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Rem Koolhaas Professor in Practice Department of Architecture |
Projects 1995-1999
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MoCA Roma, Italy, 1999
Instead of starting the collection in ’68, the moment that the strongest and most creative post-war impulse has already spent itself, we propose a collection that begins in ’47, so that MoCa Roma can display that Italian modernity — both utopian and disabused, radical and baroque — that is uniquely powerful in postwar history, not only in the plastic arts, but in cinema and design. How can Rome animate an institution of the scale and ambition now contemplated? It is a platitude that the presence of history in Rome is detrimental to the development and display of modern art. But if that were true, Rome — a city of successive modernities — would never have happened. It is true that the pressure of history forms a perfect alibi for the current crisis of modernity in Rome. As an apparatus, a museum of modern art in Rome has to work for both consumers and the producers of modern art, generate a condition where art can be enjoyed by great numbers, but at the same time created and studied in intimate conditions.
The site is big enough to organize these tensions, to treat as ArtCity, an unpredictable mixture of informal, commercial and official cultural activities.
The site is divided in two parts, separated by a wall that creates a public and a private zone. On the public side, the triangular park becomes a receptacle for trams, busses, parking. Visitors filter to an internal street, lined with private galleries, restaurant, Prada store; it leads to a covered plaza that is the entrance hall of the museum. On the other side along the Via Guido Reni, is the private zone; it accommodates Museum management and services, but also spaces for artistic production and experimentation that are safe from the public. The concept of the museum is based on a museum of typologies; four museum architypes form organised together to meet the specific needs of the contemporary art museum. The Soane museum provides the intimacy for delicate artistic procedures and provides space for experimental art as well as the permant collection. The serenity of ‘de Menil’ and it’s open space for temporary exhibtions, an auditorium and the permanent collection; the loft like efficiency of the ‘Withent for education and parts of the permanent collection and to connect the spectacle of the ‘Guggenheim’ a form that contaminates the 3 typologies — when it touches them, consolidates circulation and accommodates the permanent collection. De Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1998
Part of an effort to regenerate the Kop van Zuid area of Rotterdam, these three multifunctional towers will feature space for corporate offices, residential apartments, a hotel, restaurants, cinema and retail shopping — creating a bustling vertical city that is active 24 hours a day. The project is situated on the Wilhelminapier, near the Hotel New York, the Luxor theater and the cruise terminal. The Wilhelminapier is part of the Kop van Zuid district of Rotterdam, close to the Erasmus Bridge, and will develop into an exclusive residential/commercial location in the future. De Rotterdam will be a mixture of uses, such as offices, public amenities hotel, retail, catering, fitness, apartments and parking. This mixed usage will enable the Wilhelminapier to develop into a genuine city center location, with a host of facilities ensuring that something is happening at all times.
The name of the building — De Rotterdam — recalls the maritime history of the area. In fact, the Wilhelminapier is the former departure point of the Holland-America line, from where tens of thousands of Europeans emigrated to the United States in decades past. One of this company's famous ships was named De Rotterdam. This building accommodates functions that create a synergetic use of the different facilities by the various occupants. For example, residents can use the fitness and catering facilities, and office users can benefit from the conference and hospitality facilities in the hotel and catering establishments.
