4.

It’s 2014 and big money is finished. The crisis has wreaked havoc and the few last remaining architects in Western countries busy themselves building small housing blocks or reconstructing old offices and factories into hotels and homes. Everything else is conservation.

But what is happening outside the cities: after the privatisations city councils have only their land to make good money. They rent it out to companies and developers who fill it up with rubbish, preferably without an architect.

A hodgepodge of glass houses, shacks, barracks, horrendous industrial estates and failed office parks infest the view on nature and landscape.

What can we do? Does a countermovement exist that goes beyond some loosely gathered locals? Are there architects who think about how we can build a better and more beautiful environment? We are living in the midst of trash.

Rem is suspect, as a starchitect he is associated with neoliberal, antisocial moneymaking.

I want Rem, I have learned he is working on countryside explorations. He might even be writing a novella about the countryside (Koolhaas started his career writing for a Dutch weekly.) But Rem is suspect, as a starchitect he is associated with neoliberal, antisocial moneymaking.

This is tragic. In his lectures and books it’s his sense of community that stands out. I find it in his writing, in his work at Harvard, his project for the European Union, the research about the organic structure of the city of Lagos. But also in his first architectural interests in Russia and the constructivism of the historical avant-garde, in his phantasmagorical design for Manhattan. Or in his last big project from 2011: an oral history of the Japanese Metabolists (written together with Hans-Ulrich Obrist), in which he writes almost longingly about a group of architects that change their country together, and says that just at ‘a moment in time, when the bond between architects and their own culture is almost gone and the marketplace has slain the brotherhood of colleagues, it seemed urgent.’

Yes, in his books, his lectures, his designs, I think I find a constant: a commitment to the communal. A commitment to this article is sadly still undetectable.

5.

The Rotterdam opens. The journalists are back again, clients, dignitaries, hostesses, press ladies. The big hall is decorated festively and some people have dressed their best — not the journalists.

Rem enters, still wearing his three-quarter-length coat.

His body language wreaks immediate confusion. Will he turn left? No he goes right, then stays put. Men in shiny suits receive pats on shoulders, elbows are touched, hands shaken, alpha males acknowledge the super alpha male: the man next to whom Rem finally comes to a halt, beams as if he has just won the lottery.

I see the body bend often; arms hold it most of the time, in a sort of self-embrace, almost as if he rocks himself. His hand stroking and touching the face again and again. Why does he need that? Why does he need his sense of touch to confirm his existence? My attention strays for a moment (I see men with blow-dried hair) and immediately Rem is out of sight.

There he is again: now bended over a high table. A journalist is taking notes. A circle forms around them. People are looking as if they’re watching an art performance.

Two journalists walk towards a table and open up all the bread rolls to inspect the contents.

And Rem has moved on again. Some people use dictaphones to record their tumultuous thoughts. Rem uses assistants. There is always an ear at hand to whisper something into. Would someone mind the brevity of these conversations? Who would want to disturb his thought process?

Some people use dictaphones to record their tumultuous thoughts. Rem uses assistants.

Speeches start and at the sudden high screech of a feed backing microphone, a startled Rem grabs his ear and quickly steps back. He was the only one between all those people who stepped back. Would his hearing be super sensitive? It reminds me of this theory on autism that states, put bluntly, that autistic people shut down because of a too great sensitivity for impressions — don’t worry, I’m not out to prove that Koolhaas is autistic.

When he has to stand on the stage, he goes to the utmost back. Books are being distributed. Rem is the only one who looks interested and flicks through the pages.

I go outside, bit of a shame that I didn’t get to speak with him. But then he sees me. He darts away from a French television crew and showers me with his attention. Have I walked towards the building from the bridge? That’s so beautiful. Shall we do it together one time? Will I join him in the car to Rotterdam? Just the two of us, no driver, I would prefer that, right? Thursday next week for instance. Then we can have a quiet talk.

Elated I leave the building. Rem is amazing.

The next Wednesday I ask Petermann at what time I should present myself. He tells me Rem is in Monaco now, Milan on Thursday.

6.

