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Rem Koolhaas Professor in Practice Department of Architecture |
Projects 1987-2001
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Miami Performing Arts Center, USA, 1994
In Physics, the notion of critical mass indicates the point where by accumulating mass, it passes from one condition into another, more dynamic one. To place the two components of the Dade County Performing Arts Center — Opera and Concert Hall — each on their own individual site, would be to waste a unique historical opportunity for Miami to create a new, exciting whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. Not only would the separation itself cause many redundancies — in space mechanical plant, vertical transport, access demands — but by combining the two programs in a single building we introduce a number of important efficiencies, enormously extend its potential uses, and create a much more unique and memorable structure that makes a stronger statement about Miami’s present and future cultural potential ...
We place the building on the Sears site. East-west through its center runs a high-rise technical zone that incorporates the Opera stagetower and the reverberation chamber of the concert Hall. To reinforce the existing urban tissue those parts of the Building most active in the daytime are concentrated in the north in a profile that carefully mediates between the existing and the new. Black Box and Studio establish a direct relationship with 14th street. On the Biscayne Boulevard corner, the Burdines Building preserves a flavour of history. It is used for educational programs, functions and can also act as an entrance to the Concert Hall.
Faceted like jewels — one dark, the other light — the two auditoriums are directed to the south for maximum visibility from the sea, the highway and downtown. So far the consultants have elaborated design that guarantee acoustic and technical perfection, but the Opera and the Concert Hall are public buildings: it is our task to provide a setting that makes the experience of visiting an event. In the Paris Opéra, (the most successful precedent), the space reserved for foyer, lobby and grand staircase — the space for public display — exceeds that of the auditorium itself; in Miami, by joining the public areas reserved for the two individual auditoriums, we create a 3-dimensional "mixing chamber”, between them that will be an experience in itself. Negotiating the level differences playfully like the Guggenheim Museum, this continuous in-between-building organizes the two flows, but also turns the sum of visitors in a larger civic collective.
The bigger scale of the combined building not only eliminates waste — one system of elevators/escalators serves the two halls, one system of catering. It also creates diverse surfaces that are not mere dependencies of the two halls, but that con be used as "rooms” for more and more diverse functions such as fundraising, banqueting, etc. Below the auditoriums, our concept generates large scale spaces on street level for other cultural uses, to activate Biscayne Boulevard. Urbanism
Museumspark, Netherlands, Rotterdam, 1994 The Museum Park is exposed to conflicting demands: serenity and sensation, movement and stillness, buffer zone and connector. The entire zone from the Architecture Institute to the Kunsthal is interpreted as a sequence of five equivalent situations, with two enclosed extremities (buildings) and three open-air sections in between.
Lille Masterplan, France, 1994 A masterplan of an entirely new city — a program of one million square meters — in the complicated urban condition of Lille.
In 1989 Euralille, a public-private partnership, conceived a vast program that will ultimately consist of + 800,000 meters squared of urban activities — shopping, offices, parking, a new TGV station, hotels, housing, a concert hall, congress accommodation — to be built on 120 hectares on the site of the former city fortifications by Vauban.
Paradoxically, at the end of the Twentieth Century, the frank admission of the Promethean ambition — like for example, to change the destiny of an entire city, is taboo. This project is based on the hypothesis that the 'experience' of Europe will change beyond recognition through the combined impact of the tunnel that links Britain and the Europe, and the extension of the French TGV network to include London. If this hypothesis turns out to be true, the city of Lille — dormant gravity centre of a conceptual triangle — London/Brussels/Paris — which contains more than fifty million inhabitants — will magically acquire a theoretical importance as the receptacle of a wide range of uniquely 'contemporary' activities. In this fin-de-siècle, 'programs' have become abstract in the sense that they are no longer connected to a place or a city; they float and gravitate opportunistically to that site which offers the highest number and quality of connection — which seems nearest to all other places.
In Lille, the new TGV line is projected on the location of the former fortifications now occupied by a proliferating periphérique. A gigantic futuristic project is imagined two steps from the historical centre, a hybrid condition — history and modernity — that allows the injection of peripheral activities near the heart of the city. All these elements define a new urban condition which is at the same time local and global, as important for the 'Japanese' as it is for the 'Lillois'. Looking at Lille in its present condition, it is hard to imagine this radical, even exotic quantum leap.