The different programs are organized into different blocks, that — essentially shell and core — provide the individual users the great flexibility. The clustering of these blocks into a functioning ensemble creates a seemingly random composition that allows the building to blend into its context and yet maintain a distinctive look. Taking the mixed usage as the basis, this firm developed a very striking architectural concept — "the vertical city" — a building approximately 135 meters high. The ground floor is largely devoted to public amenities, with lobbies of functions such as the hotel/cinema/apartments and offices forming the heart of the building. Three access cores suffice to serve the different parts of the building and provide access for each program. These lobbies are interconnected by a large public hall that serves as a general traffic hub for all the functions and users in the building. Y2K, Netherlands, Rotterdam, 1998
In 1998 OMA was approached by a client who was living with his family in a house in the suburbs of Rotterdam and because he liked the view, he bought the garden first and then the meadow behind it and later also the meadow beyond that. As a result he had the certainty that for his entire life there would be a view of one-kilometre depth available to him. The client made three statements which were all equally important requirements for design. First of all he hated mess. Another declaration was his anxiety towards the Y2K problem. He wanted OMA to think about the house before the year 2000 although they would do nothing in the house until after the year 2000, until they were sure that it was safe. The last requirement was it would have to be partly a house where they could all be together, but also a place where they could all live separately. In response to the client’s particular demands and possibilities, we produced a house where everything that is necessary in a house (kitchen, bathroom, etc) surrounded a single space, resulting in a tunnel-like design with a central space where the family could get together if and when they wanted to. Everything other than the central space became an external element or a body where all the organs were on the outside and where the skin is used on the inside.
We conceived a thick layer that surrounded the tunnel on four sides and these four sides contained all the elements of the house and that to some extent there would be no house there and the tunnel would be a simple focus on the view. With this design the entire house could also act as a big storage element that allowed the client to hide any mess. Excavated from the storage element however, there would be all the other important parts of the house: a living room, his department, her department, the kitchen... In that way, the house would consist of completely empty, abstract spaces and completely solid, mysterious spaces that contain mess, junk, services and other necessities.
After further discussions with the client we had two options for the house, either the solid could be really solid (i.e. interior and exterior walls), so that the spaces were absolute and voided, or the solid could be built of translucent materials, such as a translucent concrete, so that you would not sense the mess, but behind it there would be the compacted evidence of everyday life, in the form of dirty linen, books, etc. Other options discussed for the house included allowing for rotation so that any person in the house could rotate it in the direction of the view that they would want to enjoy. Postscript Haus um die Schenkung, Germany, Berlin, 1998
Located adjacent to the Dutch Embassy by the Spree river in Berlin Mitte. The Dutch Embassy client insisted that the city sell the neighbouring site to a culturally elevated client. A group of Anthroposophists who wanted to build a small mixed-use building held a competition that would lead to a design they could show the city to gain the right to build next to the Dutch Embassy. The selection of OMA as the winner meant that one part of OMA (the architect of the Haus um die Schenkung) could cooperate/collaborate with another part of OMA (the architect of the Dutch Embassy) to produce an urban situation where two differently conceived buildings unify to produce spatial continuity (without forfeiting individuality) through sites rather than just around them.
In addition to forms of continuity between the Haus um die Schenkung and the Dutch Embassy we sought a certain continuity with the so-called Berliner Block yet not in the mode of the neo-prussianism that had taken hold of the city at the time but in a way that would bring variety to the city. Rudolf Steiner was the father of theosophy and anthroposophy, an artist and architect, and as such he became our point of inspiration and connection to the client. We read his "Wege zu einem neuen Baustil" and sought to realize infinite interiority as part of our understanding of his work. The faceted language of Steiner's second Goetheanum, rooted in the expressionism of spirit, became the preferred expression for OMA's Haus um die Schenkung. The following formed the massing of the Haus um die Schenkung: 1. the profile of the firewall of the Haus um die Schenkung's anonymous neighbour, 2. the city requirement for continuing the sidewalk arcade along Stralauer Strasse, 3. our desire for the wall framing the cube of the Dutch Embassy to connect with the L-plan of the Haus um die Schenkung to form one continuous volumetric swath, 4. preserving views of the Spree from inside the public spaces of the Haus um die Schenkung and 5. preserving views of the East Berlin Funkturm from inside the Embassy and its fronted park.
