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Rem Koolhaas Professor in Practice Department of Architecture |
Publications
| Rem Koolhaas: Unveiling The Prada Foundation
After more than 15 years—during which it exhibited work by such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Dan Flavin, Carsten Holler, Barry McGee, Tom Friedman, Francesco Vezzoli, Tom Sachs and Nathalie Djurberg and hosted numerous lectures, panels and film festivals of unusual sophistication—Milan's Prada Foundation is widening its exhibition spaces and broadening its cultural perspective with a new compound designed by the renowned Dutch architecture firm, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), led, of course, by its Pritzker-Prize-winning founder, Rem Koolhaas. The new art center and permanent exhibition space will be situated in a location that includes early twentieth century buildings that originally belonged to one of Milan's first spirits manufacturing companies. Preserved in their original condition, the seven preexisting buildings include warehouses, laboratories, brewing silos and workers' residences—surrounded by a large courtyard. OMA/Koolhaas' project adds an exhibition building, an auditorium and a tower to the existing structures, which will house works from the permanent collection. This accessible volume documents the Foundation's past events and future developments, highlighting the ways that contemporary architecture can coexist with a regenerated historic site. Al Manakh, Gulf Region AMO in collaboration with Moutamarat and ARCHIS
Al Manakh offers a detailed analysis of the history, culture and architecture of The Gulf region including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah and discusses the implications of the rapid development of these territories for the rest of the world. This is the first time that the unprecedented urban condition of this region has been comprehensively documented from diverse viewpoints and communicated to outside the region. Voices of architects, intellectuals and developers making The Gulf happen are represented in the numerous essays and interviews that accompany this richly illustrated study. Key figures such as, Rem Koolhaas, Ole Bouman, and Thomas Krens give their take on the current situation in The Gulf, along with their predictions for the future of this ‘ultimate tabula rasa’. Al Manakh is divided into three sections:
I. The Dubai Guide
II. Gulf Survey
III. The Global Agenda
AA Words One: Architecture, Ideology and the City: In January 2006 Peter Eisenman joined Rem Koolhaas at the Architectural Association for an evening of conversation about architecture, ideology, and the city. Their dialogue forms the basis for the first volume of AA Words, a series emphasizing the written word as the basis for critical debate by contemporary architects and theorists. Each architect states his views about the terms of architecture, including its theories and relationship to the city and other forms of critical and cultural practice. As a coda to the conversation, the book includes contributions by Jeffrey Kipnis, Robert E. Somol, and Brett Steele, who offer their personal interpretations of the critical practices of Eisenman and Koolhaas.
Lagos: How It Works Lagos: How it Works is the result of more than eight years of research in Lagos, Nigeria. As a symbol of West African urbanism, Lagos contradicts almost every defining feature of the “modern” city. And yet it’s a city that works. In over five hundred pages, this mega-book documents the changing mega-city with essays, illustrations, maps, diagrams, rumors, interviews, images, and anecdotes. It follows the development of Lagos from a small-scale, traditional settlement on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea in 1800 into one of the largest mega-cities in the world today. With an emphasis on modernity, infrastructure, and the role of oil and town planners in the 1970s, it observes the effects that globalization has had on the city’s identity, from its position on the cutting edge of African modernity through its dramatic decline during the oil crisis until today.
Rem Koolhaas & Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
In this traditional paperback, renowned critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist teams up with Dutch avant-garde architect and paradigm-shifting intellectual, Rem Koolhaas, for a discussion of Koolhaas's work in China, his designs for Prada, architecture as metaphor, and the development of urbanism in the slipstream of globalization. The Gulf
This accordion-fold booklet contains a series of analytical views of the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf by AMO-OMA and colleagues from the American University of Sharjah, UAE. In a “futurized present,” these views seek to depict the current and unprecedented state of the region, which invites one to contemplate the design of a new version of urbanism. Like a pristine and untouched canvas, the sand and sea of the Persian Gulf coast constitute a tabula rasa, waiting to receive the imprint of new identities. The West is guilty of a double negligence vis-à-vis this land of possibilities— something that actually has its origins in the West is not being taken seriously, and as a result we are unable to seize upon a burgeoning global phenomenon. This accordion-fold booklet is published to coincide with the 10th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
Junkspace I tre scritti di Rem Koolhaas, qui riuniti insieme dall'autore su richiesta dell'editore italiano, sono da leggere come il seguito ideale di Delirious New York (1978). Essi ci offrono una nitida visione delle forze ingovernabili che regolano lo spazio nelle nostre città. Il rapporto fra storia e identità (fra «destino e carattere», direbbe Benjamin) è qui smascherato crudelmente: Junkspace, «spazio spazzatura», è una nuova categoria del pensiero che Koolhaas, maestro di similitudini, introduce con lirico cinismo per aprirci gli occhi sullo spazio in cui viviamo, e forse sullo spazio in generale. Post-Occupancy
As part of the 'Festa per l'architettura' Domus will present the new "Domus d'Autore" series, dedicated to "listening to the voice of those who know how to look beyond current confines and have the strength to direct and influence our way of perceiving the city and the spaces beyond it." This is how publisher Giovanna Mazzocchi describes the project, with the first issue edited by AMO/Rem Koolhaas. To illustrate this point of view, AMO has chosen to analyse four recent OMA buildings in the light of everyday experience, examining the way they are used rather than their form.
