July 9, 2000, Sunday Magazine Desk Rem Koolhaas Builds By Arthur Lubow Before he could build, Rem Koolhaas wrote. Now that buildings of his design are cropping up everywhere, he continues to write. ''In my own mind, I am as much a writer as an architect,'' he says. An architect of Koolhaas's far-reaching ambition might plausibly prefer sitting at his desk to building in concrete. Remaining within the realm of his own imagination, he need not worry about pesky clients who can dilute a project into mediocrity. But, in fact, part of what Koolhaas likes about architecture is the chance to mesh gears with a client. When I asked him if he would consider designing a house for himself, he replied that the idea bored him. ''It would feel too solipsistic,'' he said. ''The whole point of architecture is the engagement with the other. So there wouldn't be any sparks.'' Koolhaas, 55, is in the business of making sparks. Last month, at a meeting in his New York hotel room, I watched him review the mock-up of a book on shopping, which he produced with Harvard graduate students in a research seminar that he directs. (They meet about every three weeks.) The book had been redesigned since he last saw it. He was not happy. ''It's so sedate now,'' he said as he rapidly turned the pages. ''This was supposed to be something with real tension, a kind of schizophrenia where you say something and see another, and now it's too parallel and neat. It's lost an aggressive, invasive quality that it had in the beginning.'' He delivered all this talk of tension, invasion, aggression and schizophrenia in a polite monotone that barely rose above a murmur. Koolhaas was an hour and a half late to the meeting, having been detained at a conference on modern architecture at the Guggenheim Museum, where he was a star speaker. ''I couldn't sneak out early because they were discussing my work,'' he said apologetically. These days, Koolhaas's work seems to be constantly under discussion and, even more gratifying to him, under construction. Whereas in the past his cutting-edge designs rarely advanced beyond the model stage, Koolhaas's current commissions include a concert hall in Porto, Portugal; the Seattle Public Library; a student center on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus; three U.S. stores for Prada, the Italian fashion house; and the Dutch Embassy in Berlin. His office is also collaborating with the Basel firm of Herzog & de Meuron on a luxury hotel in downtown New York for Ian Schrager, whose holdings include the Mondrian in Los Angeles and the Delano in Miami. Koolhaas is at the forefront of what has become arguably the most exciting branch of culture. The wild critical and commercial success of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao has made it clear that in architecture, unlike any other art form, the critics' favorites are also the public's favorites. People are flocking to Bilbao to see the building, not its contents; in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum doesn't even have any contents -- the exhibits have not yet been installed -- but the powerful structure is drawing unanticipated throngs. Suddenly, every city wants its own knockout piece of modern architecture. Koolhaas recalls competing for the commission for a new museum of modern art in Rome. ''The director said, 'We need a building that does for Rome what the Guggenheim did for Bilbao,''' he recounts. ''That is a staggering statement, because Rome doesn't need to be put on the map.'' Koolhaas, despite his professed admiration for Gehry, is uncomfortable with buildings that, like the Guggenheim Bilbao, seduce by dazzling. He wants to arrive at beauty as a byproduct, not the goal, of the design process. He is suspicious of the wow factor. ''I like to do things that on first sight have a degree of simplicity but show their complexity in the way they are used or at second glance,'' he says. Although he is not a pop-culture celebrity on the order of Gehry, within his profession Koolhaas is the more influential figure -- because he writes as provocatively as he designs and because his innovative style, unlike Gehry's metallic whorls, has not solidified into a one-of-a-kind signature. ''We are flamboyant conceptually, but not formally,'' Koolhaas says. His firm is known for thoroughly researching and radically addressing a client's needs; this cerebral approach to design undergirds all of his work. ''His intellectual view is a lot more accessible to younger architects coming out,'' Gehry says. ''I look at my work as personal. I'm not trying to create a school.'' Of Koolhaas's intellect, Gehry says: ''He's capable of challenging everything. He's one of the great thinkers of our time.'' Adding immeasurably to Koolhaas's reputation as a writer is his proven prowess as a builder. His volleys are coming from within the fortress. ''When he says that design is not necessary or it's a value not to have it -- if he said all of that and I thought he was an apologist for his own inadequacies, that would be a fascinating position for some mad charlatan,'' Gehry says. ''But it's not about that, because he can do it.'' Koolhaas projects the calm of opposing forces held in balance. Although he is mobbed like a rock star at lectures, he disdains the auteur theory of architecture. ''It is an insult to me, as well as to the others, to make it all seem like just my work,'' he says. ''If I pride myself on one thing, it is a talent to collaborate.'' Conspicuously rejecting individual primacy, he gave his Rotterdam firm a blandly anonymous name, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (with the typically droll twist that