Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas (born 1944 in Rotterdam, Netherlands) is a former journalist and screenwriter educated in architecture at the Architectural Association in London. He is the principal of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, or OMA, and of its research-oriented counterpart AMO.
Perhaps better known for his books than his buildings, he has authored several seminal works in architectural theory, including Delirious New York, and S,M,L,XL, a collaboration with the graphic designer Bruce Mau. Koolhaas' work emphatically embraces the contradictions of a discipline that struggles to maintain its humanist ideals of material honesty, the human scale and carefully crafted meaning in a rapidly globalising world that espouses material economy, machine scale and random meaning.
Using a canny direction of observation and diagram, Koolhaas mobilizes the omnipotent forces of urbanism into unprecedented forms and connections organised along the lines of present day society. Shopping is examined for intellectual comfort whilst the unregulated taste and densification of Chinese cities is analysed according to "performance", a critera involving variables with debatable credibility - density, newness, shape, size, money etc. Through his ruthlessly raw approach, Koolhaas hopes to extract the architect from the anxiety of a dead profession and resurrect a contemporary sublime however fleeting it may be. He is also very funny.
In 2000, he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Koolhaas's projects include:
- , (Rotterdam, 1993)
- Euralille (Lille, 1988)
- Netherlands Dance Theater (The Hague, 1988)
- Educatorium, (Utrecht, 1993-1997)
- Netherlands Embassy (Berlin, 2003)
- Guggenheim Museum, (Las Vegas, 2002)
- Nexus Housing (Fukuoka, Japan)
- Retail design for Prada stores (New York 2003, Los Angeles 2004)
- McCormick Tribune Campus Center, (IIT Chicago, 1997-2003)
- Seattle Central Library (2004)
- (Oporto, finishing)
- CCTV HQ, Beijing (Construction Commencing 2004)
