Rem Koolhaas

The Architect: Rem Koolhaas

          Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect , architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He was born in 1944 in Rotterdam, where bombing in World War II had erased , as in Berlin in the image of the historical city. With his family he moved to Jakarta , Indonesia in 1952 and staying until 1956 to Brazil, where he admired the works of Oscar Niemeyer.Back in Holland he would often spend time drawing in the architecture studio of his grandfather. His grandfather, Dirk Roosenburg (1887–1962), was a modernist architect. His grandfather had worked for Hendrik Petrus Berlage, before he opened his own practice. Koolhaas first studied scriptwriting at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. Koolhaas co-wrote The White Slave, a 1969 Dutch film noir, and later wrote an unproduced script for American soft-porn king Russ Meyer.He joined the group of the filmmakers “1,2,3 groep”. His experiences writing screenplays will later contribute to the development of his idea of the animated building , like actors on an urban stage , episodes organized in narrative sequences. In 1968 Koolhaas registered at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.(gargiani, 2008,p.3)

          On 1st January 1975 , after the work conducted since the start of the Seventies in London with the “Dr.Caligari Cabinet of Metropolitan Architecture”, Koolhaas founded , together with Elia and Zoe Madelon Vriesendorp , “The Office for Metropolitan Architecture” with offices in New York , London and Berlin. OMA is a leading international partnership practicing architecture, urbanism, and cultural analysis. OMA's buildings and masterplans around the world insist on intelligent forms while inventing new possibilities for content and everyday use. OMA is led by seven partners - Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, David Gianotten and Managing Partner, Victor van der Chijs . They were later joined by one of Koolhaas's students,Zaha Hadid- who would soon go on to achieve success in her own right. An early work which would mark their difference from the then dominant postmodern classicism of the late 1970s, was their contribution to the Venice Biennale of 1980, curated by Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, titled "Presence of the Past". Each architect had to design a stage-like "frontage" to a Potemkin-type internal street; and the OMA scheme was the only modernist scheme among them.

          In the 1990s Koolhaas and OMA saw several important works to fruition, including the Nexus Housing project (1989–91) in Fukuoka, Japan; the Kunsthal (1992) in Rotterdam; a private residence (1994–98) in Bordeaux, France; and the Educatorium (1993–97), a multipurpose building at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who developed a distinctive aesthetic, Koolhaas did not establish a constant look from project to project. Instead, he created architecture that, utilizing the best of modern technology and materials, spoke to the needs of a particular site and client. For instance, the Bordeaux house, made for a client in a wheelchair, utilized a dramatic glass room that acted as an elevator between the levels of the house. In these commissions, Koolhaas refused to refer to past styles (he called for an “end to sentimentality”), choosing instead to engage directly with the true gritty character of the modern world. For example, his Kunsthal dramatically engages with urban modernity through its electronic billboard and orange steel components. The combination of Koolhaas’s theoretical writings with his fondness for asymmetry, challenging spatial explorations, and unexpected uses of colour led many to classify him as a deconstructivist. However, his work, unlike that of other deconstructivists, does not rely heavily on theory, and it is imbued with a strong sense of humanity and a concern for the role that architecture plays in everyday life, particularly in an urban context. This grounding in reality was reflected in Koolhaas’s keen interest in urban planning, most notably in a master plan for a new city centre in Lille, France (1985–95), through which he transformed Lille into a business, entertainment, and residential centre. His celebrated Grand Palais, an elliptical structure utilizing plastic and aluminum, was at the centre of this plan.