the acronym OMA means ''grandmother'' in his native Dutch). This garb of humility, however, barely disguises his estimate of his own abilities. Indeed, if his denunciation of the cult of personality has only enhanced his own mystique, that is the sort of contradiction that he relishes. Physically, he is a model of functionalism. He is thin, as if to reduce resistance. His aquiline nose, extended ears and penetrating eyes ensure that nothing can escape him. His long legs allow him to outpace the pack. But basically, his body is just a delivery system for his mind. Like Le Corbusier, Koolhaas has the double-barreled power to write brilliant, provocative essays and to design surprising and satisfying spaces. Young architects revere him -- in large part because he has refused to ossify or settle down. ''At a certain point, certain architects begin to capitalize on their success, to kind of do it again, rather than look to new territory,'' says Terence Riley, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. ''I've never seen Rem attracted to that. Instead, there is an unbelievable willingness to keep the thing as a series of new questions. When kids go to a lecture by Rem, they come out with questions, not answers.'' Koolhaas energetically cultivates his renegade persona, not such an easy task as he attracts grander commissions and prizes. When he confided in March that he was about to be proclaimed the winner of architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, he relayed the news with a shrug that approached annoyance. As behooves a superarchitect, Koolhaas travels as often as a supermodel. (He stays in hotels so often that he is excited to be involved in designing one himself: ''It is the typology I have experienced most in my life.'') His commissions are divided about equally between Europe and the United States. His life in Europe is also divided about equally between an airy apartment in North London, which he occupies mainly on weekends with his wife, the artist Madelon Vriesendorp, and a workweek centered on his Rotterdam office and often shared with his other female companion, Petra Blaisse, an Amsterdam-based designer of interiors and gardens. (He and Vriesendorp have a daughter, 23, and a son, 20.) Vriesendorp's quirky illustrations grace Koolhaas's first book, ''Delirious New York,'' while Blaisse has long held chief responsibility for Koolhaas's curtains, landscaping and exhibition installations. For the Netherlands Dance Theater, constructed in The Hague in 1984, Blaisse did the interiors while Vriesendorp designed an exterior mural. ''Part of the whole thing in London is it's a place away from the office, so I'm protected from the daily invasion,'' Koolhaas says. ''I can do nothing.'' In the London flat, Vriesendorp's ebullience is on view everywhere -- for example, in a fish motif that recurs on the shower curtain, on the tablecloth and in a puppet that is sailing through the kitchen-door transom -- everywhere, that is, except for Koolhaas's spare, white, book-lined, high-ceilinged studio. When asked about his domestic equipoise between Vriesendorp and Blaisse, Koolhaas slips into the counterbalanced syntax that distinguishes Rem-speak: ''It's all about facets and a kind of extension of territory, not in terms of claiming but in terms of exploration.'' Refusing to be tied down to one place or person is also a way of defying gravity. Just as he does in his architecture, Koolhaas welcomes tension into the structure of his life. Other people adjust. ''I always feel that he is a plug and the whole world is full of sockets,'' says Vriesendorp, a striking-looking woman with silver hair, sharp blue eyes -- and a talent for blunt metaphors. ''He has chosen different sockets in different worlds. It will always be sensitive, because there will always be competition between different sockets. Everything in his life that seems functional gets everyone around him in hysterics.'' Koolhaas has manufactured a form for his life that radically rethinks convention to accommodate his requirements. The stress lines are visible. And that sums up both his design for living and his design philosophy. The OMA office occupies the top floor of an undistinguished eight-story building and affords broad views of the banal postwar cityscape of Rotterdam. It is a large room with a few glassed-off enclosures (including one for Koolhaas), all abuzz with multifocal activity. Different teams are working on separate projects, so that OMA at first seems completely decentralized. However, when Koolhaas walks through the office, you can feel the young architects (typically, men with shaved heads and black sweaters) shift slightly in response to his presence, like flowers to the sun. Koolhaas prefers another metaphor to describe his role at OMA. ''It's more a kind of lamination, a bonding between layers,'' he says. The OMA architects appear to adore him, but also to fear him -- knowing from experience that this lamination can scorch. One morning I witnessed Koolhaas unleash an angry dressing-down in Dutch (rather than the office lingua franca, English) that made the young man who was its object whiten in shock. Amid the hubbub, Koolhaas has the impressive capacity to blinker out distractions, including the project that he has just been reviewing, and concentrate on the next question. ''No glass,'' he said to one architect who came up to him for advice on a parking garage. ''It has to be superradical and brutal, from beginning to end.'' (''Brutal'' is one of his favorite words of praise. On the subject of his current Harvard research seminar, the chaotic urban development of Lagos, Nigeria, he says, ''What