Rem Koolhaas didn’t stay dead for long. Just last fall the Dutch architect looked like roadkill. His student center at IIT had opened to (misguidedly) mixed reviews, and one by one a series of high-profile clients had canceled projects–he lost a billion dollars’ worth of work for Universal Vivendi, New York hotelman Ian Schrager, the Whitney Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Art. In their wake Koolhaas issued a series of sour statements expressing disgust with his American experience.
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Lincoln once said, “We must disenthrall ourselves,” and not many have taken the sentiment more to heart than Rem Koolhaas. As critic and as architect, his hallmark has been to break free from a conventional way of looking at things that too often becomes a way of not seeing. His first book, Delirious New York (1978), celebrated the explosive density of the city Gerald Ford had told to drop dead. The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2002), an anthology produced by Koolhaas and his Harvard design students, stopped treating our obsession with buying things as a sideshow pastime and recognized it as probably the single most powerful force shaping architecture and culture today. Well before the outsourcing of jobs and soaring trade deficits became a subject of daily headlines, 2002’s Great Leap Forward–also from Harvard under Koolhaas’s direction–provided a cogent, massively detailed overview of how booming industrial expansion in the Pearl River Valley was helping to turn China into a global economic superpower almost overnight.
In Content, one essay contrasts, on facing pages, reproductions of paintings by Vermeer–and the stories of their subjects–with the photos and backstories of contestants from the Dutch version of Big Brother. Koolhaas’s buildings appear as a series of gleefully malicious cartoon caricatures that pop up through the book like “Spy vs. Spy” panels in Mad magazine. “I’m not sure if this is a book or a magazine,” says the male half of a conjoined set of cartoons representing his Guangzhou Opera House. “Actually, I find the tension between the two super-interesting,” responds his mate.
Despite his recent successes in America, Koolhaas’s primary focus is on China, where he’s designing a $700 million headquarters to centralize the operations of CCTV, the country’s television monopoly. In typical Koolhaas fashion, Content’s “Kill the Skyscraper” derides the work of American architects who have chased after the Chinese gold rush to build the type of traditional tower that “has not been invested with new thinking or ambition since the World Trade Center’s completion in 1972. Having made New York City an unbearable demonstration of architectural mediocrity, they continue their mission on a new continent.” Koolhaas’s CCTV project is to consist of two sloping 40-story towers placed at opposite corners of a massive site, joined by a low L-shaped base and a cantilevered structure at the top. “The towers press their overhanging heads together, as if each were wearied by the effort to remain upright,” writes contributor William B. Millard. All of Koolhaas’s buildings–the IIT student center is a good example–are about creating environments that encourage interaction, and the continuous loop of the CCTV building includes a “circulation system” that is horizontal as well as vertical, encouraging workers to interact with one another and with the public.
