The Impact of Major Urban Architectural Projects

There is a natural reaction from citizens and from governments when their cultures are not reflected in urban building projects. This often comes up in the Middle East. So many international architects make it their business to be contextual. As a result, their projects will feature doves, camels, falcons and other first-degree symbols of local history.

This issue is fascinating because if you look back a hundred years, you find that there was still such a thing as Indian architecture, Thai architecture, Chinese architecture, African architecture, Dutch architecture and Russian architecture. But now, almost all of these languages have disappeared, and are subsumed in a larger and seemingly universal style. The process has been like the disappearance of a spoken language.

Remnants of these differences still exist. For example, a high-rise in Singapore is inhabited in a very different way from a high-rise in the suburbs of Paris or a high-rise in China. Each of these cultures, which once had its own form of speaking, is not trying to resurrect its old language, but is interested in defining and asserting its uniqueness again.

On the other hand, some cultures have managed to maintain their distinctiveness. It still is meaningful to say that someone is a Japanese architect, but relatively meaningless to say that someone is an American or a Dutch architect. The Dutch happily subsumed their identity into international modernism and found international resonances and connections. In Japan, however, there has always been an insistence that even a modern thing should respect tradition. Japanese forms are still particularly careful, particularly well made, particularly intricate; they do not surrender to a large or brutal scale.

by Rem Koolhaas

Reinventing Architecture in Digital Domain

There is an extremely new domain being constructed,

Which partly undermines architecture or eliminates the reason for being or architecture

—the electronic domain.

Now is an existential moment for a discipline that will decide whether it will be a dinosaur or whether it will be reinvented.

by Rem Koolhaas

Delirious New York

I would say that the writing of Delirious New York had one major “aim”:

I wanted to construct—as a writer—a terrain where I could eventually work as an architect.

I was trying to de-emphasize the artistic part of being an architect and describe a role that was much more concerned with the intellectual issues, where other interventions were possible and therefore, by definition, could not be done through drawing.

I would say that almost at the beginning of every project, there is maybe not writing but a definition in words—a text—a concept, ambition, or theme that is put in words, and only at the moment that it is put in words can we begin to proceed, to think about architecture;

The words unleash the design.

All of our projects, or our best projects or maybe our most original projects, are first defined in literary terms, which then suggest an entire architectural program.

by Rem Koolhaas

From Journalist to Architect

Well, unlike most architects, I had a profession before I was an architect.

I think that being a journalist had an important effect.

Journalism is ironically one of the few professions that is almost completely immune to fame.

There are almost no famous journalists.

The journalist is driven by an insatiable curiosity coupled with the ability to find and condense information quickly.

That experience, coupled with the fact that I started relatively late in architecture

—I was twenty-five before I even started studying architecture—

Made it relatively easy for me not to feel intimidated by the architecture world at that stage.

The great benefit of writing a book before practicing as an architect was that it helped me get work.

But it was bad because it meant that my subsequent work had to meet an unusually heavy burden of proof.

I think that my experience exposed me to a number of unspoken prejudices that still operate in the current cultural moment.

There’s a strange prejudice that says you cannot both think and do architecture at the same time

by Rem Koolhaas

A Chaotic Adventure

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence.

Ostensibly involved in “shaping” the world,

For their thought to be mobilized architects depend on the provocations of the others

—clients, individual, or institutional.

Therefore, incoherence, or more precisely, randomness,

Is the underlying structure of all architect’ careers:

They are confronted with an arbitrary sequence of demands,

With parameters they did not establish,

In countries they hardly know,

About issues they are only dimly aware of,

Expected to deal with problems that have proved intractable to brains vastly superior to their own.

Architecture is by definition a chaotic adventure.

by Rem Koolhaas