Lille Grand Palais, France, 1994 Inserted in the ring of the former fortifications of Lille, between the historic center and the periphery, Congrexpo is a hybrid building — a programmatic mixture of congress/exhibition/concert hall ("Zenith"). Each program has its own zone in the building, arranged so that the interfaces create new programmatic opportunities. In an east-west direction these zones are autonomous, while in the north-south direction they are connected. The large amphitheatre-like auditoria are placed back to back, to form a bridge, leaving below a large reception space.
The vertical layering of the building starts with a socle for parking and deliveries. The edges of the socle towards the city are animated with the reception and other daylight oriented programs. The edge towards the service road is on the same higher level as the road, allowing lorries to deliver straight into the exhibition halls. The facades open when possible to the public space, to incorporate the Congrexpo program — usually located outside any city — into the public realm. This is the middle layer. The top layer, the roof, has an almost perfect oval form, which is lower towards the centre. The ceiling becomes apparent in perspective, in such a way that the shape of the building can be imagined without ever being visible as a whole.
Kunstal, Netherlands, Rotterdam, 1992 The Kunsthal combines 3300 square meters of exhibition space, an auditorium and restaurant into one compact design. Sloping floor planes and a series of tightly organized ramps provide seamless connection between the three large exhibition halls and two intimate galleries. Its position, wedged between a busy highway and the network of museums and green spaces known as the museum park, allows it to function as a gateway to Rotterdam’s most prized cultural amenities. The program demanded three major exhibition spaces — to be used jointly or separately, an auditorium and an independently accessible restaurant.
The site presents a dual condition: the southern edge is bordered by the Maasboulevard, a 'highway' on top of a dike. The northern side, a level lower, faces the Museum Park — conventional contemplation. The building was conceived as a square crossed by two routes: one, a road running east/west, parallel to the Maasboulevard; the other, a public ramp extending the north/south axis of the Museum Park. With these given, and the fact that these crossings would divide the square into four parts, the challenge became: how to design a museum as four autonomous projects — a sequence of contradictory experiences which would nevertheless form a continuous spiral. In other words, how to imagine a spiral in four separate squares. The concept of the building is a continuous circuit.
The pedestrian ramp is split, with a glass wall separating the outside, which is open to the public, from the inside, which is part of the circuit. A second ramp, running parallel and reversed, is terraced to accommodate an auditorium, and beneath it the restaurant. On the level where the two ramps cross, the main entrance is defined. From there the visitor enters a second ramp which goes down to the park and up to the dikelevel. Approaching the first hall, one confronts a stairway and an obstructed view, which is gradually revealed — a landscape of tree-columns with a backdrop of greenery framed, and sometimes distorted by the different types of glass of the park facade. From there one follows the inner ramp leading to hall 2, a wide open skylit space facing the boulevard. A third ramp along a roof garden leads to a more intimate single-height hall and further on to the roof terrace.
Yokohama, Japan, 1992 From the outside, the Japanese city seems a mere coexistence of random architectures in a field of maximum freedom. There is no planning, no public realm. But Yokohama deviates from the Japanese norm; through its commitment to Urban Design it could become a laboratory for the definition of a "Japanese" public realm.
Point of departure for the project — maybe it should be called hypothesis — was the unique conditions that we found on the site: the presence of two markets with a colossal number of parking places, the arrival on the site of railroads, cars (via the new highway) and ships and the proximity of "Minato Mirai 21", a tremendous injection of density in an already congested urban condition: together they define a site of almost unlimited potential for supporting public life. We have avoided designing buildings (with their inevitable limitations and separations): continuous and formless the project engulfs the site like a kind of programmatic "lava", three layers of public activity manipulated/treated to support the largest possible amount of events with the minimum amount of permanent definition. Noticing that the peak hours of the market fall in the early morning, our hypothesis proposes a complementary spectrum of events, which would together exploit to the maximum the location and its existing infrastructure, to create a 24 hour "peak" composed of a mosaic of heterogeneous 21st century "life".
Some parts are used as roads, some as parking places; minimal interventions "provoke" theatres, cinemas, dancings, restaurants, churches, sportplaces and other programs; the new given of access, communication, artificially and technology are frozen in a momentary configuration. Covering the south-east corner of the site, this programmatic tapestry leaves an area of the former docks intact; a series of ideal conditions exist ther for an intense housing development: sea views, openness and density. Toward the city is a site for a small "center", which together with the housing will give a degree of a three-dimensional "anchoring" to the site.