We extruded the large opening in the apartment wall of the Dutch Embassy back into the Haus um die Schenkung and subtracted it from the mass of the building to provide open views to the Spree. This subtraction left two service core bookends and a mass above. The upper generic horizontal floor plates in that mass house offices, a kindergarten, and apartments and are joined together with trusses that span the column free public spaces below. The ground level of the Haus um die Schenkung is formed by a creased plate (inhabited by a shop) that mediates the horizontal sidewalk along Stralauer Strasse with the inclined drive of the Dutch Embassy behind. The public spaces of the Haus um die Schenkung form vertical continuity without stairs, ramps, or elevators using joined and creased plates. Inspired by Steiner's initial unbuilt Goetheanum in Munich as a grass mound, we wanted to follow suit. The Haus um die Schenkung is a grass mound in Berlin. Maison à Bordeaux, France, 1998
Located on a hill overlooking the Bordeaux region, this private residence is conceived of as three houses stacked. The lowest level, which accommodates intimate family life, is a series of caverns carved out from the hill; a garden level, completely sheathed in glass, provides additional living and working spaces, while the highest level is reserved for a master suite and children’s bedrooms. The heart of the Maison à Bordeaux is an open mechanical lift which moves freely between the three levels. The Maison à Bordeaux is a residence of three floors on a cape like hill overlooking Bordeaux. The lower level is a series of caverns carved out from the hill for the most intimate life of the family, the ground floor on garden level is a glass room — half inside, half outside — for living and the upper floor is divided into a children’s and a parents area. The heart of the house is a 3 by 3.5m lift that moves freely between the three floors, becoming part of living space and kitchen, transforming itself into an intimate office space and granting access to books, artwork and the wine cellar.
A couple lived in a very old, beautiful house in Bordeaux. They wanted a new house, maybe, a very simple house. They were looking at different architects. Then, the husband had a car accident. He almost died, but he survived. Now he needs a wheelchair. Two years later, the couple began to think about the house again. Now the new house could liberate the husband from the prison that their old house and the medieval city had become. "Contrary to what you would expect” he told the architect, "I do not want a simple house. I want a complex house, because the house will define my world...”. They bought a mountain with panoramic view over the city.
The architect proposed a house — or actually three houses on top of each other. The lowest one was cave-like — a series of caverns carved out from the hill for the most intimate life of the family. The highest house was divided in a house for the couple and a house for the children. The most important house was almost invisible, sandwiched in-between: a glass room — half inside, half outside — for living. The man had his own "room", or rather "station". A lift, 3 by 3.5 m. that moved freely between the 3 houses; changing plan and performance when it "locked” into one of the floors or floated above. A single "wall" intersected each house, next to the elevator. It contained everything the husband might need — books, artwork and in the cellar, wine... The movement of the elevator changed each time the architecture of the house.
Très Grande Bibliotehèque, France, Paris, 1998 OMA received an honorable mention for Très Grande Bibliothèque, a competition to build a new national library in France. The program called for the creation of various smaller libraries contained in one building envelope; including libraries for moving images, recent acquisitions, reference, catalogues and scientific research. The immense amount of information to be stored within these spaces (books, films, digital databases) became the impetus for the overall concept design. The library is imagined as a solid block of information, a dense repository for the past, from which voids are carved to create public spaces — absence floating in memory. The ambition of this project is to rid architecture of responsibilities it can no longer sustain and to explore this new freedom aggresively. It suggests that, liberated from its former obligations, architecture's last function will be the creation of the symbolic spaces that accomodate the persistent desire for collectivity. At the moment when the electronics revolution seems about to melt all that is solid — to eliminate all necessity for concentration and physical embodiment — it seems absurd to imagine the ultimate library. But that was exactly what the French government proposed when it organized a competition for the TGB in the summer of 1998: 250,000 m2 on the east side of Paris on a site near the Periperique, facing the Seine. Along with conference centers, restaurants, offices, etc., it would consolidate five separate and autonomous institutions in which the complete production of words and images since 1945 — the Bibliothèque is as much cinema as library — would be contained: a cinemateque, a library of catalogues, and a scientific research library.
