Tuesday, 8 October 2024

Rem Koolhaas

Inside the world and brain of the last truly great architect. A superinterview in three parts.

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The Dutch architecture giant and founder of OMA/AMO inspires a whole issue of Fantastic Man that delves into his new mega fixation: the countryside. The topic forms the basis of his huge show at the Guggenheim in New York and, like all Rem’s grand ideas, it’s poised to be paradigm shifting. What happens outside cities? Why don’t we look there, live there, build there more often? Is urbanism over? Will the countryside be the key to the future of planet earth? Here, in a humongous three-stage profile, Remment Lucas Koolhaas (Rotterdam, 1944) and his intricately organised life and career are seriously investigated and digested.

From Fantastic Man n° 31 – 2020
Text by EMILY KING
Photography by BLOMMERS/SCHUMM (portraits)
KUBA RYNIEWICZ (Rem in Qatar)
MARK PECKMEZIAN (Rem at the Rotterdam office)

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1. THOROUGHLY KOOLHAAS

It begins. Over a period of months, the author of this story monitors the ins and outs and particularities of the architect’s every movement to answer the possibly unanswerable: What is Rem Koolhaas?

Rem Koolhaas’s way of being in the world engenders stories. My favourite in print is from a 2005 profile in ‘The New Yorker’ when Rem gets impatient with a driver who has shown up 20 minutes late. “Koolhaas had fumed while the driver placed his jacket in the trunk, then suddenly fired him, jumping in the front seat and speeding away with the jacket. ‘Revenge,’ he said, chuckling.”

Before I met him for this article, I had my own story. Back in 2006 I went to a talk by Italian designer Enzo Mari in the Serpentine Pavilion, which had been designed that year by Rem’s firm OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture). Mari deserves a heap of respect, but in later life he has become a bit of a windbag. There we were, perched on the painfully uncomfortable foam cubes with which OMA had chosen to furnish the pavilion, with a chill wind whistling through its flimsy structure (to be fair, the budget for the project is close to zilch), listening to Mari extemporise at length. Rem was sitting immediately behind me and chose to rest his glass of red wine on the edge of my foam block, so that the smallest fidget from me would send it flying. Then, apparently as bored as I, he started to bitch loudly about the temperature of the pavilion. Sat upright and rigid, I did think, “Well, if there’s one person in here who might be considered responsible…!”

PITHY

In Amsterdam to see Rem give a talk to an audience of Dutch CEOs in the course of writing this piece, I took part in what might be the birth of yet another tale. Rem was sharing the bill with super sharp ‘Financial Times’ journalist Gillian Tett. His entourage included not just me, but also writer Sander Pleij, who is undertaking a substantial book about the architect. Gillian’s amusement was palpable. I sensed the forming of an anecdote in which Rem moves with a flotilla of profilers.

Sander describes his book – working title: ‘The Rem Koolhaas-method’ – as an “antibiography,” an account that eschews the normal biographical pegs such as childhood experience and early adult life and instead prefers biological evidence, for example DNA tests and MRI scans. Sadly, I didn’t get to share these insights, but Sander did lend me a theory that he is “playing around with,” which contends that among Rem’s defining qualities is his awkwardness. Sander had watched Rem being photographed before the start of the talk and described a scenario in which Rem had been unable to negotiate a relationship with the Dutch-orange cushions that were casually strewn over the onstage sofa. The sharp angles that Rem’s legs assume as he descends towards a soft seat are remarkable. He is not a natural lounger, and I imagine that cushions play little part in his life. Paying no heed to the fact that these accessories were likely carefully considered, brand-appropriate props, Sander reported that Rem shuffled them out of shot one by one. Rem’s physical awkwardness is matched with a measure of discomfort in his social interactions. His conversation is not stilted, but there is a grain to it. Sander argues this instinctive and inescapable awkwardness allows Rem to pursue paths that are not smooth. Lacking a natural sense of ease, Rem is not tempted to go easy.

But in conversation, Rem is pithy and quotable, to the extent that he regularly admits to quoting himself. His forte is intimate discussion and, as such, he rarely gives talks in large arenas and shuns the TED circus. At the lecture in Amsterdam, while Gillian Tett moulded her presentation into the kinds of aphorism that CEOs might remember (“It’s all about trust,” apparently), Rem talked as he might one-to-one, almost meandering through a presentation that took in destinations as distant and diverse as Lagos and Nevada. The high-gloss framing of the event was not the best fit for him, and the 30-minute presentation was not the best format for the vastness and complexity of the information he was presenting, yet he was notably confident with the crowd, which included influential Dutch business people and a smattering of present and former politicians. Introducing the speakers, a bumptious MC character offered a few unsolicited tips for onstage address by way of a warm-up, among them to not cross your arms defensively over your body. When Rem later sat down to be interviewed by said MC, I was delighted to see that he did just that.

When I first met Rem, he had, by coincidence, just had his brain scanned for Sander’s book. Convening in an anonymous hotel in Amsterdam, along with his driver, Greg Vyner, we paused for a coffee before setting off to the OMA office in Rotterdam. Rem was wearing the same slim-cut, dark-toned Prada separates topped with his signature three-quarter-length coat that he seems to be in whenever he’s interviewed or photographed. Scissored onto a small wooden chair in the lobby, his pleasingly anachronistic Blackberry on the marble coffee table nearby, he downed his cappuccino at double speed before making for the car. Rem has complained about journalists forever writing about how fast he walks, but he does walk very fast. His pace is a major feature of ‘Rem’, a documentary made by his son, Tomas Koolhaas, released in 2016. For a large part of the film’s 75 minutes, Rem strides in front of the camera, his coat flapping as he goes.

Rem also processes information extremely fast. At the top of our first conversation he launched into an analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s designation of NATO as braindead, a story that had blown up in the press only hours before we met. I was yet to engage with any kind of news that day, but Rem had already decided that the French president’s statement was “the first step to the liberation of Europe” from the “decadent” domain of the Atlantic. Rem absorbs his information traditionally, his assistants collating a stack of international papers each morning. For all his mental velocity, he is still happy to accommodate the lag before a story makes it into print.

PING-PONG

While Rem is fluent around power, his immediate circle feels like extended family. His driver, Greg, is a skater, and it took me a while to spot him when he picked me up at Schiphol Airport as I was looking for a chauffeur’s suit, not a graphic hoodie. Greg has worked with Rem for many years. OMA’s executive manager and Rem’s de facto assistant Rita VARJABEDIAN arrived at the firm in the months leading up to the Venice Biennale that Rem curated in 2014. She and he tend to speak French together, the shift away from the dominant English appearing to be a moment of respite. Rita has the monumental task of masterminding Rem’s intricate and incessant travel schedule according to a complex and ever-shifting equation of priorities. “It’s always a game of ping-pong,” she said. “The real magician is his travel agent, ANNE-MariE, because she can make anything happen.” Rem’s plans are ever-fluid, solidifying only in the moment that events come to pass. Our first meeting took three tries before it actually transpired, and I consider myself lucky. Accepting the uncertainty of Rem’s schedule is the price of entry into his orbit.

Once you finally get your audience, you are made to feel that you have been absorbed into the circle. In the car with Rem, conversation ranges from Macron and NATO to the degradation of politics, the hypocrisy embedded in Western notions of freedom and democracy, the environmental crisis and onward. Rem seems at his most relaxed when in transit. Many of the published interviews with him have taken place in cars and, in a 2014 magazine profile that was the preamble to Sander Pleij’s current book, he reports Rem saying that his favourite working space is chair 1-A in a Boeing. While horizontal sofas and their attendant cushions might cause Rem’s elbows and knees to assume odd angles, forward-facing vehicular seating fits him just fine.