Jussieu — Two Libraries, France, Paris, 1992 In the award winning scheme for two libraries at Jussieu, a technical university in Paris, OMA radically reconfigures the typical library layout. Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect; thus forming a single trajectory — much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building. The implantation of the new library represents the insertion of a new core, which should at the same time resuscitate the original significance of Albert's project.
However beautiful, Albert's campus is windy, cold and empty, but more important for its disfunctionality is the fact that Jussieu is a network, not a building. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance any attempt to 'inhabit' it. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residue, a mere slice of void sandwhiched between sockle and building. To reassert its credibility, we imagine in this project the surface of the parvis as pliable a social magic carpet. We fold it to form a 'stacking' of platforms which is then enclosed to become a building which is to be 'read' as the culmination of the Jussieu network.
These new surfaces — a vertical, intensified landscape — are then 'urbanized' almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below. In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean 'flaneur', inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario. Through its scale and variety the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme which influences the interpretation and planning of the Boulevard as part of a system of further supra-programmatic 'urban' elements in the interior: plaza's, parks, monumental staircases, cafes, shops. Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientetechnologie (ZKM), Germany, Karlsruhe, 1992
Sandwiched between railway lines and autobahn loops at the southern 'entrance' to the city, lies this manifesto for a new kind of deep/large building. Organizing a large number of different programs, including sound laboratories, a library and musea, this potential development interwines with the existing systems of the city, while a public circulation system unfolds the activities from its core. The Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) is an experiment, a Darwinian arena where different media — classical and futuristic — can compete and influence each other.
The building organizes a large number of different programs in such a way that while their particular needs are respected, their coexistence insures maximum mutual influence; their interface generates hybrid condition. Its five programs:
A public circulation system snakes around the core, invading it at strategic moments in a continuous unfolding of the center`s activities.
Context Manifesto
Villa Dall'Ava, France, Paris, 1991 The villa is situated on a hill which slopes steeply toward the Seine, the Bois de Boulogne, and the city of Paris, in the residential area of Saint Cloud — a neighbourhood characterised by 19th century houses in a classical "Monet" landscape. The client wanted a glass house with a swimming pool on the roof and two separate "apartments" — one for the parents, the other for the daughter. They also wanted a panoramic view — from their swimming pool — of the surrounding landscape and the city of Paris.
The site is like a big room, with a boundary made of greenery, garden walls and slopes. It is composed of three parts: a sloping garden, the main volume of the villa, the street level garage with access in a cavity. The house is conceived as a glass pavilion containing living and dining areas, with two hovering, perpendicular apartments shifted in opposite directions to exploit the view. They are joined by the swimming pool which rests on the concrete structure encased by the glass pavilion.
Nexus World Housing, Japan, Fukuoka, 1991 This project consists of 244 individual houses in the Kashi District of Fukuoka, each three stories high, packed together to form two blocks. Each house is penetrated by a private vertical courtyard that introduces light and space into the center. A closed cyclopic wall wraps around the exterior of the blocks so that they can eventually serve as socles for Isozaki's future towers. Confronted with the possibility of building in Japan, a European architect faces a dilemma: should the project be 'as western as possible'?; is it just another export like Van Gogh, a Mercedes, or a Vuitton bag?; or should it reflect the fact that it exists in Japan?
In Fukuoka, the character of the site reinforces this dilemma: the context is more organized, less 'chaotic', than the typical Japanese city. For this operation, Arata Isozaki invited one Japanese architect (Osamu Ishiyama) and five non-Japanese architects (Oscar Tusquèts, Christian de Portzamparc, Marc Mack, Steven Holl) and O.M.A. to define a superblock with freestanding perimeter buildings for a client who wanted to introduce a 'new urban lifestyle' in Japan. The only 'Japanese' aspect of his master plan: 120-meter-high twin towers (architect: Izosaki) projected at the center of the otherwise five-story-maximum development. Like an earlier scheme in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, the project explores a fusion of the Roman city — sections of Pompeii, for instance, form continuous tapestries where houses never become objects- and similar experiments by Mies van der Rohe where individual courtyard houses are consolidated to form blocks, so that the substance of modern architecture is condensed to generate urban form. The project consists of twenty-four individual houses, each three stories high, packed together to form two blocks. Each house is penetrated by a private vertical courtyard that introduces light and space into the center.