The scheme is based on technological scenarios developed with inventors, systems analysts, writers and electronics companies. They all anticipate the utopia of fully integrated information systems to materialize before the opening of the building: books, films, music, computers will be read on the same magic tablets. The future will not spell the end of the book but a period of new equalities. The Very Big Library is interpreted as a solid block of information, a repository of all forms of memory — books, laser disks, microfiche, computers and databases. In this block, the major public spaces are defined as absences of building, voids carved out of the information solid. Floating in memory, they are multiple embryos, each with its own technological placenta.
Schiphols, Netherlands, 1998
The study for Amsterdam Schiphol Airport was driven by the presumption that the airport itself would be relocated off-shore, and subsequently required an investigation into the implications that this could have on the Netherlands. At the brink of the 3rd millennium, at a time when most developed countries find their planning options increasingly limited, the Netherlands is considering to relocate its main airport on an island in the North Sea. Removal from its current densely populated context not only drastically affects the future possibilities of the airport itself, but at the same time creates a unique opportunity to redefine the planning and development of the country as a whole. Currently OMA is part of a multi disciplinary team, chaired by Schiphol Group and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines that is developing a case on how to accomodate the future growth of Schiphol Airport. This study explores the new sense of clarity and possibilities that the relocation of the airport produces. Through the conceptual explicitness of the logo a new guidance/direction for future planning is suggested. The creation of a major international airport is a massive infrastructural effort. The same goes for the creation of a new city. The thesis of this project is that a single effort can produce and sustain both ambitions. Port of Genoa, Italy, 1997 The port of Genoa is the geophysical condition, beautifully located on the slopes of the coastal mountains the city overlooks the Mare Ligure and the harbour. There the steep seashore forces the city and the harbour to coexist on the same stretch of coast. Result is the historical city in front of an ever modernising harbour: nostalgia facing the pure contemporary condition. So we realised that no conventional waterfront rehabilitation could be the answer.
As by magic the economic growth of South East Asia has forced the re-emergence of Genoa as an important European harbour. This is the incentive for a drastic change in the scope and the ambition. Our plan proposes an aggressive welcome to the new condition: the further improvement of the harbour, preparing quays for more berth and the newest logistics for ships, cranes, trains and lorries. At the same time our plan proposes to reclaim Genoa’s relationship with the seaboard. After the outward expansion of the post war era Genoa is forced to expand and improve on actually occupied territory. Genoa has the chance — almost non existent in Italy — to restructure an area central in the city, important to both civic life and economic activity. We propose a combination of manipulations; efficient infrastructure and logistics restructure a former infrastructure clot, freeing land for new program. Mutual exchange of territory between city and harbour improve conditions for development. The introduction of port related manufacturing and assemblage allows the city to generate income from the passing flow of commodities between sea and hinterland.
Educatorium, Netherlands, Utrecht, 1997 Composed of two planes which fold to accommodate a range of distinct programs including an outdoor plaza, two lecture halls, cafeteria and a testing facility. Planes interlock to create a single trajectory in which the entire university experience — socialization, learning, examination — is encapsulated. The Educatorium is conceived as a new center of gravity for the Uithof University Campus. Point of departure of the design are two sheets which fold and interlock. The concrete slab is treated as a malleable surface which allows an optimum fit for each program. The sloped planes of the entrance plateau, function like an urban plaza or mixing chamber. Beneath this area is sheltered the bicycle parking and intersecting bike-path.
Above the mixing chamber is the two-story block of examination halls. While specifically planned for mass examinations they are also designed to allow varied configurations of furnishing and inhabitation. The two auditoria are accessed via the large entry area ramp. Oriented towards the north side the larger auditorium is open to the view of the botanical gardens. Two curving walls enclose the room, one solid, one of glass. Laminated with a holographic film which changes between transparent or translucent depending on the viewer`s point, the glass wall acts as a fabricated cloud alternately clearing and obscuring the view to the outside while providing a screen of privacy for the interior. In the ceiling, steel reinforcement bars emerge from the exposed concrete slab. Steel and concrete dissociate allowing each material to work at optimum efficiency: the 20cm thick concrete slab is made to span 21 metres.
