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Rem Koolhaas Professor in Practice Department of Architecture |
Projects 2003
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European Central Bank, Germany, Frankfurt Am Main
The European Central Bank is a bank without tradition, presiding over a currency with no history. The Euro is the only currency not backed by a state. Like Europe itself, the ECB is modern by default, simply because it is unprecedented in its effort.
Conceiving a building for the European Central Bank is like flying blind: venturing into a domain with no clear references. So far the question of a European style or iconography to accommodate Europe’s increasing integration has the usual habitat of business: a high rise tower clad in beige marble with brown mirror glass windows. Besides the building’s name “Eurotower”, no effort has been made to present the bank as one of the symbols of a unified Europe.
There is little that sets the ECB apart from Frankfurt’s other 400 banks. Eurotower neatly blends in with the 17 other high-rises that have crossed the 100-meter barrier to form the skyline of “the city” of Frankfurt. In height it is casually surpassed by the German Commerzbank. So far the identity of the ECB has successfully been submerged into the overall ambition of Frankfurt to be a financial center. Ascot Residents, UK
Although being impressed by the striking setting of Ascot (UK) with its full-grown scenery, the existing configuration on the site doesn’t exploit its the potential beauty. In order to fully take advantage of these potential, a set of transformations are proposed. In the midst of densely grown areas we propose opening new views to make it possible to fully appreciate the size and shape of the site. In doing this, we turn the hill at the center of the site into an Acropolis, overseeing the property.
On the hill a compilation of sport accommodations is positioned, which result into a sports Acropolis. In other to further accentuate the edge a sunken linear volume is added, making both a stage and the difference in height more explicit. The volume opens toward the valley; it accommodates the summerhouse, swimming pool, bar, parking and party facilities. As a result the lower garden has a much clearer definition, which benefits the setting of the main house. A stretched flat lawn opens new views and introduces convenience. The cultivated garden establishes control and culture in the rough natural setting.
The hill is too small to accommodate the full program of the house. Several studies showed that putting the house on top of this Acropolis would eliminate its effect and would fail to exploit the potential of the lower garden. A further study of the main house resulted in two radical options: a vertical and a horizontal house, both based on the same configuration. Traditionally country house is sprawling and horizontal, which results in spaces that all have the same close relationship with the ground, the view and the landscape. By turning our initial proposal 90 degrees we discovered a vast new potential in which each space could have its own personal relationship with the landscape. What used to be a conventional patio becomes centrally located multi-level living space which gives the inhabitants an unprecedented special experience and at the same time fits the very specific demands of the program.
The move to the site of the Grossmarkthalle located in Frankfurt’s Ostend marks a significant shift: A new purpose built accommodation, set apart from the skyline of Frankfurt’s financial district, is an endorsement of the ECB’s importance and marks an important step in the emancipation as a European Insititution. From quietly performing its tasks for years the ECB will suddenly find itself in full limelight. The new ECB building would be a monument, if only because of the expectations it invokes. Hermitage Museum, Russia, St. Petersburg
The Hermitage is a former palace, used as a museum. With the addition of the general staff building, the Hermitage gained 800 rooms to the existing 1,200. The Hermitage and its surroundings is becoming an urban quarter, incorporating the palace square where the revolution started. OMA proposed an extension project dealing not only with architecture but as well with the distribution of 3.5 million artifacts across 2,000 rooms. Does every museum need to be modernized? Do all museums have to adhere to the same technical conditions? Do all museums have to be extended and updated, or can a certain amount of inaction, a certain resistance to change, actually be instrumental in maintaining a degree of the authenticity so frequently erased during the process of modernization?
Can the architect, a person usually hired to change the conditions he finds, perform more like an archaeologist, scrupulously examining the current conditions, and proposing new forms of organization that allow each element to enjoy renewed value? The Hermitage project cannot be understood in strictly architectural terms; in fact, it cannot be understood along any of the classical definitions of a project. The "Hermitage Project" is not a project: it is a concentration of different issues that can only be resolved successfully by taking a more comprehensive approach – curatorial or intellectual. Rather than a confident imposition of the new, the task at hand is to find those changes that will allow the Hermitage in a discreet way, without being too manifest, to function better. During the last three years, AMO/OMA has worked as a consultant for the Guggenheim—Hermitage Foundation on scenarios for the museum’s future. The central issue at stake is how to modernize the State Hermitage Museum while accepting one of Russia’s great legacies on its own terms. The Hermitage is examined as a whole: its functioning as a museum, its future position, its integral participation in the city of St. Petersburg
Het Paard van Troje, Netherlands, The Hague Trojan Horse is an appropriate name for the concert venue, with most of the new construction located behind an ancient, monumental facade. The Netherlands National Trust for Historic Buildings protected one of the two buildings that form the centre, while the other building had only its authentic facade left. By removing the old construction behind the historic facade, a complicated problem of space and acoustics could be solved efficiently: the small concert hall was positioned directly behind the historic facade while the large concert hall was constructed on the backside of the two buildings and is also reachable through an adjacent street.
