground floor. This lasted through the 50s
and 60s. In the 70s the first hesitations came. There was an attempt
to create so-called humanistic cities, based on irregular patterns,
different geometries, smaller scale and more cellular entities. Then
there was a kind of modest Postmodernism. So we are now the
fourth layer of projection in this history, and with all those layers my
greatest sympathy lies with the first iteration. Therefore the building
tries to resonate and investigate how it could bring that vision
further and how it could become the next iteration of that vision.

De Rotterdam had a long gestation period. Why so

protracted?

It started in the late 90s, working for developers who made

continual adjustments to the programme mix of housing,
commercial offices, hotel. So we decided that we needed something
that could survive all those changes. We developed an idea around a
group of independent blocks where each had a shifting relationship
to the other. This generated a building with a richness of silhouettes
as you move through the city.
The Skyscaper as a utopian device for the production of unlimited
numbers of virgin sites on a single metropolitan location - 1909

The building is essentially four combined towers rising

from a podium. It was completed soon after CCTV and just
before the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. For a man who has
declared his antipathy for the tower, youre doing a lot of
them.

In content I declared death to the skyscraper, which was obviously a

joke. At that time the skyscraper became simply a race for the tallest
building, with the same boring mix of Armani hotel, corporate office
etc. I basically thought that that kind of approach was really done. In
a certain way CCTV is emphatically not about height, but about
doing more than trying to consume a site. Its trying to establish an
urban territory. De Rotterdam is also trying to do the same. It is an
effort to establish a bridgehead between the main city and an area
that was formerly a part of the harbour and from which industry has
disappeared. It became a ghost town until the city developed a vision
to develop it, first building the Eramus Bridge by UNStudio. There
remain a few historic buildings, and over the years a few towers have
risen. But there was never enough critical mass or activity.
So I see it less as an isolated city in itself, a vertical city if you will,
than as a contribution to a genuinely urban condition on that island.

The Architecture international exhibition: the Venice Biennale

Returning to Venice, for 2014 you have curated a Biennale

that focuses on the the inevitable elements of all
architecture. Can say more about the forensic way you
have pulled apart the contents of all architecture, as you
describe it?
I have, in the past, written a lot about the city and the shifting ways
that cities are seen. When I started practising architecture, the
Western city was considered the measure of all things. I tried to
create an openness to the situation in other countries. Now, after all
these years, for me it is interesting to look at pure architecture
features.

We live in a very flat digital world in which everything is accessible

but increasingly there is less and less memory. We are, you might
say, condemned to the perpetual present. So I thought it was
important to go back, to show the incredible richness that has been
associated with what are now seemingly banal elements doors,
windows, stairs, walls. I want to make a statement about how much
history our profession still contains, and how many latencies and
unconscious expectations there still are. It is, I think, a history that
we are barely aware of.

To this end, we have had a team of students working within AMO

researching these 12 elements: floor, door, wall, ceiling, toilet,
facade, balcony, window, corridor, hearth, roof and stair.

The bible-sized book that is being produced for the

Biennale appears to be walking a tightrope. Its technical,
but not a manual. Its historic, but not a history book. It
contains theory, but is not a theory book. Its trying hard
not to be located in any genre.

Exactly. And that you can say is a kind of general reflex.

You have a cadre of Harvard students assisting with

research for the book. Having them embedded within AMO
is very different from the typical architectural education.

I am very lucky that Harvard is interested in that model. It started in

1995 when I started teaching there. We were about to start work on a
project looking at the rehabilitation of a pier in Boston. I looked
around at the students and saw a number of people who had already
had careers in different areas one had been involved in urbanism,
another in shipping and so on. I began to realise that the traditional
role of the teacher, who has knowledge that he conveys to people
who dont have that knowledge, needed to be drastically revised.
As a direct result of globalisation, each student had knowledge that I
didnt. So I reversed the dynamic and said, you are experts and with
your expertise I want to look at different subjects. It is now adjusted
slightly as I have the luxury of choosing students. So, in assembling a
team it has become like casting a movie.

The Y2K house (elevation) - Image courtesy OMA

The Y2K house (plan)- Image courtesy OMA

Besides your oscillation between Mondrian and batik, as it
were, Im interested in another oscillation, between the
Casa daMsica and Seattle Public Library. Former
principal of OMA New York, Joshua Prince-Ramus, has
described the concert hall as determinedly irrational and
the library as a kind of hyper-rationalised organisation. Is
this an accurate description?

Its always slightly disconcerting to hear my former collaborators

describe the projects. I have to say that one thing that is rarely
discussed is how big the influence of forces other than the architect
is on the architectural project. The economy is an obvious example,
but there are other examples, such as how a project is
commissioned. When a project starts as a design competition, you
have to overwhelm the client from the first moment with a fully
fledged project. On the other hand, when a project is a direct
commission, you are typically involved in a much more collaborative
effort to work with the client or trustees and in that case, the idea
of overwhelming with a single idea almost never works. So that is a
difference that is totally independent of the architect and can have a
huge effect on the outcome.

In Seattle, we had been directly commissioned and our process had

to appear, at least, to be very linear and very rational. At the same
time we were working on the competition for the Casada Msica. I
had done a project for a house for a family, where the client said we
dont really like each other, so we each need our own part of the
house and then a place where we can get together if we want to. It
was a challenging proposition, which we thought was negative at
first, but was actually quite inspiring. But every time I presented the
house, the client keep pulling back and resisting the design. At the
same time we were doing this competition in Porto and I was getting
increasingly desperate to get an idea. Then I realised that, if we
multiplied the scale of this house we were working on by five or six,
the space that we had designed for the family to get together would
work perfectly as a concert hall. We simply took the idea and
enlarged it. It was a purely intuitive leap, which we subsequently
won the competition with.

All of which is to say that the comparison of these two projects is less
a question of being torn between two languages but rather a
consequence of working within two completely different situations
within which projects are generated.

Batik is the most develloped traditionnal indonesian art form, with

many patterns and repetitious dots.

Few architects are willing to acknowledge the conditions

that impact on architectural outcomes, which often lie
outside the architects control. Why is that?

The profession has an investment in the idea that the architect has
superhuman powers. It is totally counterproductive, because it cuts
off any real communication between the architect and the public.
When we put ourselves on a pedestal it makes any engagement with
other aspects of the profession almost impossible. Since I am
interested in communication and I write, I like to understand what
the real issues are, and what the changing conditions are.

For architecture the conditions have changed more in the last 30

years than they changed in the previous two centuries, yet we still
act as if its the same profession. There have been radical changes to
so many things, such as computing power, engineering and the
relationship between architect and client, yet we persist as if we are
still old pipe-smoking gentlemen.

In the 60s and 70s the public sector was very strong, but in recent
decades that has given way to various forms of market economy.
This has enormously changed the conditions in which architecture
can be produced. In the first instance, the architect was expected to
do things for the public benefit. Now we are expected to broadcast
the interests of individuals or corporations. So, although we still
maintain the core values and ambitions of what architecture can do,
this change has radically transformed the architects work.

Is that shift from public to private interests connected to

the circumstances that led to the connection between
practice and brand?

The profession has become entangled with that kind of thinking, but
there is branding and branding. The Anglo-Saxon version of
branding means you try to reduce something to its essence and then
ram that essence down everyones throat. And at a certain time, that
essence becomes a prison and you cannot change anything. But
maybe there are also more subtle forms of branding that are based
on contradiction or unpredictability. Our office has an affinity with
that approach.

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