Numerous cancelled appointments later I am finally next to him in a car. In the backseat. In front Petermann and the driver. After the opening of The Rotterdam, the reviews came in, from Canada to Australia and Spain (El Mastodonte vertical de Koolhaas). Exactly that what provokes Rem, is happening. Good or bad, they are talking about the biggest building of The Netherlands.

De Volkskrant (Dutch newspaper; sp) wrote an article beforehand, juxtaposing the new generation of architects and you.

‘There are many capable young architects. Their concerns are of course different. They have different experiences and are working within different conditions. But to compare, rhetorics: nowadays that’s less. There is so much.’

But why did you have to tell Die Zeit (German paper; sp) that you would be ashamed of yourself if you were considered only as a Dutch architect?

‘I don’t know, did I say that?’

Petermann: ‘Yeah, yeah.’

Koolhaas: ‘But being ashamed, that’s more meant like, that has more to do with modesty. That as an architect, you have to play a part in different environments. I think I mean it more as in adventure: it wouldn’t be adventurous if I was only a Dutch architect.’

The Guardian was very negative about The Rotterdam and described it as “a dreamlike stage set of financial capital” and “the Twin Towers resurrected in a Frankenstein muddle.”

How did you feel about the article in the Guardian?

‘Well, if you look at the reality of the moment, then almost every approach is at one moment diametrically wrong compared to other moments. That’s one of the weird things about architecture; it takes a long time. So yes, you could say, in times of crisis it’s not very appropriate to build something grand. But in the long term I think that this building finally realises the ambition to involve this part of the island with the city.

Moreover, this kind of criticism is also welcome. Every well-written piece, no matter how derisive, is an asset.’

Are you Buddhist? Don’t you get annoyed?

‘No, seldom. I am not someone who says: I never read them. I read them carefully. I can imagine a lot of things.’

Of course he evokes these criticisms. His texts are often put in the language of the manifests we know since the historical avant-garde movements: a language brimming with visions, sweeping statements, metaphors and concise recapitulations on the zeitgeist, with compulsory paradoxes.

‘Junkspace is authorless, yet surprisingly authoritarian,’ he writes.

And: ‘There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture staggers endlessly sideways. Or: ‘Shopping: arguably the last remaining form of human activity.’

And in these writings he likes to state his ‘final lack of interest’ in architecture.

‘I have made so many assertions,’ he tells me as we glide along the motorway, ‘there is always something you can throw at me later.’

‘There is always something you can throw at me later.’

The Netherlands we drive through so speedily, shows all sorts of ugliness coming off industrial estates and office parks. I ask him if he can deal with that. Petermann has already been to a German agricultural fair and has travelled all over the province Noord-Holland on his bike to knock on random doors gathering information about the countryside.

But he says: ‘It’s funny, but government for me is ancient history. I made the Bijlmer-strip (in the eighties he made a plan to pimp up one of Amsterdam’s roughest neighbourhoods. It was rejected.) I worked for the European Union, even thought up more utopian stuff: Airports in sea, all inhabitants on a strip next to the border and the bulk of the land free and green. And I would be invited by ministers of state, to dinners, breakfasts or lunches. But nothing. It is of course true that government has withdrawn.’

7.

How fundamental research is to him, I learn during a public talk with Madelon Vriesendorp. In New York she and Rem collected postcards, old magazines and books about the history of Manhattan and it’s skyscrapers. Maps, leaflets, manuscripts, they even joined a club for postcard collectors. Rem wrote the texts for the book, which would establish his name: Delirious New York. She made paintings, drawings, watercolours and gouaches that featured in the book.

Later they moved to London, but the English, she says, never understood Rem.

We Dutchmen don’t use words liker ‘rather’ or ‘quite.’

The English told Rem: ‘You don’t say something is white or black, you say: ‘it’s rather a bit like’.

Well… of course I’m curious, but I’m not going to ask the man in which bed he sleeps, does it matter?

Vriesendorp has been with Koolhaas since the sixties and still lives in London.

But Rem lives in Amsterdam, right?