SMALL TALK

“I tell an architectural journalist that I sort of like Rem. He tells me how good Rem is at making you feel close to him,” wrote Sander. According to Rita, “Rem is a chameleon, a shape shifter throughout the day. Today he will be a teacher, the boss, the project leader, a friend.” I will happily admit to being suckered by the act – Rem’s spontaneous and thoughtful engagement with my journalistic and conversational sallies and his curiosity about me and my family’s lives were hard to resist. In 2018 architect and writer Jack Self launched a damning article in the ‘Architectural Review’ with the claim that “Rem Koolhaas does not do small talk.” Jack’s wrong; he does, but likely only when it suits.

The thrust of the Architectural Review piece is that Rem’s career is a case study in the systematic and ruthless ascent to power, but the takeaway is that some of Rem’s fellow architects are provoked by the longevity and breadth of his influence. Architecture is a highly competitive profession, with formal competitions ramping up personal rivalries, but Rem, more than any other architect, does seem to inspire wariness. That might simply be because OMA enters an enormous number of said competitions, so the chance a big-name architect has been shortlisted against the firm at some point is very high. It might also have something to do with his talent for ambiguity. Oftentimes Rem seems to be having his theoretical cake while eating his practical one too, which must be galling if you are operating at the same table.

Attempting to map how Rem became Rem, Jack Self describes the tendency of others “to focus on inconsequential details” like “why he swims every morning” as “futile, as well as supremely naive.” I took this as licence to attempt to get a swim in with Rem, but although I turned up to every meeting with my suit in my bag, no dice. Rem has said you can tell a lot about a person by the way they move in water, but I wasn’t going to get that opportunity. I did meet someone who had, however. Carol Patterson, an OMA architect from the US who lives in London, used to coincide with Rem in the lanes at the YMCA in Bloomsbury. She described his style as slow and steady, which, though not the way you would characterise him in any other field, perhaps offers some underlying truth. For all the dazzle of its output, the OMA project is underpinned by dogged persistence.

My conversation with Rem had just reached Soviet-era Russian architecture when we arrived at OMA’s building in Rotterdam. Greg pulled into an internal car park and we climbed a small staircase to the office itself. Immediately after we arrived, Rem was drawn into meetings, so I was put in the charge of Sander Manse, one of the six-person in-house PR department. The firm’s relatively new premises are spread sparsely over one very spacious floor of a late 1960s brutalist building designed by Huig Maaskant, the architect responsible for reconstructing much of the city after the bombs of the Second World War.

The finishes in the office are minimal – raw ceilings, strip lights, grey vinyl floor, white tables – and the general demeanour of its seemingly very young staff is equally understated – black tops and trousers predominate, a white shirt acts as a flourish (a notable exception here is Rita, who has a predilection for bright colours that is particularly effective against the muted tones of her colleagues). The average age of the 250 OMA employees in Rotterdam is apparently 34, but when I joined them for lunch in the dining room on a mezzanine level above the office it appeared a decade younger. Assembling a salad for myself, with the addition of a hard-boiled egg (Sander told me that protein sources are varied through the week), I felt like I was in the canteen of an extremely international university. Rem usually has take-out sandwiches over meetings, only eating communally if, say, his grandson is in the house.

After lunch I was invited to join a meeting between Rem and the team working on the exhibition ‘Countryside, The Future’. Launched at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in February and running until August, the exhibition takes up the entirety of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building’s spiralled rotunda, and its scale of focus – the “radical changes,” both architectural and anthropological, taking place in the 98 per cent of planet earth that is not occupied by cities – could potentially set the agenda for much of Rem’s work in the years to come.

In an origin story for the project that Rem has told in various lectures, it all began with trips to the house in the Swiss Alps that belongs to the parents of Koolhaas’s partner, Petra Blaisse, a landscape and interiors designer, which he has visited regularly for the past 20 years. One day he realised he could no longer smell cows in the village and decided something must be up. Then he met a man he assumed was an indigenous farmer, but discovered was in fact a disillusioned nuclear scientist retired from Frankfurt. Next, he realised that the people taking care of the local meadows and cleaning the weekend houses of city dwellers were, typically, from Southeast Asia. “Visiting the same place two or three times a year allowed me to observe the changes very slowly, even without knowing I was observing,” Rem told me. “Once I was alert to it, it became almost like a laboratory. That was really the beginning in terms of my own conversion-slash-discovery.”

PERMAFROST

While the multifaceted exploration behind Rem’s rural turn has been bubbling up to a greater or lesser extent for more than a decade since his revelation in rural Switzerland, the biggest hook was the announcement in 2007 that 50 percent of the world’s population was already living in cities – that’s half the world’s people crammed into 2 per cent of its landmass. The time frame of the project overall is not so much that of a conventional exhibition – even the curators of the monumental recurring show Documenta in Kassel in Germany only have a five-year lead – but more a period associated with a major building. When I was in Rotterdam, however, the opening was only ten weeks away, a period that encompassed the two-week Christmas break, and there was a frenetic sense of fleeting seconds.

Those working on the exhibition are deemed to be part of AMO, OMA’s in-house research arm. In the meeting, the office felt as much like a school as it had in the dining room, albeit one with an unusually high pressure to deliver. You could criticise it as a research sweatshop, but the long hours and high pressure are common to most architectural offices. The discussion followed Rem’s rhythm and, when he felt something had been talked about enough, the room moved on in an instant. There was a sense of everyone being on their toes – literally in some cases: while Rem sat, quite a few of the participants stayed on their feet – but I saw no confrontation or anxiety. Journalists sitting in on Rem’s meetings with younger colleagues often report nerves, colour creeping up necks and the like, and mentions of Rem’s anger are common, with even his son’s film showing him snapping at a journalist. I felt warranted in asking what had changed. Without a hint of denial, he dismissed anger as a “style.” “There was a moment that big displays of emotion and temperament were considered acceptable,” he said, “and I think that it’s very clear that they are no longer.”

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The ‘Countryside’ exhibition is co-curated by Rem and Samir Bantal, the architect who has been the director of AMO since 2016. Although Samir wasn’t in on the day I visited, there were hordes of his young researchers, many more than had joined the meeting, in the part of the office devoted to concepts rather than buildings. With Rem’s review over, I waded through the piles of papers and books around their desks to ask a few questions. There was material spanning thawing permafrost in the Siberian tundra, server farms in Nevada, vast health spas in Switzerland, dairy production in Qatar, Chinese investment in rural Africa, and on it went. The volume of material that has built up around the team, the printouts pinned layers deep on every available wall, tell of the vast scope and potentially preposterous ambition of the ‘Countryside’ project. (The whole countryside! Really?!) I found it daunting to look at.

A kindly AMO-er spared a couple of minutes to show me some of the films that will be included in the exhibition, and I settled in to watch a seductive sequence on pixel farming, a possible industry-changing agricultural practice being pioneered in the Netherlands whereby farmland is carefully divided into small squares – one square per plant – much like screens are divided into pixels. The crops are monitored by self-driving robots that use sensors and an awful lot of data to give each plant the precise amount of water and fertiliser it needs to maximise crop yields. Another film showed endless aerial shots of Midwestern cornfields that form part of a vast corridor of near-continuous farmland that stretches north to south across the entire length of the United States. It was 5.55pm and I had heard we were getting back in the car to Amsterdam at 6pm, but Rem showed no signs of disengaging, so, unlike everyone around me, I was relaxed. Then, at 5.59pm, all of a sudden we were off. Greg was sprinting to the car park carrying various bags and a pile of newspapers, Rem was a couple of metres behind, and it was all I could do to grab my coat and dash after them.