On the lower level a concourse leads to individual front doors; beyond each door lies a patio with white pebbles. A continuous staircase leads to individual rooms on the second floor and living quarters on the third — a suite of living, dining, open-air, and 'Japanese' rooms where screens and curtains generate different configurations. A closed cyclopic wall wraps around the exterior of the blocks so that they may eventually serve as socles to Isozaki's future towers. The roofs of the domed Japanese cells are covered with grass. 'Escaping' from the walls are the floating rooflines of the living room floors. They resonate with the mountains that surround the bowl of the city. Each house offers a variety of spatial conditions and tectonic contrasts: enclosed vs. exploding, intimate vs. open, public vs. private, high vs. light, concrete vs. abstract.
Agadir, Morocco, Casablanca, 1990 Our project can be read as a single building 'split’ in two parts, a roof and a sockle, to create a major urban 'room’, a covered plaza on the beach, facing the sea. The two axes culminate on the plaza. Floating above the verandah; the hotel: a single layer of rooms, each its own view. The conference centre forms the lower part, the sockle. It was our challenge in this competition to find an original architectural expression for this enormous program which is compatible with the beauty of the site.
The curvilinear landscape of the dunes continues as the 'hills’ and 'valleys’ of the sockle, which accommodate the major components of the program: auditorium, etc. As in a mirror image, the same kind of relief appears on the roof where it accommodates the royal chamber. In this way the experience of the plaza will be determined by the similarity between above and below. The landscape which is generated with its concave and convex domes, with the 'forest’ of columns, its shafts of light, is a modern interpretation of Islamic space - Islam after Einstein relativity — which will also be expressed by the materials: polished concrete, mosaic, tiles etc. The parking is arranged on several levels in a U-shape around the building. The sand-filled moat offers the complex a relative degree of autonomy and privacy.
The main axis extends into the garage, gives access to the lobbies of the mayor components, then turns to emerge on the plaza to serve the royal rooms. The floor and the ceiling of the veranda are formed by concrete 'shells’, which have been cast upon the dunes, using the sand as a natural formwork. Ribs strengthen the shells and form patterns on the interior surfaces. The uppershell is supported by columns, which are different in height, thickness, and spacing. The lower shell and the roof are supported by vierendeel beams. Stability is achieved by means of the connection between the two shells combined with steel bracing. 'Soft’ joints have been integrated between the columns and upper beams because of seismic considerations. The elevation and the roof, clad with polished and unpolished local stones, give the building its rock-like appearance. Zeebrugge Sea Terminal, Belgium, Zeebrugge, 1989
To stay viable after the opening of the tunnel between England and the continent, the ferry companies operating across the channel propose to make the crossing more exciting. Not only would the boats turn into floating entertainment worlds, but their destinations — the terminals — would shed their utilitarian character and become attractions. Sign To become a landmark, this project adopts a form that resists easy classification to free-associate with successive moods- the mechanical, the industrial, the utilitarian, the abstract, the poetic, the surreal. It combines maximum artistry with maximum efficiency.
Theme The original Babel was a symbol of ambition, chaos, and ultimately failure; this machine proclaims a functional Babel that effortlessly swallows, entertains, and processes the traveling masses. Site Building
The two lowest floors organize traffic to and from the ferries with maximum efficiency; four ships can load and unload simultaneously without interrupting traffic flow. A bus station is projected above this sorting machine; pedestrian acces is through a separate external loop. Above, two floors of parking wind in an ascending spiral culminating in a great public hall, where the panorama of sea and land is revealed for the first time. Then the cone splits into vertical segments: a wedge of offices divides the sphere into hotel and promotional sections. The void between these two parts offers an upward view to the sky and a downward view, through a glass floor, to the depths of the parking garage. The entire building is capped by a glass dome. Under the dome, the two halves are connected by ramps and bridges. The hotel roof accommodates the ulitmate "North Sea Casino”; an amphitheater that slopes down toward the sea can be used as a conference center. IJ Plein Urban Planning, School and Gymnasium, Netherlands, Amsterdam, 1988
The intervention of OMA for the IJ-plein site is twofold, urbanistic and architectonic. The urbanistic plan gives the precise location and envelope of all buildings and the lay-out of all public space. This plan is the basis for OMA’s supervision over the design of seven housing projects, done by 6 architects, amongs whom OMA. The brief required an explicit visual relationship with the IJ-river and with the historic center of Amsterdam on the opposite riverbank. The urbanistic plan proposes an open plan of parallel slabs of different height and form, and a triangular lawn. The western part is of three rows of urban villas (towers with four dwellings on each level) and two slabs, with dwellings accessible by a street in the air or central stairs. The eastern part is dominated by parallel slabs of different hight.