CCTV by OMA Aiming for the China 2008 Olympic Games, many famous international architects have started to inject their design concepts into China, the construction war has reached its peak, of the many projects, CCTV(China Central Television) stands outs prominently. This issue clarifies the whole picture based on the latest data with full cooperation by OMA.
Content
Content is a product of the moment. Inspired by the ceaseless fluctuations of the early 21st century, it bears the marks of globalism and the market, ideological siblings that, over the past twenty years, have undercut the stability of contemporary life. This book is born of that instability. It is not timeless; it's almost out of date already. It uses volatility as a license to be immediate, informal, blunt; it embraces instability as a new source of freedom. Content is a follow-up to SMLXL, an inventory of seven years of OMA's tireless labor. In many ways it is structured according to what its predecessor is not-dense, cheap, disposable... The relentless internal logic that propelled SMLXL is here counteracted by the incorporation of critical, external voices. Subjects are not arranged according to size, but by geographical proximity: the trajectory moves ever eastward, beginning in San Francisco, ending in Tokyo. Content is dominated by a single theme — "Go East" — at once a response to 9-11's mounting wreckage and an acknowledgment of the eastward momentum that has, through AMO's political involvement with the EU and an increasing density of Chinese projects, redirected the office's energy. It is an attempt to illustrate the architect's ambiguous relations with the forces of globalization, an account of seven years spent scouring the earth - not as a business traveler or backpacker, but as a vagabond - roving, searching for an opportunity to realize the visions that make remaining at home torturous. Content is, beyond all, a tribute to what are perhaps OMA-AMO's greatest virtues - its dogged, almost existential pursuit of discomfort, its comitment to engaging the world by inviting itself to places where it has no authority, places where it doesn't "belong".
The Dutch Embassy in Berlin by OMA/Rem Koolhaas
In November 2003 Berlin gained one more spectacular example of contemporary architecture. The new Dutch Embassy built by the internationally renowned architect Rem Koolhaas on the River Spree in what used to be East Berlin. After the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, Congrexpo in Lille and the villa in Bordeaux among others, the Berlin embassy once again attests to the astonishing design talent of the Netherlands' best-known architect. Two concepts underpin the embassy design. Koolhaas managed to turn to his advantage the strict planning regulations applying in Berlin, which require that every corner of a city block has to be built-up. In one corner of the site he designed a freestanding cube to house the actual embassy. Wrapped around it, and defining the other corners, is an L-shaped block of three houses for embassy staff. The principal organizing element is a continuous route spiralling through the building, with the different embassy departments strung off it discretely. The spiral winds its way through the cube accompanied by new and unexpected views of the building and more especially of the city. In The Dutch Embassy in Berlin by OMA/Rem Koolhaas sketches, drawings and models illustrate the design's points of departure. Koolhaas himself expounds upon the context of the project. Candida Höfer gives her personal perspective on the embassy's exterior and interior. Parisian architecture critic François Chaslin analyses the building in an essay.
Layout: Interview with Philip Johnson by Rem Koolhaas
and Hams Ulrich Obrist Philip Johnson (born 1906) was director of architecture at the New York Museum of Modern Art during the 1930s. In “Layout”, he converses with colleagues and curators Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist about art, artists, and architects. Subjects include his legendary exhibit International Style (1932) at MOMA, the work of Schwitters, Mondrian, Finsterlin, Warhol, Duchamp and his admiration for Mies van der Rohe. From this interview material, the artist Thomas Bayrle has created an extraordinary book, taking as its design basis, the layout of the New York Times and fleshing it out with text. In English and German text. WHAT IS OMA?