I had hoped that Rem would be driving, as he often does when he is interviewed – indeed, in Fantastic Man’s previous profile of him written in 2007, Susie Rushton tells of a “hair-raising spin in (Rem’s) black 1998 BMW 840.” Greg drove this time, but happily, the opportunity did arise later: after another day of interviewing, when Rem was driving himself and Rita to Rotterdam, he offered to take me to Schiphol Airport on the way. We got into that same two-door BMW, but the roads were quiet and we proceeded at a pace that left my locks smooth against my scalp. Rem remarked on the beauty of the lowering indigo-clouded sky – much superior, he said, to a conventionally nice day. Hardly boy-racer material, but I was glad, nonetheless, to have experienced Rem at the wheel.

SATNAV

On our way back to Amsterdam that first evening, Greg driving, we stopped briefly in a residential street where his daughter, Charlie, lives. Rem might dictate the terms at OMA/AMO, but I sense his relationship with his immediate family, in particular Charlie, involves more negotiation. Charlie is a photographer who grew up in north London, where Rem’s former wife, Madelon Vriesendorp, still lives, but is now based in Rotterdam. We picked up Charlie’s young son, who was going to be spending the night with Rem and Petra. It was a passing encounter, Charlie strapping her boy into the car, yet we were all bathed in her emphatic charisma. Regarding the grandson, I am banned from writing anything, in particular from using the word doting (“I hate that word,” said Rem), but I will risk saying that the kid has inherited the gene for good conversation.

A chatty hour or so later, still in rush hour, we arrived in Amsterdam. Rem called on Greg to second-guess the satnav and we made a few traffic-defying U-turns before reaching Rem’s door among a beautiful row of houses designed by “Amsterdam School” architect Hijman Louis de Jong. It was dark and drizzling and, very sweetly, Greg offered to drive me on to my hotel.

GO-TO

The following day I joined another meeting in OMA’s Amsterdam office, effectively a single room not far from Rem’s home. In attendance were Niklas Maak, a Berlin-based writer who, like Rem, teaches at Harvard’s Graduate Design School; Stephan Petermann, an OMA architect who co-teaches with Rem at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing; and James Westcott, a freelance editor from London who has worked with Rem on several publications. The office is dominated by a large meeting table at its centre, and unlike AMO’s space, its walls are virtually empty. Rita bought us all lunch from Le Pain Quotidien (Rem ate quiche at speed) and the mood was notably more collegial than that in Rotterdam. An hour or so in, Rem’s long-time friend and graphic design go-to Irma Boom arrived in a whirl of nicely textured textiles, long brown hair and a snap of red lipstick. The warmth in the room went up a notch.

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Rem and Irma were first introduced by graphic designer Michael Rock in the late 1990s. Rem had just published ‘S,M,L,XL’, a vast compendium documenting 20 years of OMA projects arranged by size, and Irma had recently designed ‘SHV Think Book 1996–1896’, an extraordinary exposition of a corporate archive on roughly the same scale as Rem’s magnum opus. Rock believed that the authors of these two big books must meet, and the pair have worked together ever since. “It’s become a really fertile collaboration,” said Rem. “Irma is a really incredible editor – she becomes smarter with every single step.” She is overseeing the graphic design of both the exhibition and the catalogue of ‘Countryside, The Future’.

In this meeting there was time for circumstantial chat and storytelling. Niklas, whose slightly unkempt appearance seems to be the product of his whirring brain, talked of a recent trip to Osaka where he had given a talk to robotic engineers. Apparently, robot therapists are becoming a thing there, as some Japanese prefer to confide in machines. Niklas is the primary author of a chapter in the ‘Countryside’ book and the part of the exhibition concerning the buffer zone between Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and its human settlements. Intended to minimise the contact between the gorillas that inhabit the park and people, the buffer zone gives rise to a culture all its own. I was shown a film of gorilla interaction that felt more like something produced by David Attenborough than OMA. “Some of the films have an inherent beauty; some of them are really touching, or really dramatic. I’m moved by them,” said Rem. “Everyone is bored by statistics and classic infographics material, so we’ve been very careful to exploit the fact that the countryside is relatively unknown, and to harvest, so to speak, visual material that is not about information pure and simple, but also has its own power and impact.”

Meanwhile, Stephan told us that in China schemes are afoot to dole out benefits to the best-performing members of society. Apparently, this is measured, in part, by the purchase of equipment such as work boots, hence people have realised they can game the system by purchasing superfluous tools merely to bump up their scores. Arguing that this kind of engagement with the state has the side effect of sharpening the mind, he demonstrated a Rem-like propensity to insist that everything that is ostensibly bad, might, in fact, be good.

James Westcott, a lightly bearded Brit with an Extinction Rebellion sticker covering the Apple logo on his laptop, questioned Rem as to whether something he had written about his own interactions with the countryside sounded a little “Marie-Antoinettish.” Rem acknowledged the criticism, but went with the risk of appearing the naively entitled urbanite.

I get the sense that Rem is revealing more of himself in ‘Countryside’ than he has in past projects, not that he’s prepared to admit it. When I asked whether the research has roots in his own biography, his own desire to be outside cities as he gets older, his reply was typically unequivocal but open-ended: “Maybe that is true, but there is no point in reading it that way. I’ve always been good in projecting my own biography in terms of larger issues, or hiding my biography under different issues.”

2. QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Rem Koolhaas sits down for a one-to-one meeting in Amsterdam. The architect is kept in a room for a good hour or so where he discusses the future of everything and whether he will ever slow down. Frankness contained within.

It was the morning after Rem’s talk to an auditorium of CEOs, and the last I had seen of him, he was making a quick exit from a poseur-table-dotted atrium of men in suits eating effortful bowl food. This morning he was wearing much the same outfit as he had the night before – slim trousers, dark knitted top – with the addition of a black wool beanie that he took off as soon as he was out of the cold. It was just the two of us in the office and, with an embarrassment of seat options around the large central table, it took a couple of tries to manoeuvre ourselves into optimal conversing positions. His colleague Rita Varjabedian joined us soon after and offered to buy coffees for both of us and get the newspapers for Rem. Rem suggested he didn’t need the coffee, but she bought him a cappuccino anyway.

Sat side by side on the longer side of the table, we began by negotiating the subject matter.

EMILY: We’re talking before your show ‘Countryside, The Future’ opens at the Guggenheim in New York, but this Q&A will be published after, so I would like it to be a case of: “So, now that’s over, what’s next?”

REM: So that’s what we’re talking about now? Yes. I was thinking, your life falls into three chapters so far, of roughly 25 years each: the preamble, the early career, then the success. I was wondering what you were planning to do over the fourth chapter, the next 25 years. Ah, I gave a lecture at the Bocconi School of Management in Milan, and actually we produced a graph of our career. You should see it. It’s entertaining: there’s a struggling-artist moment. Rita can find it for you.

I would love to see that.
 
[Rita starts looking for the timeline]
 

The graph is both true and untrue, of course. It’s part fiction, but it does show the main phases and the pattern. In the lecture I tried to be explicit about what each phase offers, and also what are its limits, what sabotages it – what is credible in one phase becomes no longer credible in another.

Related to that, would you have been happy never building? Did you need your architectural success, or would you have been content just to write and teach?

That’s a good question. I think the answer is no, not because I actually know what the answer is, but because I cannot imagine that I would have spent so much time, used so much energy, had so much patience for anything other than building. More than anything, a building needs patience. I’m thinking of the patience I needed – and still need – for CCTV (the monumental Beijing headquarters of China’s state broadcasting company, completed by OMA in 2012) and for what we are doing now in Taipei (the Taipei Performing Arts Center), the patience to build even small houses. I think that’s a really fundamental satisfaction.

Has the time frame for architecture changed? Does it need even more patience now? Or has it always been this way?