The lobby, under the small concert hall shows the confrontation of old and new. The walls are not treated and show damages and changes that happened during the last century. The small hall is supported by 6 beams with large buffers and does not touch the historic walls and facade, avoiding acoustic leaking. The entrances of both halls are on the same level so that they can be used together for large events. Also the cafe in the historic building is connected so all public spaces can be used together. The interior of the large hall has two movable balconies offering a variety of positions that can adapt the space to the different character of the performing acts.
At Lange Beestenmarkt side a new facade was constructed. Cor-Ten steal is mounted to the facade in such a way that the water is drained inside the facade. Beijing Preservation, China
The study for Beijing examines the possibilities of historic preservation in a city whose urban development is driven by radical modernization. In recent years, planning guidelines have been enforced by Beijing planners as a response to internal and foreign criticism. Their main issue points at the loss of any evidence of Beijing's past replaced by rigid, bloated buildings. The preservation study suggests stepping away from the idea of 'temporary' structures and the predominant focus on Beijing's city centre, but instead allows new architecture to enter the periphery, which then will allow for a permanent interface of older and newer architecture.
The traditional substance of the Chinese city is the hutong—a mat of courtyards impressive for its intimacy and versatility, but often casual in its construction. In a society that is modernizing with passion, it is perhaps hard to share the passionate defense of the past that characterizes societies that have their modernization behind them. But responding to internal and foreign criticism, the issue is now taken very seriously by Beijing planners. By consensus, the hutongs—the generic substance of the Chinese city—are most characteristic of Beijing’s ‘past’. The dilemma: building is less permanent in Asia; restoration often leads to a harsh reconstruction from zero that removes all traces of authenticity in favor of rigid, bloated rebuilding. In the name of preservation, the past is made unrecognizable.
From 1790 onwards, the scale of what is preserved has become more ambitious. Beginning with ancient monuments, the repertoire of preservation has escalated to a point where it includes practically all typologies that make up the current environment. The arguments for preservation have become steadily more political over time, expressed now in the language of cultural correctness. The interval between the object and the moments of its preservation has decreased from about two millennia in 1882 to mere decades today. Soon, the interval will disappear. In a radical shift from the retrospective to the prospective, we will then have to decide what to preserve before we build. Some structures will be conceived to last, others to have a limited span. Preservation will introduce a deliberate phase difference in the texture of the city. We will invest ourselves more in long lasting construction – and perhaps have more fun with short-term architecture. Seemingly in opposition to development, the current scale and thrust of the combined preservation effort in fact suggests a parallel universe of alternative planning. Preservation and construction are in fact twin phenomena, not opposites. They could be part of a single planning discipline that ultimately decides the duration of any construction.
If the point of preservation is to identify and keep elements that make a give city unique, Beijing through its recent history contains a vast arsenal of relatively new architecture and urban situations that deserves the same consideration as the old center. Beijing could reinvent itself by expanding its agenda and introducing it as a parallel planning of the city, rather than depending on existing practices and approaches. Instead of a seemingly inevitable focus on the center—the oldest, the most beautiful, the most historic part—different models of preservation can be imagined: an infinite wedge could record, systematically and without esthetic bias, all the developments that have occurred in an urban system over time, a point grid could act as a form of sampling, a statistical preservation model where every condition is captured in the form of samples.
The most visionary approach to preservation would be to use it in a prospective rather than retrospective way by declaring different areas of the city to be preserved for different periods of time. Instead of a temporal monolith—a permanent center and an ever changing periphery, the city will be defined and enriched by planned phase differences between its parts. The contrast between past and present will become more relative—older and newer will share a permanent interface. It means new architecture will not limits its contributions to the periphery. But the construction can take place—visions articulated—in the center, where it counts. It also means that new architecture could appear anywhere and that new ‘building’ would be distributed instead of concentrated in predictable extensions. IIT - McCormick Tribune Campus, USA, Illinois, 2003 Connecting the east and west part of the campus through a mosaic program
A dense mosaic of program including a food court, auditorium, bookstore, computer facility and meeting spaces attracts students to the new campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Its location in the physical heart of campus re-links the previously disconnected eastern and western halves of the university; while the iconic steel rail station which floats above, connects the campus to the larger metropolitan area. How to inhabit a given territory with only half the population that animated it in the 70's? To us the conundrum implies a building that is able to (re)urbanize the largest possible area with the least amount of (built) substance. IIT's situation is further exacerbated by the no-man's-land to either side of the Elevated that keeps the developed halves apart in a diagram of disengagement. Building an urban facade on State Street-as the Mies master plan suggests-would even further condemn the residential quarters east of the Elevated to the status of hinterland.
