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Perhaps it's because Koolhaas is not wedded to any one style that he finds McArchitecture easy to digest. Unlike the work of Peter Eisenman or Gehry, a Koolhaas building isn't easily identifiable. "In some ways I consider that a compliment," says Koolhaas. "You work in so many conditions that it would be artificial and unreal if your work did not become very different too." One consistent element in Koolhaas' buildings, however, is a relaxed attitude toward detailing and a willingness to use extremely cheap materials. In Kunsthal, an art gallery in Rotterdam, he used unfinished concrete and corrugated plastic for walls, metal grids for flooring, naked fluorescent tubes for lighting and tree trunks for pillars and a balustrade. "Architecture is always the encounter of vision and circumstance," he says. The Dutch, Koolhaas explains, don't believe in spending a lot of money on buildings. "So there's no choice but to build with really cheap materials."
But even when his clients have money, Koolhaas doesn't spend it on materials. The Villa Dall'Ava, outside Paris, cost $485,000, yet the architect still used orange plastic webbing, familiar from construction sites, for a balustrade on the roof. One room on the ground floor is surrounded on three sides by glass, which can be opened to the outside or enclosed by a curtain--almost like a hospital bed--for more intimacy. The clients asked for a "masterpiece," and they got an adventure. Neighbors, on the other hand, so opposed the plan that the house had to be fought for all the way to the French supreme court.
While XL projects continue to be Koolhaas' specialty, one of the commissions he's most excited about at the moment is another house in France, this one for a client who uses a wheelchair. An orgy of open-endedness, the house is designed around a huge hydraulic platform that interlocks with and completes the different floors as the client moves up and down the house. "And of course," says Koolhaas, salivating at the thought, "the movement changes the architecture." At last, the machine is a house for living.
--With reporting by Daniel S. Levy and David E. Thigpen/New York