I think it has always been the case. But also, we tend to do – or I tend to do – things that are complex, projects that address complex demands or complex political situations.

You appreciate the patience, but is the time frame ever frustrating?

There’s a huge amount of randomness in any architect’s career. You cannot control what you do. It’s determined by other initiatives, other people, moments over which you have no influence. I think you can probably say that, as a human being, I have welcomed a certain amount of randomness and engagement with chance, but at the same time, I’ve also wanted something more solid, something of which I was more in control. I’m thinking of writing on the one hand and architecture on the other hand: both forms of engagement are profoundly satisfying. Architecture has the effect of not being in control, having to improvise and learning from improvising, and also engaging with completely random situations and random places, which in itself is deeply exciting. Writing, on the other hand – systematically learning things that you don’t already know – is also exciting. So, if you ask if I would only be satisfied with one, I think the answer is no.

Working as an architect, do you feel as if you’re at the beck and call of others to the extent that it’s a problem?

Umm. I feel that time is like barcode with very distinct moments. There are totally compressed moments and other, more expanded moments. It can have a kind of staccato rhythm. Maybe 20 years ago I was much more at the mercy of my situation. Now, I think that I am not ever in control, but I am able to control more or less, or to manage.

Was setting up AMO, your own in-house research arm, a means of getting control?

Definitely. Obviously in AMO we are much more in control of what we are doing. We have our own agenda, and I think that is the hardest thing for an architect to do. It’s not always necessary, but it’s desirable. To have an agenda on the one hand and, on the other hand, to be open to the initiatives of others: that’s the most productive combination. AMO came into being when I started teaching at Harvard in 1995. From then it was a slow burn, active when needed. What triggered it at the very start was designing a headquarters for Universal Studios in Hollywood: they’d defined their needs at the beginning, but after six months those needs had already completely changed. Architecture is a very slow medium, but we were trying to use it to address a phenomenon that was evaporating in front of our eyes, or mutating beyond recognition. At that point, I felt that we needed a way to be more alert and more able to assemble intelligence from different fields in order to respond. We needed to redefine what the architecture could be about. Then, teaching at Harvard enabled us to do various investigations regardless of what anyone else was asking us to do. One of the first things we worked on was ‘The Harvard Guide to Shopping’.

Was that before or after your meeting with Prada? (For nearly two decades OMA/AMO have worked continuously with Prada on shops, set design and the brand’s Prada Foundation in Milan. Their collaboration began with the Prada Epicenter shop in New York in 2001.)

We did it around the same time we met Prada. They came unannounced: Mrs. Prada, her husband and an American associate of theirs. We had never done a project like that before, but we were intellectually prepared to think about the issues because we’d already been conversing with the techniques of shopping. Then we did an initial study of what the possible issues could be, and it worked. But it was more or less a coincidence.

Thinking about needs: what were Prada’s needs?

They defined it very well. Basically: “We have green stores (when Prada approached OMA at the turn of the millennium, its stores were a very distinctive shade of light green), and we are becoming an international brand, but if the whole world is full of green stores, people will get bored. What do we need to do in this situation?” So, we said maybe it would work to have key moments that are not green stores, moments that are not predictable and not always commercial.

So, that’s a commercial need, but not a need of the shelter, nutrition, education kind. I suppose they’re different things.

Of course they are! One of the greatest forms of perplexity for me is that I’m considered by many people as an advocate of neoliberalism, even though in my writing, it’s very clear that I’m highly critical of it and definitely not an advocate. I’m an old-fashioned architect – I’m interested in needs, and also, if you actually look at our work, most of it is for public institutions, and not for developers, not for commercial entities. So there is a really weird difference between perception and reality. Of course, I am really interested in the impact of neoliberalism, and what it has caused and how it has transformed our world. In that sense, I think it’s a very weird case of killing the messenger, or at least hitting the messenger for the message.

(Rita brings the timeline, a graph printed over five sheets of A4 that documents Rem’s journey from “Starving Artist” to architect in “Retreat”)

Let’s be a bit more structured in the interview here: let’s look at the diagram. I haven’t seen it for a long time, but it’s divided into “Start-up,” “Take-off,” “Starchitect,” and then a kind of “Retreat.”

Looking here, I can see it all happened in 1995: the publication of ‘S,M,L,XL’ marks the moment between “Take-off” and “Starchitect.”

Yes, from that moment on we were really working against that typology (of the successful architect) as harshly or as intensely as we could.

Tell me about the last 20 years, the “Retreat?” What you’ve done since 2000 wouldn’t look like a retreat to anyone else.

The Retreat is, for instance, working more on various things to do with the EU (a multi-year-long study into the image and iconography of the European Union), and working more in Europe. But also our projects with AMO that have nothing to do with the commercial world, that are critical of the commercial world.

Are you suggesting that there was a five-year period between 1995 and 2000 when you became swept up in the notion of being a “Starchitect?”

No, not really. I never was swept up – I hated that whole thing. It’s more that it took me time to admit that.

How many people did you have working in your office at various points?

Let’s say here five (c. 1980), maybe eleven here (c. 1985), probably 40 here (c. 1990) and 200 here.

Two hundred in 1995?

Maybe 300. But that was also the point a kind of partnership began to form in OMA, which meant I was less dominant in the office, and also that I had a certain independence from the office.

Do you feel that the five years between 1995 and 2000 was also the time when you began to become more dependent on money because you took on more projects and your office grew?

I’ve always been totally indifferent to money. Supposedly that is typical of a person of my generation. It has been an incredible strength because, frankly, I’ve never worried about having mouths to feed or families to take responsibility for. I really never felt that was a part of the deal. I also think that in the earlier periods – although this may have changed now that I am not so much the centre of things – everyone who came to the office was profoundly aware that security was not part of the deal. If you were looking for that, you wouldn’t come to our office. In 1995, we almost went bankrupt, which was partly because I spent about seven months in Toronto, doing ‘S,M,L,XL’. So we almost went bankrupt, and then we got bought by another company, and then, after a while, we were able to buy ourselves back again.

The more I learn about architecture, the more I realise that almost every firm has been on the verge of bankruptcy at some point.

It’s an incredibly difficult profession in that sense. The essential thing with architecture, the paradox, is that your whole ingenuity and intelligence is invested in developing prototypes that will never be repeated. That feels really dumb, particularly in the current moment. Under socialism you could have spent your entire life working on the right kitchen plan, or the right prefabricated staircase, maybe. But we are in this limbo where we are not mass producing, and also, weirdly, not working for the masses. When you look at how people in other areas can rely on single ideas or repeatable elements and actually strike it really rich, it’s almost humiliating.

I do know some architects who are trying to create repeatable units that they can sell to big housing developers.

Of course, that’s something we all try to do.

Have you done that?

I am not doing it now.

What happened to the company in the crash of 2008? Did you ride it out?

2008, yes, we rode it. We could ride it out because we had work in many different countries, and being active in China really helped us. Also, our work in Qatar had started in 2007, so we were lucky in that sense. Even work in Europe was also relatively continuous. It was difficult, but we had seen it coming, so we had reduced our scale a little bit in advance.

Interesting, since so many other architects went down, or came close.

Yes, we were lucky. Part of it was foresight, the other part distribution.

Back to my earlier question: What happens next, from 2020 onwards?

Well, I think that now that I’m 75, this, the whole ‘Countryside’ project, is a big effort. And I’m still doing a number of important buildings, also on quite a big scale. But I hope and expect that it will open new directions or new territories where we can work as architects. I’m also considering whether I should try to work more intensely with a university in the Netherlands that is focused on agriculture (Wageningen University & Research). We’ve been working with them for the last three years, and that has given me a real appetite to learn more, and also an awareness of how incredibly crucial their work is, but how little it is talked about. This whole thing has not only been about getting away from the city, but also about trying to look at more fields where we can engage with a much wider range of interests, one of them being sustainability, obviously. There used to be an idea that, if you were really ingenious and if you could plan buildings really well, then the city is the only way to actually create a sustainable modern culture. I am not so sure about that any more. I think there are actually more opportunities and greater possibilities in the countryside.