This book provides a clear insight into the role and significance of Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Authors of international repute from beyond the province of architecture examine OMA's work in the light of social and economic developments. The many facets of Koolhaas come under review: his take on architectural theory and the conceptual apparatus he employs, his vision of urbanism and the contemporary city, the designs put into practice by OMA and the research projects of the AMO think-tank, which exist outside the immediate boundaries of architecture. This book paints an intelligent picture of the sheer range of OMA's architecture and of Koolhaas's seminal role in the architectural world. Essays by Aaron Betsky, Ian Buruma, H.J.A. Hofland, Okwui Enwezor, Neil Leach, Matthew Stadler, Bruce Sterling, Bart Verschaffel. Excerpts by Jean Attali, René Boomkens, Fredric Jameson, Fritz Neumeyer, Michael Sorkin, Anthony Vidler, Sarah Whiting.
New-York délire : Ce "manifeste rétroactif de Manhattan" selon l'expression même de l'auteur, décrit un Manhattan théorique, comme conjoncture, dont la ville actuelle n'est que l'imparfaite réalisation parce que seule une reconstruction spéculative peut faire comprendre le New York réel, vieilli prématurément. Il s'agit donc d'une interprétation de la théorie implicite sous-jacente au développement de la cité gigantesque. L'auteur montre comment la trame rigide du début a été envahie par le délire. Une abondante illustration appuie la thèse. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping
Contributors: Tae-Wook Cha, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jutiki Gunter,
Dan Herman, Hiromi Hosoya, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung
Leong, Kiwa Matsushita, John McMorrough, Juan Palop-Casado, Markus
Schaefer, Tran Vinh, Srdjan Jovanovich Weiss, Louise Wyman
Great Leap Forward
Contributors: Bernard Chang, Mihai Craciun, Nancy Lin, Yuyang
Liu, Katherine Orff, Stephanie Smith
Rem Koolhaas (Archipockets)
Rem Koolhaas (Rotterdam,1944) studied architecture at the AA in London--where he went on to become a lecturer--and at the IAUS in New York, during Peter Eisenman's time there. Koolhaas has always been connected with the theory of architecture, as lecturer at the innovative AA, as a speaker, and with his published work: Delirious New York, a retrospective manifesto for Manhattan (1978) and the recent S, M, L, XL (1995). In 1972 Koolhaas set up the OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), whose name clearly expresses the planning intentions of the team, comprising Koolhaas, Elia and Zoe Zenghelis, and Madelon Vriessendorp. Each volume in this eminently affordable series highlights the work of a renowned 20th century architect. Packed with dazzling four-color photographs of exteriors and interiors, detailed plans, generous layouts and brief, comprehensive texts, these books are both authoritative and attractive, while their convenient size makes them great travel companions. An easy reference for work, school, or play, these colorful introductions to architectural wonders will fill your head with inspiration—without emptying your wallet. Mutations
The Harvard Design School Project on the City began as a response to a pervasive condition of architectural practice, in which the architect is asked to intervene in, but never to appreciate or understand, a given situation. An architect's interests are ultimately determined by a series of random encounters with projects and clients that do not allow an independent investigation of issues or conditions outside their field of vision. Thus architects operate, be definition, with ulterior motives; the capacity for independent analysis, research or investigation is simply not within their repertoire. It is becoming increasingly important for architects to operate on a level independent of architecture, in order to understand, at the most basic level, the phenomena affecting the development of architecture and the city. The Project on the City is an investigation of a series of issues related to the urban condition. These issues have been chosen to reflect certain pertinent, unusual, or unknown conditions of the urban mutations taking place at this moment in the world. The project has no connection with design: it is a pure research project, conducted by thesis students who explore a specific subject each year.
Colours
"The nature of colour should change - no longer just a thin
layer of change, but something that genuinely alters perception"
and this stipulation of Rem Koolhaas is echoed by the world famous
architects and designers Alessandro Mendini and Norman Foster.
In this volume, they present between them a total of 90 colours
- each covering half a page - accompanied by comments on the background,
the significance and the applications of the colours. The studies
of colours from each office form the basis of this book, and were
previously only available in extravagant individual editions.
