Or better still, that he could teach them. The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the Rotterdam-based firm that Koolhaas established in 1975, has tied the 21st century building into some very interesting knots. For the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, OMA devised an angular student center topped by a huge horizontal cylinder that contains the station platform of an elevated railway. The Seattle Central Public Library, an OMA project with jutting irregular floors, or the splendid contortion that will be China Central Television's headquarters in Beijing (now under construction), are both a thorough rethinking not simply of what of a building can look like but what it can be, how we can use it. As Mao might have said, if he had been an architecture critic, let a thousand contortions bloom.
The great ModernistsLe Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohewere control freaks who tried to impose their vision on the messy realities of the street. Though Koolhaas is possessed of an ego every bit as formidable as theirs, his outlook is entirely different. In his view, the tumultuous disorder of the modern citythe hyberbolic megalopolis from Lagos to London to Lahoreimposes its will on the architect, whose work must come to terms with and even reflect the "junk space," as Koolhaas calls it, that's all around. In the enduring contest between the architect and his times, Koolhaas has arrived at a unique positionthe man who simultaneously resigns himself to the chaos around him and sees in it an opportunity for an altogether new kind of order.
April 28, 2004
October 11, 2004
October 10, 2005