As you said when we spoke before, the issue of sustainability is one that now underlies every discussion. In the architecture and the art worlds, we had almost made a virtue of the willingness to travel, to cross the world to see one exhibition, but that doesn’t look so great any more. Are you rethinking your own approach?

Of course, yes, that is definitely a big issue. On a personal level, I take the train whenever I can. I don’t fly in Europe if I can avoid it, and I also travel less. Although for ‘Countryside’, we travelled enormously.

I recently read an article that implied that the alternative to the art world’s constant travelling was for artists and curators to adopt a more nationalist point of view, which made me feel uncomfortable. Does globalism depend on flying? If we stop taking planes are we likely to become more nationalistic?

No, I don’t think so, but this is a constant dilemma. How can you behave better in terms of the environment without abandoning a whole series of ambitions that rely on a belief in a degree of globalisation and a belief in collaboration with other cultures? But I think that, probably, we should also not exaggerate. If one person travels to meet a hundred students in Africa, that’s probably an efficient way of interacting, right? Definitely more efficient than if all the students came here. You need to establish a difference between tokenism and the authentic improvement of your behaviour.

Do you think you could create a coherent scale to judge if a flight is worth taking?

Yes, I think so.

Does OMA have one yet?

It’s a work in progress and obviously continuously at the mercy of different forces, but if you compare what’s happening now to, let’s say, three years ago, there’s a considerable difference.

And in terms of your own life, are you entering a slightly more retired phase? Are you spending more time at home?

It’s not a retired phase, and I’m also not at home, but it’s more to do with other activities than simply being in the office. So, it would be writing or simply learning about different territories, trying to find new overlaps. It’s work, but it’s about changing the nature of that work, perhaps.

You initiated a succession plan at OMA some years ago, didn’t you? Have you been thinking for a while about how the other partners can operate independently?

It was definitely not a “succession plan,” but I wanted to avoid – or thought it would be smart to avoid – the model where the architect goes on and on until the end, when he has only a few doddering collaborators. I wanted to change the script. And, of course, changing that script gave me the freedom to define the exact intensity of engagement I want to have now.

Can you imagine OMA without you at all?

I can easily imagine it, but I don’t necessarily fantasise about it or think about what it would be. For the moment, it’s not an issue. It’s a very confident organisation right now and I want to keep it that way. I think that there’s very little anxiety in terms of either with or without me.

I hear that you sometimes collaborate with architects outside OMA, including smaller firms like Cookies. Is that about escaping the monolith that you have created?

No, but I do have a lot of collaborations outside the office. That’s been one of the strengths of the office, that there is a constant injection of people from outside. Certainly that is the strength of AMO. You’ve met Niklas MAAK, right? To work with a writer like that is incredible – a privilege but also fun. It’s crucial for a freshness and insight that I keep doing that. For me, whether people are in the office or not isn’t important. There are many offices that have their origins in OMA, or offices that we became entangled with at some point, and that, at any moment, we can do something together with.

A slightly trite question, but your name – Office for Metropolitan Architecture – might it feel like part of a bygone era now you are all about the countryside?

Well, the great thing is that we created an acronym and almost nobody knows its background any more. The two acronyms – OMA and AMO – have a sufficient ambiguity or lack of position that you can read anything into them.

For all its potential for ambiguity, I do think OMA implies an agenda.

Behind everything I do, there’s always a polemical intent. Polemics may be defined as not ever being happy with a situation as it is, always having a degree of ambition to change something. I’m deeply aware that it is a tone of voice and a mentality that is not particularly popular at the moment, even to the point that I was wondering whether Americans still understand what the word means. You know?

You are polemical, but also you tend to remain ambiguous, which is an interesting combination. You argue very forcefully, but it can be hard to know what you actually think.

For example, in the talk last night, I was really surprised to hear you being so unequivocally in favour of Emmanuel Macron, particularly given your views about neoliberalism – he is the arch neoliberal enemy for many French people. I know, and I understand that view, but I think in part, given the situation that Macron is in, that he is doing absolutely the right thing. I also mentioned Macron to provoke the Dutch, because they are so hedgy about anything to do with Europe. They are so happy to go to the EU and say, “We’re not paying a cent more for this!” or “We’re not going to be part of a European army!” They sit opportunistically on a fence, and they’ve been doing that since the 17th century.

Is that because, historically, the Dutch have always traded more with the rest of the world?

Yes.

A big question: what happens to Europe over the next five, ten, 25 years?

There was a European proposal for a deep engagement with Africa back in 1929, made by a German who suggested lowering the level of the Mediterranean and creating a bridge from Africa via Sicily to Europe. The project was to make the Sahara fertile using the water that was siphoned off of the sea. There is a big contrast between these kinds of ideas, and the paralysis we have now.

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Paralysis?

We need ideas like that, maybe not in that form, but it’s urgent that we create new alliances and new confederations.

True, but that feels like the opposite of what’s actually happening now. It feels like people are more interested in building walls.

In Europe and America, yes, but not in the rest of the world. That’s the interesting thing. If you see how China is building railways in Africa, in the end, maybe they will help us get out of our funk.

The relationship between China and Africa is not straightforward.

I had a South Sudanese Uber driver yesterday who explained the various factions – he was part of the NAS, the nationalist movement that has an army on the border with Congo. I asked him about the impact of the infrastructure that the Chinese were building, and he called them “devils.” Why did he call them “devils?” Did you ask?

Because of the feeling that the Chinese just come into a country with the sole intention of expanding their own network, establishing power and making money, with no interest in the local people.

Well, you can’t say that this is entirely untrue. We have huge expectations, a sense of mutual obligation, but maybe that is not particularly modern any more. We are all incredibly conflicted about immigration because we want to be good people, but, at the same time, with an immigrant we think, “Can he take a place in our society?” “Can he be accommodated in our schools?” “Can he live with our levels of tolerance?” But I think it’s possible to have a much lighter engagement. You can see it if you go to Dubai. You can be an Iranian in Dubai, you can be an Australian in Dubai, you can be whatever, but no one is wondering “Do you fit in our society?” because basically you don’t. And you know you don’t, so it’s not even a question.

But, as well as not fitting in, foreigners have no rights in the UAE and no possibility of becoming citizens.

Absolutely, so it’s a different engagement. And I think that’s also what the Chinese have. They do something, they create something and then they go. But what they leave has an effect; it has benefits.

If we need to make new alliances, should this be driven by private enterprise or by governments?

I think that, right now, everything is going to be a combination. Because basically governments don’t have the money to do it, but on the other hand, the markets don’t have the vision and the power. So it has to be a combination.

You seem to be in favour of governments using regulatory powers, yet you also speak up for the informality that arises from lack of regulation. If you had to come down on one side, which would it be?

We did a research project about the effects of deregulation. When we started the office, the average height of a new building in Holland was eleven floors, and basically 30 years later, it was only two. Only two storeys high in one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Because it had become so complicated, the government systematically abdicated their obligation to define what was going to happen, to impose something, to have a master plan. Instead, they simply created an artificial laissez-faire in a situation where any laissez-faire is totally counter-intuitive given the established complexity of the country. What I’m saying is that you cannot continue like that. Governments must have some shape-giving ambition.

I suppose in most fields there are two competing forces: order and chaos, public and private. Across your work, you talk slightly ambiguously about all these oppositions.