Mmm, The Guardian tells me he lives in Amsterdam with designer Petra Blaisse and that he leads a ‘complex private life.’ Well… of course I’m curious, but I’m not going to ask the man in which bed he sleeps, does it matter? Anyway, he probably sees the vague description ‘complex private life’ as adding to the mystification. I bet he’s just with Petra Blaisse.

Most significant I guess, is the fact that Blaise with her studio Inside Outside is one of the important partners of OMA. They played a big part in projects like the Prada shops, the library in Seattle, Porto. And that she has a similar status to Koolhaas as a leading thinker in her trade, based on her lectures and projects. They seem partners in design.

Another good view is given by Gerrit Oorthuys. He used to teach at a Dutch technical university in Delft and made numerous architecture trips with Koolhaas. To Prague and Russia to research the utopian plans of the constructivists, and later to New York.

Oorthuys: ‘Rem would go to the countryside to buy old stuff in old shops. He was always on the lookout for the curious. He was enthralled by the fact that the homosexual salesman in an expensive fashion shop would daintily hold up the underwear before his crotch if you asked him about the size. Or that there was a little porn cinema in a well-known shopping street. Everything outside of the ordinary.’

According to Oorthuys he comes from a clever family with an extremely likeable mother and a father (a well-known writer and journalist Anton Koolhaas) who would spend serious time in the garden next to a frog as if they were having a conversation.

Oorthuys says the affected environment of big-time architects is not suited to Koolhaas, who fits in better with traditional architecture.

Oorthuys: ‘One of the holy grails in architecture is the social cause. The utopian ‘we are doing something good for mankind’ is still ingrained in most schools. Architecture is one of the few art forms that is by its nature socially involved. Rem has returned to functionalism: taking architecture seriously — but in a humorous way.’

Only the CCTC building in China, made by Koolhaas, he thinks is for a controlling regime, and in that he doesn’t agree with Oorthuys.

8.

The Biennale. In Rotterdam they are finalizing the books and the logistics. But in the room that holds the models, a brainstorm is taking place with half the board of directors of the German publishing group Axel Springer Verlag about the future of books and media, because OMA is going to build their new office in Berlin.

Koolhaas travels between the Amsterdam office of Irma Boom, the designer of books and catalogues, and OMA (when he is not travelling between continents.) OMA has succeeded in getting the most outrageous objects, from an age-old Chinese roof, to a floor from the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, a Yurt tent, the oldest toilet known to man, fireplaces, etc.

It’s somewhat sad that both you and the director of The Biennale criticize the influence of the market economy on architecture in the catalogue, and then we find a huge ROLEX logo on the following page.

‘Yes, terrible. I think I’ve spent the most part of the last six months raising money.’

Is every serious countermovement immediately encapsulated and stamped with a brand-logo?

‘People can distinguish between that.’

But it feels symbolic of your work. Can I interpret your career also as a big tragedy? You were so interested in the collective, the community, but your fame was based on neoliberalism.

‘I wouldn’t view that as tragedy. I’ve been given the opportunity to struggle with new issues in a new way. One of the things that has surprised me the most is that my curiosity has been explained as complicity: Koolhaas does a book on shopping, so he’s all for shopping. He does a book on the YES-regime (YES stands for yen, euro, dollar; sp), so he’s into YES.

In a way it has enabled me to develop a critical structure and at the same time develop things that are based upon that old structure, like the library in Seattle, the concertbuilding in Porto. And on the other side there was the intelligence of some of the new stuff, like G-Star and Prada.’

No tragedy?

‘Absolutely not. Rather, it’s doing the splits on a large scale. And nothing is more interesting than working in that position. You could say that my whole story is about the splits. From the beginning up to this point: first between Europe and America, then between Europe and China. And a split position always has these elements: you feed from both sides, you make a bridge, or a schizophrenia. Those are the three models of the splits that all happen sometime, but with which you can develop a dynamic position.

I really hope you have written this down correctly, because I have never formulated this so precisely, you’re the first one to hear it.’

‘I really hope you have written this down correctly, because I have never formulated this so precisely, you’re the first one to hear it.’