The physical heart of the campus-a large rectangle between State and Wabash, 32nd and 33rd streets-is our project. By not stacking activities, but by positioning each programmatic particle as part of a dense mosaic, our building contains the urban condition itself. To capture the sum of the student flows, the web of lines that already connect the eastern and western campus destinations are organized through the Campus Center to differentiate the multiplicity of activities into streets, plazas and urban islands. Without fragmenting the overall building, each of the constituent parts is articulated according to its specific needs and positioned to respond precisely to contextual influence to create neighborhoods (twenty-four hour, commercial, entertainment, academic, utilitarian), parks and other urban elements in miniature. The autonomy of each program is respected (even exacerbated): the shortcuts guarantee their co-existence.
The main federating element is the roof, a continuous concrete slab that shields the Campus Center against the noise of the Elevated while unifying the heterogeneity below. The existing Commons Hall now functions as food court: its perimeter and the (original) wooden partitions preserved. The commercial parts of the program are organized along the 33rd Street edge of the building, providing convenient access for the neighborhood "twenty-four seven". The Elevated has a huge impact on IIT's character, solved or unsolved. To proclaim a new beginning, we enclose the section that runs above the Campus Center in an acoustically isolating stainless steel tube, thereby releasing the potential of the no-man's-land around the Elevated. The encircled track-"The Tube"-also becomes a crucial part of the Center's, and IIT's, image.
Content, Netherlands, Germany CONTENT shows an overview of the innovations and current activities of OMA-AMO. Rather than a straightforward presentation of major works, it delves into the ideas, experiments and thoughts behind both built and un-built works of architecture produced by OMA, as well as non-architectural research projects conducted by AMO.
The exhibition relates architecture and urban planning—focusing on OMAAMO’s production since the publication of S,M,L,XL in 1995—with a diverse set of contemporary issues, ranging from global and local political and economic situations, to social and cultural discussions. CONTENT also inevitably documents the consequences of September 11th on OMA-AMO’s work: a reduced preoccupation with the USA and an eastward shift that focuses increasingly on Europe, Russia and China. Work for the EU has introduced an explicitly political dimension to the firm’s work. Meanwhile a study of preservation in Beijing has for the first time brought the issue of history into the OMA-AMO’s work.
The exhibition is composed of a series of themed installations conceived by OMA-AMO and collaborating artists and designers. Numerous architecture models are displayed alongside a multimedia installation of “Junkspace” by Tony Oursler (based on the text written by Rem Koolhaas), a new fi lm by Jeff Preiss, and photos by Candida Höfer of the Dutch Embassy in Berlin. The entire environment is made of the temporary construction equipment found in nearly every urban setting today. Given the shear mass of material, CONTENT creates a sense of almost urban fullness—a substance from which a series of thematic boulevards is carved, enabling discrete subjects to interact with one another, and giving a vivid sense of connection both synchronically and diachronically. Beijing Books Building, China
This hybrid bookstore, publishing headquarters will accommodate 50,000 visitors per day, functioning as a dynamic place to read, research and absorb information. In order to communicate the interior’s exuberance, the building is wrapped with a glass-block façade—making visible the bookstore’s constant flux of activity and exchange. Upon completion in 2008, the Beijing Books Building will be the largest bookstore in the world. Most shopping now is introverted; most shopping now is housed in boxes. The larger the store, the less its exterior reveals about the events inside.
The intense way in which the Beijing Books Building is currently used not only as a store but as a place to read and soak up information, is profoundly exciting, but very little of its energy is communicated to the city. With the doubling of its scale, and the addition of new public and technological elements, the intensity of the store will more than double, triple. It will be the largest bookstore in the world. We have conceived a way in which this energy can be channelled / exploited inside the building to dramatically reorganize the shopping, and secondly, we have conceived a facade to convey this energy to the city.
To master the pressure of up to 50,000 visitors per day, the new building is conceived as a system of ramps that connect to the existing structure and merge both old and new into a single continuous floor plate. Circulation is no longer confined to escalator banks, but the sales areas themselves form a spiral movement of gradually sloping bookshelves that both channel and accommodate the customers. The building unfolds an urban experience of multiple activities mixed with commercial areas along its vertical trajectory and transforms the existing book store into an urban media center.
As the volume of the store doubles, its interior functions become increasingly disconnected from its façade. In order to reverse this condition and let the building speak to the city, we have developed a favade like a gigantic translucent bookshelf. Stacked cast glass blocks contain books and are animated by the people inside browsing and reading from the outside they become large pixels that switch on and off according to the activities inside the store. Two large openings towards Chang An Avenue and Xidan Square articulate the main entrances and form large electronic billboards that broadcast events inside the store to the city and information from the rest of the world to the inside of the building. |