But do I talk ambiguously?

Well, in ‘Delirious New York’ (Rem’s vivid account of the early development of Manhattan, published in 1978), you seem to have an attraction to chaos, but elsewhere you appear to despair about the lack of regulation that might mitigate chaos.

Maybe I introduced that confusion myself by suggesting I was interested in chaos… The only position an architect can take is to be on the side of the people who want to avoid chaos in the full knowledge that they will fail. That’s something I wrote a few years back, and it is a good definition of where I stand.

Is there a way to deal with that inevitable failure in your work?

You can try to. It’s really not about chaos, but about how to find – in a chaotic time where many uncontrolled forces proliferate – the beginnings of alternative systems. Lagos is very interesting in this sense. At some point in the 1970s, Nigeria had a bigger economy than South Korea, and at that time, they were creating some really ambitious infrastructural elements. But, after their economy failed in the late 1970s, what emerged was the systematic and deliberate dysfunctionality of all those systems. Nevertheless, it was completely conducive to promoting the kinds of small interactions and small transactions that were still possible in a country almost without government. Initially I thought it was chaos, but when I looked closer, I saw forms of human intelligence that were using what was there, acting intelligently in a way that was most appropriate in the circumstances.

Is it frustrating that, as an architect, you can never design that sort of intelligence?

Not really frustrating because once you can perceive it, and once you appreciate its qualities, you can try to participate in it. Have you ever been to Taipei?

No.

Taiwan’s incredibly interesting, because it’s super active and completely Chinese, of course, but it’s also a country where luxury hasn’t arrived yet. So it’s definitely not Communist, but it has a certain lack of excess. Yet it’s also a place where people go to bed later than anywhere else, so you’ve got an incredible nightlife. Several years ago there was a competition for a big theatre. (Rem draws.) Here’s a mountain, here’s a beautiful brutalist subway line, and here is a totally intense Chinese night market with hundreds of restaurants. So we had to do a theatre there, right in the middle. The almost inevitable solution would have been to scrape it clean, but instead, we’ve protected it. They wanted three theatres, but instead of building three theatres in three components, we consolidated all the techniques and technology into a single supertower, and then put all the auditoriums in such a way that you could combine everything. The design was based on a cooking pan I saw in a market that was divided into three parts, so you could make three dishes in a single pan – it is a direct translation of that idea. Then, if you put the structure on stilts, the night market can continue underneath it, eventually.

That sounds amazing, when will it open?

(To Rita) Do you know when Taipei opens? End of the year?

RITA: The end of the year or early next year.

Okay, it will be finished in the course of this year. We started in 2012; it’s one of the fastest buildings we’ve ever done. The fastest ever was for Springer in Berlin (the headquarters of German publishing house Axel Springer, completed in late 2019). It was totally linear: we designed it, it went to tender and it was executed on time and on budget, which is an incredible rarity in Berlin, but it still took six years. A decade is not a long time in architecture, and, as you know, each decade has a totally different tone, so it’s always a major gamble whether the direction you’re suggesting will still be plausible once it’s built.

Yes, often buildings seem to belong to previous eras, like the Barbican, that went up in the ’70s and opened in 1982, yet ideologically it belongs to the 1960s.

That also has a certain beauty. That is now its great strength.

Yes, when it was new it looked dated, but now it’s beloved.

It’s not really a problem, but it’s an additional challenge. Of course, challenges are what we thrive on, what we seek out.

One challenge that’s interesting with the ‘Countryside’ project is the question of what actually constitutes countryside. It seems you haven’t become too tied up with defining what is countryside and what is not.

No, because the more we tried to define it, the less successful we were. Take Holland, for example: it is really hard to say what is the countryside – between Amsterdam and The Hague is all one condition, and that is not countryside.

So the 98 per cent of the world’s landmass that is the countryside doesn’t include the sprawl?

No. We decided to simply describe it as everything that is not urban. In a way it’s a cop-out, but on the other hand it’s an efficient way of doing it. What is particularly interesting is that the population of the countryside has been reduced by 80 per cent. What happens when you only have a fifth of the original population inhabiting a territory? How does that work? It means, for instance, that a village in Switzerland is now surrounded by wings of second residences and nobody is still living there. The only residents are Filipino housekeepers and, apart from that, it’s mostly empty. Unless it’s Christmas, when it’s full.

The classical depiction of migration to and from the countryside is that a city is a place for a young person and the countryside is somewhere older people are drawn to. Do you think that is still accurate?

I don’t think that that is still the case, necessarily. You could almost say the reverse. Young people cannot afford the city and only better-situated people now own the place, so I don’t think it’s that story.

Is that true of Amsterdam?

Definitely.

Okay, but the bigger question is that you’re suggesting the countryside is the future, but to be that, it really has to work for younger people. Do you really think it can?

I cannot really say that. Ironically, I am less aware how it will work for young people in Holland – I can see it better in China or Africa, or even in Russia.

In terms of engaging with agricultural science, what kind of buildings do you imagine will come out of that?

It’s difficult to imagine a specific kind of building, but I’d love to get involved in a combination of energy, data, agriculture and whatever else makes sense. I think a number of new combinations are being experimented with, but in a timid way. There are a lot of things that could be developed further.

Can we address something very fundamental, your contrarianism.

I don’t see it so much as contrarianism, but more about my having been shaped by a number of early experiences that were, in terms of what happened to me later, quite unusual. Particularly the experience of being in Indonesia as a child, speaking Indonesian, shopping in Chinese supermarkets, being in Indonesian school, being the only European boy scout with my brother out of 80 Indonesian boy scouts. It’s not so much contrarianism as having a different perspective that comes from other experiences.

There is a Dutch national tendency towards being frank that is very powerful in combination with an individual propensity to being contrary. Do you agree that there is a Dutch way of arguing?

Yeah, I’m afraid there is. You could see my life as an attempt to unlearn that by being educated in London and then living in New York and then living in London. But of course, it’s still there.

Why would you unlearn it?

Because I don’t particularly like the bluntness.

That’s interesting. I always thought it must be very useful to those who practise it.

Yes, it’s useful. But I think that bluntness and primitivity are very close. And I think I may be blunt from time to time, but I don’t want to be primitive.

3. REM, IN THEORY

To conclude, a career-spanning dissection of the architect’s life, work, ideas and penchant for intellectual combativeness. A subtle but significant switch is made from the informal “Rem” in the previous episodes to the more formal “Koolhaas”.

“To some extent,” said Rem Koolhaas early on in my first conversation with him in the back of his car on the way from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, “you can explain my entire life from the point of view of contrarianism.”

Coming away from my various encounters with him, both in person and in print, all I can say is: you can say that again. Contrarianism in tandem with a congruent determination to put architecture – and architects – in their place are the themes that have run through all of Koolhaas’s writing and exhibitions over the past 50 years. Both urges are evident in his first publication, ‘Delirious New York’ (1978), and both are equally apparent in his most recent project, ‘Countryside, The Future’. It’s arguable that Koolhaas’s impulse to oppose the consensus is characteristic of his generation, an early postmodern attitude as dated as his Blackberry. And just like said Blackberry, it’s still working for him.