The second auditorium with 400 seats is situated to the south. Spanning between two massive walls the roof structure is a densely packed series of I-beams forming a surface of steel. The cafeteria is situated beneath the floor of the auditoria. The lines of columns are denser to the south, almost disappear to the north towards the landscape beyond. Designed to accommodate up to 1000 people, the sloping ceiling together with the "random" columns generats a series of "places" within the large room. Circulation in the Educatorium is organized around a cruciform of two corridors subdividing each plan into quadrants and functioning as the main connectors. A second system of paths allows the building to function as a network. By merging the "pauze" areas with circulation, larger open territories are generated as part of strategy of eliminating frontiers in favour of more subtle techniques of separation or inclusion. Togok Towers, Korea, Seoul, 1996
The Skyscraper was born almost 150 years ago, when the elevator made it possible to have access to previously unimaginable levels of a building. Then steel made it possible to build higher and faster, electricity to illuminate deeper spaces and to inject conditioned air: engineers learnt how to stabilize these tower-like structures. Over the past 150 years all these technologies have improved, but nothing has essentially changed. The present generation of Asian Skyscrapers only competes on the superficial level of height. It does not contribute anything more fundamental to the development of reinvention of the type. Because the Skyscraper is a solitary type — it solves all its problems on its own — the contemporary city has become a collection of SINGLE, separate buildings that are connected by streets but not really integrated with the city.
From a distance the Skyscraper has a strong aura but its effect on the urban condition is usually negative: since most of its life takes place INSIDE it rarely contributes to the energy and intensification of urban life.
For almost 50 years now, the traditional solution for the encounter of Skyscraper and city, has been to place the tower on a plaza, but all over the world the emptiness of such spaces makes them an impoverished caricature of urban life. It is a solution that is no longer credible. Our ambition in this project is to imagine the "next” Skyscraper, both in a technical sense, and to create a Skyscraper COMPLEX — a new urban condition for the 21st. century. The breakthrough this project represents, is the integration of several buildings into a larger whole. No longer soloists, the different elements support each other in every sense: ARCHITECTURALLY, they form an integrated complex; TECHNICALLY, issues of stability, access, circulation and servicing are organized collectively; URBANISTICALLY the entire building becomes an urban quarter of a new kind.
The combination of all these breakthroughs generates a quantum leap in quality. Instead of separation, the Skyscraper Complex creates continuity, variety and programmatic richness instead of repetition. For the city this arrangement means that the Skyscraper is not merely the imposition of a huge parasite, but that it now contributes to the reinvention of a new urban condition, a new way of receiving the Public. At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. we are at the brink of a great transition: real space and cyberspace coexist together. Usually they are seen as each other’s opposites, almost enemies. The next Skyscraper should celebrate that new condition and investigate if the coexistence of the real and the virtual can generate/sponsor a revolutionary new urban condition. Hyperbuilding, Thailand, Bangkok, 1996
Although initially the concept of a Hyperbuilding seems irrevocably linked to societies of hyper-development, on closer inspection, the advantages of hyper concentrated structures and programs, are more evident in societies undergoing the drastic upheaval of modernisation at full force, in other words, the Hyperbuilding may be less credible in the almost "completed” urban conditions of, for instance Japan or America, where strictly speaking it would have little significant qualities to add, than in a developing condition where the virtues of the hyperbuilding, the provision of an enormous controllable critical mass, could be a demonstrable advantage. If this hypothesis is true it would follow that it would be interesting to play down rather than play up, the technical aspect of the hyperbuilding. Although the hyperbuilding is clearly the 'next step’, it should not be confused with high-tech. It will only work if we can combine the visionary ambition of the hyper-scale with a de-escalation of its technicity, with a degree of elementary simplicity.