Projects for Prada, Part 1
Indefinite expansion represents a crisis: in the typical case
it spells the end of the brand as a creative enterprise and the
beginning of the brand as purely financial enterprise. Wired: Koolworld
In April 2001, the publisher Condé Nast, the wholly owned subsidiary of Advance Publications, asked AMO to look at Wired, post boom. Where to locate a new mission, how to position a magazine previously based on the relentless narcissism of Silicon Valley? Fashion magazines adhere to a rigorous formula—a focus-group-tested mélange of cleavage, airbrushed skin, and exclamation points. Wired's strategy for techno-single mission: eulogize the old and herald the new. This formula served as an ever-renewable font of optimism for a monthly package perpetually promising the next big thing. In the beginning, the Word The Wired Dictionary emerged out of a hunch: that a magazine's vocabulary can be as glossy as its paper stock. The simplest way to understand Wired's message was to strip its language of grammar, catalog every word it had ever published and record the frequency of its use. The dictionary made apparent the invisible fin-de-siècle lexicon that Wired both chronicle and helped produce.
And so tracing Wired's history was no longer a matter of following shifts in ownership, tracking world events, or chronicling editorial regimes. We found that a simple and consistent rhythm punctuated Wired's seven years of existence: on average, Wired proclaimed a revolution every three months. A new future generated before other futures had time to be verified. Optimism
World Agenda Strategy—Demographics Wired's demographic profile is punctured with holes—as if the impact of technology had impacted the lives of only wealthy, white, middle-aged men. What would happen if Wired tailored its message to...women? seniors...teenagers?...blacks?
Dutchtown: A City Center Design by OMA/Rem Koolhaas Almere, the Netherlands's newest town, took a significant step towards maturity with its recently completed city center, designed by Rem Koolhas, leader of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the Netherlands's most internationally oriented architectural practice. Compared to such high-profile OMA achievements as Euralille and Generic City, Koolhas' scheme for Almere is an interesting departure as it succeeds both in the contexts of old Dutch towns and contemporary metropolitan design. In addition to documenting the city center design, this book explores the design process involving the city, the property developers, and the project leaders. Also included are the designs made to flesh out the master plan, amongst them a theater by Kazuyo Sejima, housing by Claus & Kaan and Frits van Dongen, William Alsop's pop/rock center, Benthem Crouwel's business center, OMA's parking garages and cinema, and the public space design by DS Landschapsarchitecten. OMA 30: 30 Colours
Through the ages, paint has been used to protect surfaces, to enhance the appearance of simple materials or to provide decoration for aesthetic pleasure. Over the past century, the coatings industry has devoted considerable time and effort to creating as many different colours as possible, in a wide variety of textures and in as many different product forms as required. Despite all this work, the natural colours of materials and the colours of paints remain fundamentally different, a fact which has often led to a degree of ideological friction. The key topic addressed during the most recent phase of the New Colours for a New Century project was therefore 'Stretching the possibilities of colour in paint'. We are honoured that Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture were willing to share their ideas with us and create the thirty colours featured in this book. — M. Roosebloom,
OMA Rem Koolhaas Living, Vivre, Leben
Patiovilla / Rotterdam (1988) The completion of Rem Koolhaas' latest house provides an occasion to take a look at the architect's "Small" projects. Small is one of the four size categories used to organize building projects in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau's outstanding book S, M, L, XL. Living, the exhibition and publication by arc en rêve center d'architecture, spotlights five projects four houses built in the Netherlands and France between 1988 and 1998 and the housing project in Japan in 1991, which comprises 24 individual homes and gives a comparative reading of them. Koolhaas is paradoxically better known for his Extra Large urban schemes such as Melun-Sénart Euralille or the more recent Seoul projects, and his Large building plans such as the Paris Bibliothèque de France, Ferry Terminal in Zeebrugge, ZKM in Karlsruhe and Lille Grand Palais. Yet the theme of the house participates in OMA's meditation on the contemporary city. Houses may even work as a small-scale laboratory, a site for experimenting with the most intimate aspects of living space. All of these houses were born out of a meeting between their future occupants and the architect who designed them; each of these singular encounters is evoked in this book. Bearing in mind the housing experiments initiated by the great modern architects of the pre-war period, Rem Koolhaas never ceases to extend the bounds of creation and invention and to open up new horizons through his remarkable work on context, typology, materials and construction. Extreme freedom is the common denominator of the four European houses and 24 Japanese homes. Openings, transparency, translucency and opacity make the interior spaces utterly permeable to variations in light and weather. Through the spatial quality and layout, these houses express subtle contradictions between brutality and sensuality, heaviness and lightness. Michel Jacques Contents S,M,L,XL
This massive book is a novel about architecture. Conceived by Rem Koolhaas - author of Delirious New York - and Bruce Mau - designer of Zone - as a free-fall in the space of the typographic imagination, the book's title: Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. This book combines essays, manifestoes, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, and a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city, with work produced by Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture over the past twenty years. This accumulation of works and images illuminates the conditions of architecture today - its splendors and miseries - exploring and revealing the corrosive impact of politics, context, economy, globalization -- the world.