Within this urbanistic plan OMA has designed a number of buildings. A long slab over a podium (that serves as dyke and bicycle storage), on pilotis, leaving an open space with pavillions: four shops in ovals and one in a triangle, a communal center in a second triangle and lobbies. The slab contains dwellings of 2 or 3 rooms on a gallery, dwellings accessible by staircases and dwellings accessible by stairs — skylit — cutting diagonally through the section of the building, which creates a lay-out that shifts at each level. A shorter slab contains two-story maisonnettes of 4 or 5 rooms and a collective housing unit for disabled people. In the maisonnettes the (upper) bedroom level is diagonally above the livingroom level. The school is a primary school with eight classrooms and a gym. As a consequence of the open plan we proposed for the neighbourhood, the school is split into two small multi-story slabs.
The program for the school (in the eastern slab) required classrooms (in the two-story part) with spaces for collective use (in the three-story part integrated with corridors and stairs). The school yard is on two levels (for younger and older pupils and partly sheltered by the gym hall on its pilotis. The gym is over two stories, the 0-level with locker rooms, showers and space for equipment for the schoolyard, on the first floor is the gym and room for its equipment. The volumes are shifted, to create a view from the gym to the city on the other embankment. The building is of normal glass in wooden frames, brick and — distinguishing it from the housing — corrugated aluminium. The gym has a steel frame.
Patio Villa, Netherlands, Rotterdam, 1988
In a parody of the classical Dutch section of houses in the slope of a dike, this house was projected on the raised embankment of a highway that was never built. On the north, the road and the entrance level are one level below the main site. The garden and the main area of the house — on the higher level — are defined on the south by a canal. On the main floor of the house — more or less a square — a patio is placed in such a way that it generates, in combination with a free-standing wall, the living spaces of the house: a living area to the south, a dining zone to the north. The wall defines 2 "rooms" — a bedroom and a study — connected by a secret corridor that also gives access to the bathroom.
The garden elevation consists of four different kinds of glass — armoured, clear, etched and green, that create transparencies, obstructions and intensifications. The (metal) east wall of the patio is a kitchen, the north-, and south wall are mobile, and the patio floor is made of glass planks that give daylight to the gymnasium below. Netherlands Dance Theatre, The Hague, 1987
The Netherlands Dance Theatre, completed in 1987, was originally conceived in 1980 as an extension to a circus theatre in Scheveningen, a seaside resort in The Hague. In 1984, the design was adapted to a new site — the Spui Complex — in the centre of the Hague. This new context — an area undergoing substantial change — was dominated by two slabs, the slope of an abandoned project for an innercity motorway to be overbuilt, the axis towards the houses of parliament, the site for the future townhall, and a seventeenth century church — a lonely testimony to the once historical centre. The Dance Theatre shares the Spui Complex with a concerthall (van Mourik, architect) and a hotel designed by Carel Weeber (also the planner of the complex). What would have been a flamboyant exterior reflecting the holiday vernacular of Scheveningen, became, in the city centre, a humble building (with the exception of the billboard/mural), which almost disappears between its extroverted neighbours.
Although there was minimal collaboration between OMA and the architects of the concert hall, the buildings` physical proximity generated a shared foyer — a 7 meter-wide alley between the two buildings — in which an exterior wall of the concert hall becomes part of the NDT interior. The foyer consists of three levels: the lowest slotted beneath the auditorium tiers, above it a half-moon balcony, the highest — a 'floating' skybar. The plan, which is partially determined by the grid of the parking garage below, divides the building into three parallel programmatic zones. The large zone contains the stage (35 x 18m2) and 1001 seat auditorium, the middle accommodates rehearsal studios, and the smallest includes offices, dressing rooms, the dancers' common rooms. An independent restaurant and an expresso bar are contained in the gold cone, which also services a cafeteria for dancers and staff. The theatre has structure of steel beams and girders, using metal cladding with sheet rock covered with stucco, marble and gold foil. The roof has a self-supporting structure of a double layer of trapezoid folded sheet steel. |
