Koolhaas, Rem

Bio Sketch

Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944) is a Dutch architect, theorist, and a principal of OMA/AMO, among the most influential and contested figures in contemporary architecture. Author of Delirious New York, S,M,L,XL, and "Junkspace," and thinker of the "generic city," he is a key (ambivalent) figure in Geoffrey's postmodernism & critique, semiotics & representation, and star architecture areas.

Key Works

• Delirious New York (1978); S,M,L,XL (1995); "Generic City" and "Junkspace."
• CCTV Headquarters, Beijing; Casa da Musica, Porto; Seattle Public Library — "route buildings"/icons.
• AMO content/branding work (e.g. EU project, "Content").

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Star Architecture
• Iconic Architecture
• Critical Architecture

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Koolhaas matters to Geoffrey's postmodernism & critique and semiotics & representation areas: his theory of the generic city and junkspace, and his ambivalent embrace/rejection of iconicity and content, are central to the critical-vs-projective debate and to the question of whether architecture can be content-driven and critical within capitalism.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the sustained spatial critique of his work (Ch. 7, "Urbanizing Architecture"): the programmatic-sabotage reading via Kipnis; the spatial-syntax audits of the Educatorium (shallow rhizomatic network, deep panoptic examination rooms — "smooth folding into striation"), the Bordeaux House (the elevator as "patriarchal prosthesis"; the void "only secure when the father is present") and the Seattle Public Library (the one-way spiral as consumption structure; "a place for a particular kind of being more than it is open to new kinds of becoming"); the magician thesis (Colomina: "distracting the eye with one hand, concealing what he is up to with the other"); the verdict: "What is missing… is an understanding of 'freedom' as a form of practice – something people do rather than images they consume" — the fullest critical treatment of Koolhaas's programmatic claims in this wiki, from the spatial-analysis side rather than the formal side.
• Radical Post-Modernism and Content (debate with Jencks)
• Logan Airport / Junkspace
• Architecture or Techno-Utopia
• The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance
• Parametricism Can Never Become a Dominant Architecture Style Now That the Forces of Capitalism Are No Longer Interested in the Lives of the Masses
• The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful—and Their Architects—Shape the World
• Can We Still Believe in Iconic Buildings?
• Is the Era of the Skyscraper Over?
• Latour for Architects (Yaneva 2022) — Yaneva names Koolhaas as the exemplary architect who "has never been modern," rejecting the modernist purification of form and function.
• The Abstractionist (Seabrook 2009) — Koolhaas as Hadid's teacher at the A.A.; schooled her in draftsmanship, noted "strong element of calligraphy" from her Arabic background. Called her "a planet in her own inimitable orbit."
• Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — engages Koolhaas's retail urbanism: Koolhaas "chose to engage shopping as the essential means to understand urbanity in his Projects for the City series," holding retail spaces "profoundly important to the city despite the emergence of the 'dead mall' condition" (see junkspace, post-retail-space).
• Inside-out and outside-in (Vanucci 2018) — the envelope response to two Koolhaas theories: "bigness" (S,M,L,XL) — "beyond a certain scale, 'old' architectural principles (composition, scale, proportion, and detail) no longer apply," "Sanctioning the final disconnection between architectural interiority and exteriority, this discourse advocates for the advent of a new type of urban architecture that privileges the content over the context" — and "junk space" (2001): the critique of "soulless, 'mallified' spaces… blended shopping malls, airports, hotels, convention centers, and art galleries into seamless uniformity," "The junk space, he argued, is the true product of modernization." Vanucci's use: the generic interior is what made "the building envelope gain[] a new centrality in contemporary architectural discourse" — Koolhaas's diagnoses as the negative frame for the performative envelope. See junkspace, interior-urbanism.