To test this hypothesis, we have looked at the city of Bangkok. Maybe its greatest quality in the context of this operation would be that Bangkok is a city on the edge of the tolerable. From its traffic to its haphazard development, to its politics, it is a city of crisis. It is therefore by definition a city that is ripe for experimentation. In the Bangkok context, the hyperbuilding would have to be programmatically adjusted to its context. This means for example in Bangkok to reduce its reliance on commuting by introducing a place where people can stay. Site Location Program Space
Circulation Structure Universal Headquarters, USA, Los Angeles, 1996
Los Angeles is a city without a center. It has Universal City. Universal City, in turn, is a center without a city: myriad functions dispersed across a huge site. The new Headquarters Building will be its Central Business District — an office building of urban complexity that introduces the reality of critical mass by challenging all components of the new company, (re)assembling the cells, orchestrating their coexistence through its expansion, consolidating and reconfiguring. The building has to forge a new entity from disparate parts — whose final relationships are uncertain. Masterplan
Headquarters Creativity needs an elusive dosage of order and chaos, fixity and improvisation. The building contains Universal’s current and future divisions, offers them platforms to interact, laboratories to invent, silos for meeting rooms, places of assembly and relaxation. It is a corporate theater where groups emerge, are disbanded, and regroup. By dividing the program into horizontal office floors and vertical towers, the organization of the building becomes a literal diagram of the unique and the generic: specificity in the vertical direction, generic office space in the horizontal. No matter how turbulent the composition of the company becomes, the office floors provide the necessary flexibility, while the towers guarantee a single entity is maintained.
There is a “virtual Tower" of double height, containing loft-like workshops, a circulation tower” which is a travertine clad atrium with the main elevator bank and open to the outside air, a “collective tower” of shared meeting, conference centers and screening rooms, and an “executive tower” of executive suites for senior management. The 4 structures are connected in mid-air by the Corporate Beam — a glass volume that consolidates corporate activity with special needs and shared support departments. Close to the hill top the beam cantilevers to lodge corporate leadership. A ramp across the Terrace Parkway gives direct access to an open air parking level for guests and executives. At this scale of organization, architecture approaches urbanism. Universal is not so much an office plan as an urban plan, a map: the building as an organizer of different elements. The organizational diagram resonates more with a subway map than with a building plan. Dutch House, Netherlands, 1995
Challenged by highly uneven topography and a 4m height restriction, OMA designed this private residence to occupy space both above and below ground. The embedded design accommodates a maximal program — four bedrooms, kitchen, living room, study and two terraces — while making a minimal formal gesture. Marking the termination and final frontier of the ice-age, an endmorene remains as a Dutch hill, about 50m above sea level. The 5000m2 site is located here, in a forest of pine on fine golden "beachsand". Aside from the unstable ground conditions, specific site requirements include height restrictions of 4 m from adjacent road and excessive limitation of buildable area. Literal interpretations of these given dictate a frame of total length and roof height.
Manipulations of terrain became subsequent. A drive-through path was carved out to ensure efficiency of access and exit. The program consists of facilities for two permanent residents — the parents — and for three grown-up daughters, visitors at most. To fade the presence of their absence, a programmatic split was introduced, materialized by the slab, held by one house holding the other. How to translate the two different conditions of occupation related to specific site and ground, autonomously and with moments of interaction, became our focus. Further, to compress maximum program into a minimal amount of formal gestures. At zero level, one wrapping wall is defining a continuity of inside areas and patios for the daughters "motel", introverted and grounded.
The floating deck supports a crystallized container of parents program. One hingpoint, the pivoting bridge/horizontal door feeds both bedroom unit with patio above/service entry below. The content of wall itself is dictating, but leaving surrounding space free within the glass-box. Physically detached, but visually inclusive of site. Various treatments of glass and shadings are manipulating this mutual relationship, according to program and orientation. The node of the house is a central ramp, providing visual and functional connection between the two counterparts. Paradoxically this physical cut is where reconcilation is found. |
