(2 of 3)
He's alluding to his early career as a screenwriter. He had one script produced by Dutch director Rene Daalder, a work Koolhaas describes as a Fassbinder-ish allegory that used images of B movies to comment on contemporary Europe; he also wrote a screenplay for Russ Meyer, the American nudie-pic auteur, that was never produced. Before turning to architecture, he worked as a journalist, so it's not surprising that at 33, after training at the Architectural Association in London and teaching four years in the U.S., his first project was not a building but a book. Delirious New York, which made Koolhaas famous as a kind of architect without portfolio, explores the "culture of congestion," what happens to a city when so many different activities and conditions coexist. What others saw as regrettable, Koolhaas saw as dense with choice and potential.
It took almost 20 years for Koolhaas' career as a builder to catch up to his reputation as a visionary. He's still recognized less for individual structures than for huge urban-planning projects. His biggest, and the one that probably scored him the MCA commission, is in Lille. What excited Koolhaas about the city was that, strategically located at the mouth of the Chunnel linking France and England, Lille must be able theoretically to accommodate the 50 million who could pass through each year and yet retain a user-friendly scale for its 175,000 residents. As the city's designated master planner, Koolhaas commissioned a number of architects to build there: Christian Portzamparc built an office tower, Jean Nouvel a commercial center, and Koolhaas himself tackled the Grand Palais, a huge convention center. "I'm interested in how architecture channels or intensifies or relaxes or crystallizes the flow of events," says Koolhaas. Perhaps his most arresting gesture in the Grand Palais is in its lobby, where he created a meeting place by putting a few smart chairs on a square of expensive carpet and lowering a smallish square of wooden ceiling in the midst of a vast expanse of concrete and air-conditioning ducts, as if a room had been marked out but given no walls--function without any form at all.
The theory that architecture should do rather than be has made Koolhaas the hero of students but not necessarily of his elders. Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, says Koolhaas, like many theoreticians, doesn't really know how to build. "There's a phrase being coined in Europe, and I think it has been applied to American literature but has been picked up by Europeans in relation to architecture--'Dirty Realism,'" says Frampton. "There's a touch of that about the game of doing buildings that are slightly slapped together as a sort of manifestation of the epoch in which we can't afford things anymore." Koolhaas has also been criticized for his apparent embrace of the rapid, mall-filled expansion that has scarred many American cities. "Get away from Paris and Amsterdam and go see Atlanta," says Koolhaas in S,M,L,XL. "Go straightaway without any preconceived ideas. That's all I can say." In his defense, Koolhaas says he is critical of untrammeled urban growth but it should be understood before being judged.