So the red line in your work is not in your buildings, but in the attitude that gave birth to them? A split between two worlds?

‘Between worlds. Sometimes it’s a split with three legs. It’s about a kind of engagement to deal with the contradictions of these times. To use an old-fashioned word: engagement.

But being critical is the basis of it all, I think that in the last 25 years the critical from outside is no longer existent. Just like Žižek, Latour and all those other ones are declaring. You can’t look at it from the outside.’

Petermann: ‘I think the challenge of our generation lies in how to be able to organise criticism.’

9.

In 1989, whilst presenting a plan for the library in Paris, Koolhaas already concentrated on the relation between the digital and the real. What’s left for the architect in his view is: articulating collectivity.

‘You can see that the private sector has a need for collectivity. Different sectors are suddenly similar. Executives now want giant spaces where everybody can be fatalistic and desperate about the future together, where employees sit side by side like in a giant NASA control room thinking: ‘oh, hé is going in that direction.’ A space from where you can follow and improvise and think. Really, all kinds of people are coming to us asking for big spaces, demanding big spaces.’

Source: OMA

Petermann: ‘One of the door manufacturers I spoke to concerning the Biennale is really worried about it. Fewer walls means fewer doors.’

Koolhaas: ‘Really?’

Petermann: ‘Yes.’

Koolhaas: ‘No!’

Petermann: ‘They are selling fewer doors.’

Koolhaas: ‘No, but… tell me.. in what way… how did he explain it? What was he worried about?’

Petermann: ‘Well, in homes the doors are disappearing because people want big living spaces, with kitchen, sitting and everything together, so there’s a decline in demand, but there’s also a decline in offices.’

Those are the facts they are discovering because of Fundamentals. It’s incredible, says Koolhaas. Suddenly you see how everything is changing. Floors will be readable, windows too. All manufacturers are working outside of their elements. He sometimes feels like his employees are archiving everything before everything changes.

One of his concerns is: how to get people away from screens?

‘Behind screens, on their smartphones, I often don’t know if people are working or enjoying themselves. I think they don’t know it either.’

‘I often don’t know if people are working or enjoying themselves. I think they don’t know it either.’

Would more people start to resist and escape the dominance of the digital, of Google, and Facebook, etc.?

Koolhaas: ‘I am so curious about that. My kids are reducing al their involvement to this, I don’t know. Do you know this, Stephen?’

Petermann: ‘Yes, Thomas is paradoxical: he’s on Facebook being quite anti-active.’

Koolhaas: ‘On Facebook and against Facebook!’

In father’s voice sounds a mixture of admiration and satisfaction.

10.

Rem Koolhaas masks with mystifications. During lectures he sometimes stands just outside of the spotlights, it looks deliberate. His sense of metaphors and symbols makes his buildings legendary (just slightly tilted, different proportions, oblique, round skyscrapers, etc.) He loves stuff that causes friction, that evokes criticism ánd arises from criticism. And along with that he is constantly looking for the curious, often I hear the story of when he was living in Indonesia and a boy peed in the same water in which women were doing their laundry. It’s never boring around him. He chooses humor, or at least his work originates in the same area where humor originates: there, where the normal flow of affairs does not coincide with how things could also feel, or could be promised. Like when two cultures collide.

And from his first to his last texts I encounter the same two metaphors: the zeppelin and the swimming-pool. The zeppelin stands for the enthousiasme about the future: people are amazed, a zeppelin contrasts the human size with something larger, but it’s size can still be digested.

And the swimming-pool, he once called it the social capacitor. A lot has been published about Rem’s fascination with pools, he’s in one every morning.

In Delirious New York, the book that made him famous, we find his short story: The story of the Pool. It’s a strong piece of fiction, worthy of a literary author, about a group of Russian constructivist architects who build a floatable pool.

They discover they can move with it and swim from Russia to America. The swim with their heads facing the country they are fleeing and their asses towards New York. When they arrive there, the American architects don’t know what to do with their colleagues. So they swim on and encounter the raft of Medusa. They cut through it, like a hot knife through butter. And swim on.

Upstream, like their creator, searching for new splits.