I suspect Koolhaas’s contrariness has the deepest of roots – I can’t imagine him a conformist kid – but its origins vis-à-vis architecture lie in a study of the Berlin Wall that he undertook as a student at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. Produced in collaboration with his OMA co-founders Madelon Vriesendorp (his then wife), Elia Zenghelis (his tutor) and Zoe Zenghelis (Elia’s artist wife), it became his final project at the school. In an account of his initial Berlin field trip, written 20 years after the fact, he admitted that his greatest surprise was that the wall, which had been up for about a decade by then, “was heartbreakingly beautiful.” Acknowledging that it was “deadly,” he nevertheless admired the culture that had grown up around it over its relatively short existence, a perverse liveliness that owed nothing to the input of architects. “It was as if I had come eye to eye with architecture’s true nature,” wrote Koolhaas. “In comparison, the ’60s dream of architecture’s liberating potential – in which I had been marinating for years as a student – seemed feeble rhetorical play. It evaporated on the spot. (…) I would never again believe in form as the primary vessel of meaning.” Apparently such iconoclasm did not go down well at the AA. After Koolhaas’s presentation of the project, the school’s director, Alvin Boyarsky, asked ominously, “Where do you go from here?”

For Koolhaas the answer was the US to escape from the European insistence on the social efficacy of architecture. In 1972 Koolhaas left London for Cornell University in New York, where he became first the student and later the colleague of architect Oswald Mathias Ungers. Koolhaas had come across Ungers’s work in Berlin, where the latter had been teaching until 1968 and from where he had left in part to escape the political activism of his German students. Ungers’s intials, OMU, prefigure OMA and likewise his concept of the “dialectic city” – an urban environment that resists planning according to a single strategy and instead takes the form of an archipelago of distinct environments – anticipates much of Koolhaas’s writing.

Alongside contrarianism and a scepticism of mainstream architectural agendas, Koolhaas has also maintained a life-long sympathy with what he dubs “the informal.” During my conversations with him, as in many previous interviews, he harked back to the four years he spent in Indonesia as a child, which he believes offset his native Dutch “affinity for order.” ‘Delirious New York’ is a hymn to such informality. It establishes the fairgrounds of Coney Island as the prototype for early 20th-century New York City. As a proponent of the unplanned, Koolhaas generally has little time for other architects, yet he does have a soft spot for Raymond Hood, the lead architect of the Rockefeller Center and a possible model for Ayn Rand’s fictional architect Peter Keating in her 1943 novel ‘The Fountainhead’. Hood was wont to seduce clients with statements such as “All this beauty stuff is bunk.”

The original cover of ‘Delirious New York’, featuring an illustration by Vriesendorp of a post-coital pairing of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, adds a frisson to its agenda. Koolhaas describes the Empire State Building as “a sensuous surrender by its collective makers – from the accountant to the plumber – to the process of building.” Boiled down, the book argues that the most important factors determining the form of early 20th-century Manhattan were 1) the 1916 zoning law, an edict that required buildings to step back from the full extent of their potential floor plan once they had reached a certain height (hence creating the distinctive shape of the early 20th-century Manhattan skyscraper), and 2) the invention of the elevator.

Significantly, this thesis anticipates the argument behind his ‘Elements of Architecture’ at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, which bypassed complete architectural works to instead focus on the components of the “architectural collage”: windows, façades, escalators, corridors and the like. Since the launch of the Architecture Biennale in 1980, it has been the convention to have the curator, usually an architect, showcase the work of his or (very rarely) her peers. Devoting a whole section of his exhibition to “the Toilet” but not a single room to a fellow living architect, Koolhaas adopted a characteristically controversial approach to the task.

Looking back on his move to America, and connecting it with his ongoing trajectory, Koolhaas told me, “I went to New York in the early 1970s, when everyone thought it was dead, the worst place in the world. (…) Then, as a Westerner, I became totally disappointed with it – and this is an underlying and long-term disappointment, that we can only see architecture through the dogmatic qualities of Western architecture: public space, blah, blah, blah. In Asia, in the meantime, there was a totally different urbanism, but, because we kept looking at it from our Western perspective, we could only be disappointed and contemptuous. So, there was a motivation to say ‘there’s more to it.’”

That’s Koolhaas’s long-term engagement with Asia, in particular his unapologetic involvement with China, explained in a single phrase. When I attempted to raise various ethical issues – China’s mistreatment of its Muslim minority was all over the papers when we met – he batted me away with ease. “For way too long the whole of Europe has been focused on the Anglo-Saxon world, the Atlantic world, even though we could tell, at least since 2008 (the year of the financial crash), that there was a lot of corruption, a lot of decadence and a lot of really deeply wrong directions. Yet still we didn’t have the courage to reconsider whether the Atlantic is forever our domain,” he said. “I see everything that I’ve done in the context of readjusting and looking east. I know that there are many things you can criticise – I’m basically critical of every side – but I think it’s been insane how we’ve been unable to define productive and creative relationships there, and that all we’ve been doing, on the demand of America, is rejecting Russia, rejecting China. If we want to avoid undermining our future, we need to find a way to co-exist.”

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As a long-term contrarian, Koolhaas forever runs the risk of meeting himself coming the other way. In some of his writing he even chances running into himself within his own sentences. In ‘Junkspace’, for example, a rollicking essay published in ‘The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping’, he expanded the definition of said “junkspace” so comprehensively that the risk of critiquing his own architecture within its merciless framework became almost inescapable.

“Ostensibly a relief from constant sensorial onslaught, minimum is maximum in drag, a stealth laundering of luxury: the stricter the lines, the more irresistible the seductions. Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimise the shame of consumption, drain embarrassment, to lower what is higher,” he wrote. That’s likely a swipe at John Pawson’s early 1990s minimal-to-the-max Calvin Klein stores, yet OMA’s own Prada Epicenter, the New York flagship store that opened its door in the wake of 9/11, could be accused of pretty much the same strategy. Unnecessary purchases are rendered acceptable in “an all-white ‘clinic’ area” containing “VIP rooms” (a description taken from the OMA website).

Asked if self-contradiction is problematic, Koolhaas said, “I don’t think it would have to be disappointing or humiliating.” What’s more, he prepared himself for this possibility in ‘Delirious New York’ by quoting F. Scoot Fitzgerald’s well-known aphorism: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

The long-standing opposition at play in the Koolhaasian project is his reconciliation of architecture’s task of planning and order with his love of improvised and informal. Also in the frame is the paradox – common to many in the creative sphere – that Koolhaas professes to oppose neoliberalism, yet those with the means to commission his work are likely to be its strongest proponents. During the course of writing this piece, I went to the launch of a building designed for the British public school Brighton College by OMA partner Ellen van Loon. It is an innovative and stylish £55 million structure that boasts 18 university-standard laboratories, a strength and conditioning suite, a roof-top running track with panoramic views and a cinema-style auditorium, all created for the children of the elite. van Loon said her motivation for taking on the project was her love of teenagers, and that she hoped the building could be a model for Britain’s state educators. I don’t really expect a Dutch architect to engage with the blight arising from Britain’s proclivity for private education, but, even so, I smarted.

Quizzed on Koolhaas, his contemporaries tend to offer qualified admiration. An architect I sat next to at a dinner immediately after my first Koolhaas encounter proffered the opinion that, alone in the profession, Koolhaas and Norman Foster have been able to wrest control of the agenda. While most architects, even those thought of as starchitects, are begging for scraps from the client’s table, those two have created scenarios in which those same clients scuttle after them: Koolhaas through concept, Foster through capital (Foster is the only architect ever to have appeared in the Sunday Times Rich List). “He was commissioned by Prada to design a shop. He produces an 800-page publication on shopping, but what does he design? A shop!” said the same architect, who has himself designed several shops.

It does seem to be the case that Koolhaas is always a step ahead of those bidding to work with him. The profile in ‘The New Yorker’ from 2005 includes an entertaining account of him simultaneously winning a job and bagging a venue for his touring exhibition in St. Petersburg. That said, it would be cynical to see his engagement with ideas as pure power play. Before he studied architecture in the late 1960s, Koolhaas worked as a writer in various capacities. “I’ve always had a life as something other than an architect,” he told me. “I was a journalist, and I think I’m still a journalist.” The relationship between the intellectual agenda and the financial rewards is often convoluted, but the journalistic inclination to hunt out and find answers to questions has undoubtedly been present throughout Koolhaas’s career.