Fore Play Small Medium Large Extra Large Postscript Euralille: The Making of a New City Center: Koolhaas,
Nouvel, Portzamparc, Vasconi, Duthilleul: Architects
Euralille is regarded as the most spectacular architectural and urban planning project in Europe of the last five years. The core of the recently completed plans for this large, completely new city quarter was the TGV station, stop for the «Eurostar» train between London and Paris. The master plan of Rem Koolhaas emerged from an international competition as the winning entry ahead of works by Vittorio Gregotti, Norman Foster, Oswald Mathias Ungers, and others. This plan forms the framework for the sensational buildings by Christian de Portzamparc (office tower for Credit Lyonnais), Claude Vasconi (World Trade Centre), Jean Nouvel (shopping and office center), Jean-Marie Duthilleul (TGV station), and Rem Koolhaas (congress center and rock concert hall). The book describes the creation of the new quarter, outlines the design processes, and shows extensively the individual buildings. The documentation is supplemented by floor plans, structural drawings, and other technical information. In a series of interviews the architects comment upon their work and explain the backgrounds of their plans. Well-known critics such as Stanislaus von Moos, Jean-Louis Cohen, Jean Attali, and finally Rem Koolhaas himself establish a theoretical context for Euralille and discuss the results. Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, 1991
Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, is a pocketbook manifesto. In these transcriptions of a lecture and seminar given at Rice University in 1991, Koolhaas argues for architects to come empty handed into the spaces and processes of the free-form contemporary city; and to approach these conditions without the embarrassment of modernism, optimistically but without hope. Reflecting on OMA's work of the late 1980s, and the Houston skyline, Koolhaas makes a manifesto of the "too-large building." The BIG building effects its surroundings through its willful ignorance of them, and creates admixtures of difference, congestion and possibility within its own vast bulk. Through BIGNESS (an) architecture is achieved which sits comfortably in low slung development and becomes its own city. Contents Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan,
Manhattan is the arena of the terminal stage of Western Civilization: Through the simultaneous explosion of human density and an invasion of new technologies, Manhattan became, from 1850, a mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a revolutionary lifestyle: the Culture of Congestion. Delirious New York is a polemical investigation of that Manhattan; it documents the symbiotic relationship between its mutant metropolitan culture and the unique architecture to which it gave rise. Though this book argues that it often appears that the architecture generated the culture. Delirious New York exposes the consistency and coherence of the seemingly unrelated episodes of Manhattan's urbanism; it is an interpretation that establishes Manhattan as the product of an unformulated movement, Manhattanism, whose true program was so outrageous that in order for it to be realized it could never be openly declared. Delirious New York is a retroactive manifesto of Manhattan's architectural enterprise: it untangles the theories, tactics and dissimulations that allowed New York's architects to establish the desires of Manhattan's collective unconscious in the Grid. Delirious New York proves above all, that Manhattan has been, from the beginning, devoted to the most rational, efficient and utilitarian pursuit of the irrational. In this vision Coney Island becomes an embryonic Manhattan, testbed of a Technology of the Fantastic, the Skyscraper a self contained universe, Manhattan a man-made archipelago of architectural islands, Rockefeller Center, the first and last fragment of a definitive Manhattan. The decline of this movement sets in with the European Modernist Blitzkrieg unleashed by Le Corbusier in the mid-thirties. An appendix presents a series of projects that announce the second coming of Manhattanism, this time as an explicit doctrine that can claim its place among contemporary urbanisms. An impressive documentation of original materials and unpublished projects provides the evidence for this architectural manifesto, which reads in its insistent tracing of subconscious clues and themes, like a psychological thriller.
Introduction Prehistory Coney Island: The Technology of Fantasy The Dull Life of Utopia: The Skyscraper How Perfect Can Perfection Be: The Creation of Rockefeller
Center Europeans: Biuer! Dali & Le Corbusier Conquer New York Post Mortem Appendix: A Fictional Conclusion |
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