![]() It allows me to be irresponsible and to invest in my work.” “But as an architect I think this is a strength. “I’ve absolutely never thought about money or economic issues,” Koolhaas said. To Koolhaas, this seems to be an acceptable trade-off. The firm invests an enormous amount of time and money in projects that will never get built. The process allows for creative freedom, since a client isn’t hovering, but it’s also risky. Unlike most architects of his stature, Koolhaas participates in many competitions. Models of various projects, some so big you could step inside them, were scattered everywhere. On the Sunday morning we met, a dozen or so architects sat silently at long worktables in front of their computers. Housed in a brawny concrete and glass building, his office is arranged in big, open floors, like a factory. 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. 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. It’s a weird combination of having faith and having no faith.” Then I try to find ways in which change can be mobilized to strengthen the original identity. I kind of automatically embrace the change. “We are surrounded by crisismongers who see the city in terms of decline. “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. If Koolhaas’ urban work has a unifying theme, it is his vision of the metropolis as a world of extremes-open to every kind of human experience. 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. 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. His restless nature has led him to unexpected subjects. Along the way, he has written half a dozen books on the evolution of the contemporary metropolis and designed master plans for, among other places, suburban Paris, the Libyan desert and Hong Kong. Koolhaas has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles in search of commissions. Not since Le Corbusier mapped his vision of the Modernist city in the 1920s and ’30s has an architect covered so much territory. Yet Koolhaas’ most provocative-and in many ways least understood-contribution to the cultural landscape is as an urban thinker. 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 artist-able to draw on a seemingly endless reservoir of ideas. The attraction lies, in part, in his ability to keep us off balance. Architects dig through his books looking for ideas students all over the world emulate him. A disproportionate number of the profession’s rising stars, including Winy Maas of the Dutch firm MVRDV and Bjarke Ingels of the Copenhagen-based BIG, did stints in his office. Koolhaas’ habit of shaking up established conventions has made him one of the most influential architects of his generation. (rejected) and an addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art that would loom over the existing landmark building like a cat pawing a ball of yarn (dropped). 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. 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. But Koolhaas, 67, has remained a first-rate provocateur who, even in our conservative times, just can’t seem to behave. Architects want to build, and as they age most are willing to tone down their work if it will land them a juicy commission. Rem Koolhaas has been causing trouble in the world of architecture since his student days in London in the early 1970s. ![]()
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