EUPHORIA

The publication of ‘S,M,L,XL’ in 1995 was a significant turning point, marking the firm’s transition into the realm of “starchitecture,” a status confirmed when Koolhaas won architecture’s biggest prize, the Pritzker, in 2000. In the late ’90s, OMA relinquished its state of early-career “Euphoria” to enter a regime of “¥ $” (this formulation of target markets seems outrageously cynical, but Koolhaas has insisted that it is about “curiosity” not “complicity”). Running to 1344 pages and produced in collaboration with Canadian graphic designer BRUCE MAU, the book perfectly caught the pre-millennial mood. Launched just at the moment when the internet was becoming accessible, it reflected the sense that there was a vast quantity of knowledge out there, and that we’d better limber up to deal with the onslaught.

The sheer size of ‘S,M,L,XL’ is intimidating and its design tricks, including shunning title pages, allowing articles to overlap and collaging text and images, serve to confound concentration. I bought the book in its first edition, and am full of admiration for it, but, coming clean, I hadn’t read it until the run-up to writing this piece. Among the texts in the volume is the essay ‘Generic City’ which Koolhaas now cites as the “key switch.” Arguing that it was no longer relevant to create one-off portraits of cities because the general condition of “the city” had overcome each one’s singular characteristics, this piece anticipated the current ‘Countryside’ project. With the “similarities of cities becoming vastly more pronounced than their differences,” it was the moment to examine their antithesis, explained Koolhaas.

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Soon after the publication of ‘S,M,L,XL’, Koolhaas was approached by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to work on the travelling exhibition ‘Cities on the Move’. This meeting has become something of a myth. Obrist and his co-curator Hou Hanru arrive in Rotterdam to meet Koolhaas but he has no time for them. He is travelling to Hong Kong the next day and suggests they follow and meet him there. They do so, and Obrist’s now legendary travel itinerary is born. In ‘Generic City’, Koolhaas wrote that airports are “all the average person tends to experience of a particular city.” It’s an extraordinary claim and perhaps a reflection of how peculiar life had become for a successful architect in the late 20th century.

Now dual frequent flyers, Obrist and Koolhaas have been joined at the intellectual hip ever since. In 2006 they undertook the first Serpentine Marathon, a 24-hour, non-stop interview in a pavilion in Hyde Park designed by Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond. Interview subjects included Gilbert and George, Zaha Hadid, Doris Lessing and Peter Saville. In terms of eliciting insight from individuals, this interrogatory production line was not the most felicitous format, but as a performance it was memorable. In particular, while Obrist bristled with quotations from and references to other thinkers, Koolhaas appeared to derive all his theories and questions from direct observation. Obrist told me that Koolhaas does have important mentors, the aforementioned Ungers and the late architectural historian Charles Jencks among them. Be that as it may, he tends to present his insights as immaculate conceptions – not least the countryside and his epiphany in the Swiss village.

CONFLATION

Since the late 1990s, Koolhaas has taught a course at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design that involves no practical architecture. A number of the researchers on the ‘Countryside’ project are students of that course. Annie Schneider, who was a student at the GSD until 2017, after which she joined OMA full time, was helping to coordinate them. A meeting in the immediate lead-up to the exhibition resembled an art-school crit, with discussion moving swiftly from one subject to another according to Koolhaas’s lead. I did not witness Koolhaas working on any architectural projects, but apparently he designs buildings much the same way, acting more as a critic than a traditional creator.

The session began with a discussion of a collage of images of Chairman Mao welcoming various non-white revolutionary leaders. “What was beautiful was that the white visitors were ignored by Mao, while the black revolutionary leaders were being received!” said Koolhaas. “One of the main things about China, something that everyone forgets now that they are the enemy, was that they were actually supporters of revolutionary forces.” Much of the research is done through scouring Google Images and there is an intense focus on the correct pairing of names and faces. The digitally dependent process brings to mind the technique of argument through the conflation of unlikely images practised by contemporary film-makers such as Adam Curtis. Yet, at the same time, it reaches back to the century-long history of political collage. They will use delivery robots – like those employed at Amazon warehouses – to carry images around the Guggenheim, creating random collages in real time.

Inevitably, an element of the observation going on in Koolhaas’s rural lab is related to climate change. In the new era of mainstream environmental anxiety, you cannot discuss the countryside without acknowledging the climate emergency. That said, Koolhaas’s response to the question is notably oblique. “Everything now takes place against a background of global warming. (…) Looking away from the cities and to the countryside is connected to that. I don’t want to pretend the whole thing is about global warming. It’s not a direct response to it, but definitely it has been rewarding to see more of what’s going on.”

In the meeting, turning to explain a particular idea to me – the theory that flat land is amenable to regulation, while hills and mountains render rules untenable – Koolhaas realised he had phrased the argument in a particularly apt way, and the room paused while he wrote it down. Later, Koolhaas suggested that you might be able to map support for leaving the EU onto the UK’s less level regions. You can’t, he admitted: Scotland. Coming from London, I faced several Brexit barbs during my visit.
The Irma Boom-designed catalogue is of a significantly different size compared to both Koolhaas’s breakthrough book ‘S,M,L,XL’ and Boom and Koolhaas’s previous joint volume, ‘Elements of Architecture’, the 2528-page postscript to the 2014 Venice Biennale. Instead it takes the proportions of the first pocket book, published at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries and now held in the Vatican Library. The designer of that book, Aldus Manutius, described the format as libelli portatiles in formam enchiridii (“portable small books in the form of a manual”). Now that information overload has become the permanent condition, the compact has become aspirational, even when the subject is as potentially overwhelming as the countryside in its entirety.

Does this vast undertaking reach a conclusion? “I think the outcome, what I’m confident in being able to say right now, is that the problem can only be dealt with by embracing amazing artificiality, a drastic amount of artificiality, and combining it with an equally emphatic resurrection of techniques and forms of thinking from the past, even from antiquity, that would enable us to be more careful with what we’re doing. We need a new hybrid of artificiality and the organic.” So that’s the way forward? “We’ve found two trends, that, in parallel, each contain a degree of promise. But it’s just short of a thesis, and definitely not a recommendation.”

Cynics might suggest that, just as Koolhaas made shopping an OMA intellectual commodity 20 years ago, he is now attempting to package the countryside in the same way. In terms of a commercial outcome and the possibility of OMA building substantially outside cities, Koolhaas said, without prevarication, “I’m desperately trying to.” In particular he is interested in the vast rural warehouses that are the outcome of the digital revolution. “I think that we’re witnessing a really drastic change. Architecture doesn’t have to be for human beings any more. There are distribution centres that are completely robotic or data centres that are totally automated. These are places where humans are almost an afterthought – I think that’s fascinating territory.”

At the launch of Ellen van Loon’s building in Brighton, it became clear to me that OMA can function independently of Koolhaas’s day-to-day input. He was not at the event, and his absence was not felt. Having had the foresight to allow his partners autonomy, he has won himself freedom. It’s unlikely, however, that he will use that as a licence to go fishing. Koolhaas may have turned 75 last November, but conventional concepts of retirement do not apply. Far from a swan song, the ‘Countryside’ project is the opening of a fourth chapter, with innovative agriculture and architecture for non-human users on the agenda. It’s hardly surprising, this being Koolhaas, that nothing is set in stone, but, given the general longevity of architects and his daily swimming habit, a further 25 years of amassing information and conquering fresh territories seems possible. Above all, in planning a sideways step into research-led practice, he is evading the expectations – bigger, shinier, more costly – that arrived with his “starchitect” status at the end of the last millennium.