I thought would be depressing was incredibly powerful, inspiring and brutal.'') He likes to push in all directions and to keep everything tentative. ''Here you have this earthquake factor, everything can change at the last minute,'' says Markus Schaefer, a young OMA architect. ''You struggle, and maybe an unexpected beauty happens.'' Instead of working with wooden architectural models, as is usually done, the OMA staff whittles plastic foam, quickly cutting, discarding and recutting. In late March, on the day after Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron visited OMA from Basel for an all-day meeting on Schrager's Manhattan hotel (which will face Cooper Union on Astor Place), a team composed of architects from the two offices was trying to incorporate the collective ideas. One model that the young team proposed at the meeting was of a fairly standard orthogonal tower distinguished by an amoeboid-shaped atrium. ''What if you reverse it?'' Koolhaas asked suddenly. ''Invert it like a sock, and make the outside soft and the inside hard?'' Using yellow insulation foam, the group began pulling its tower inside out, trying to translate Koolhaas's koan-like insight into a building model. Apart from his goading of this particular project, the collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron is in itself an example of how Koolhaas likes to turn the status quo inside out. Schrager had proposed an orthodox architectural competition to determine who would design his latest boutique hotel. Competitions are the bane of a modern architect's existence. Koolhaas returns to the subject repeatedly, like a dog scratching a flea. One afternoon in Milan, I accompanied him on a call he was paying on the architect Giancarlo De Carlo, who, now in his 80's, has had a long, distinguished career. ''How many of your buildings have been realized?'' Koolhaas asked. ''Not many,'' De Carlo said. ''Maybe 15 percent.'' ''Better than me,'' Koolhaas said. ''Ten percent.'' De Carlo smiled and said he had been boasting. It was more like 10 percent for him too. ''Now I think it doesn't matter,'' Koolhaas said. ''You do architecture, and whether or not it is realized, it maybe doesn't matter. And with the nature of media today, perhaps you cannot always tell.'' Part of Koolhaas believes that, but another part of him ferociously wants his projects to be built. Faced with the offer from Schrager, he had the inspiration of asking Herzog, a rival invitee, to join forces. ''We've run against them four times, and each time they've won,'' Koolhaas says. By combining two of the hottest architectural firms in the world today, the Rotterdam-Basel alliance pre-empted a competition. Koolhaas speaks ruefully of the weak position in which even the most successful architects find themselves. ''It's an interesting topic, the economics of architecture,'' he says. ''You can never say no, because there is someone behind you who will say yes. You can never discuss fees, because there is always someone ready to undercut you.'' Beyond the professional jockeying lies a larger imbalance. ''The architect is completely passive, because his intelligence is only triggered by demands that he doesn't initiate himself,'' says Koolhaas, who gabs the way I imagine Hegel did -- dialectically. ''You must negotiate in terms of your own preoccupations through a field that is defined by the demands of others. It's only satisfying if everything changes because you engage it, and through your own engagement you put the same ideology and values to work on a new set of problems.'' Having insisted in various essays on the need of the architect to impose his personality on a project, Koolhaas now wants to expand on this idea. Much of the appeal of the joint effort with Herzog & de Meuron is the opportunity to impose two sets of values simultaneously. Renowned for classically Modernist buildings clad in beautiful ''skins,'' Herzog & de Meuron could be regarded as the antithesis of OMA. This, for Koolhaas, was a compelling reason to collaborate. ''We want to see if we can combine with two focuses and generate a third one,'' he says. ''A literal thing where a skin becomes a volume.'' (That was his motive behind inverting the model with the atrium: suddenly, the skin defined the space within the building. Not that this structure will be going up in lower Manhattan. ''We gave up on it, but it's a beautiful metaphor for the process,'' Koolhaas says, adding that they are now developing a design with ''a comparable fusion.'') To the ever-present tension between architect and client, he can now add a cultural divide between architectural firms, all in the interest of creative instability. As unorthodox as it is to team up with a rival, Koolhaas has concocted a still more radical solution to the difficulty of getting projects built: don't even try. He loves the part of design that is devoted to research, and before beginning a major project, he usually persuades his client to underwrite an ''investigation.'' As a prelude to working on the Seattle Public Library, he conducted a three-month study, traveling to check out libraries in Europe and the United States, then producing a book that includes, as he puts it, ''everything from first impressions to analysis of what is wrong with libraries.'' His office performed a similar task for Prada, analyzing such problems as ''how you can manage expansion without losing aura.'' For both these clients, he then progressed to design buildings; however, had he not, he would still have performed a useful (and billable) function as a strategic consultant. Koolhaas likes to see all of this activity as the practice of ''architecture in virtual reality'' -- and he has started a parallel office, with the mirror-image name of AMO, to pursue it. This is a new solution to an old problem. In the years that followed its founding in 1975, OMA never got to build. It was the perpetual runner-up in competitions. OMA was a four-person partnership -- of Koolhaas; his wife, Vriesendorp; Elia Zenghelis, who had taught Koolhaas at the Architectural Association School in London; and his wife, Zoe Zenghelis. When the firm did eventually win a major commission in Holland, Koolhaas in 1981 moved headquarters, without the Zenghelises, from London to Rotterdam. In 1978, Koolhaas made his reputation not with a building but with a book, ''Delirious New York,'' which ingeniously posed as a ''retroactive manifesto'' for Manhattan architecture. In it, he declared that the city's unique physiognomy resulted from a few factors. Because Manhattan was laid out on a grid, the base of each development could not exceed the size of a rectangular plot. The growth that was thwarted horizontally was permitted, by the invention of the elevator, to sprout upward as the skyscraper. No matter how flamboyant their facades might be, these skyscrapers were at their core generic: each was divided horizontally into autonomous and interchangeable floors, which were unconnected to the formal skin of the tower. And so you had Manhattan: an ''archipelago'' of island-towers, in which individual buildings and floors could change without affecting the overall stability of the system. Koolhaas told this story in a brashly prophetic style. He generously fleshed out his theoretical skeleton with illustrations executed by Vriesendorp, and a treasure-trove of historical bric-a-brac -- the section on Coney Island is riveting -- that they collected during a five-year sojourn in America. (Koolhaas had won a two-year fellowship. They liked the United States so much that they stayed for five.) Unconventional researchers, they specialized in old postcards, which they tracked down avidly. ''When you look for something, you are bound to find something that fits your theory,'' Vriesendorp says. ''He had the theory and fit all the material to the theory.'' Architects loved the book. ''The writing of 'Delirious New York' was famous before Rem's architecture, and it was better than his architecture,'' says the British architect and critic Charles Jencks. ''His architecture has caught up with it.'' Aside from its intrinsic panache, the book signaled some of the concerns that would mark Koolhaas's work in the coming years -- from his interest in the generic and the ready-made to his fascination with large-scale planning and building. Over the next decade, OMA produced a number of thrillingly innovative competition entries that came frustratingly close to realization -- the worst is when you almost win,'' Vriesendorp says -- and supported itself with the help of an urban development project in Amsterdam. Koolhaas also got to design a few idiosyncratic buildings that were actually built. I visited one of these early works, the Villa Dall'Ava on the outskirts of Paris. The house is carefully responsive to its site, yet with its corrugated aluminum and glass, pointedly stands out from the neighboring traditional turn-of-the-century houses. The client -- Dominique Boudet, an architecture magazine editor -- wanted a modern glass house with a swimming pool on top. Eager to commission a masterpiece, Boudet decided in 1984 that Koolhaas (who had not yet completed a structure) was the architect most likely to create one. ''I sent him a flowery letter saying why I wanted him to design my house,'' he recalls. ''He sent me back a telegram: 'Yes, I am interested. Phone me.' I wrote a very romantic letter, and he sent me a very short telegram. Very Rem-like.'' For Boudet and his wife, Koolhaas sat a glass box on the middle third of the narrow, sloping site, and over it he cantilevered two wings -- one for the parents, the other for the daughter (who was too old to live there by the time the house, stalled by lawsuits brought by angry neighbors, finally went up). The swimming pool that extends between the two wings enjoys a magical view of the Eiffel Tower, which Koolhaas, in a nose-thumbing gesture, marred with a piece of orange plastic fencing. The design bluntly mixes luxe and demode materials; in the small dining room, there is wood, plastic, concrete, plasterboard and glass. In the Villa Dall'Ava, as in all of Koolhaas's buildings that I visited, there is a discomfort level, supplied, in this case, by narrow passageways and a clanging metal staircase. Koolhaas has a greater tolerance for the ungainly and the unsightly than I do. The rude also cohabits proudly with the refined in Koolhaas's career-changing project, Euralille, a development that surrounds the Eurostar train station in Lille, France. When it was awarded in 1988, the Euralille commission was on a level entirely new to OMA. A huge planning project that immersed the firm in road mapping and office-tower placement, Euralille is a self-contained city: a thoroughly modern city, with a shopping mall, a hotel, some offices (including a handsome tower by Christian de Portzamparc) and a dizzying interchange of roads and tracks. In addition to the master plan, OMA designed the convention center, Congrexpo. In its trade-show facilities, Congrexpo is uncompromisingly brutal and functional: one wooden skylight in the expo hall highlights the raw concrete of the space. Yet the conference and seminar rooms are surprisingly handsome, their beauty all the greater for having been achieved on a very low budget -- for instance, with a corrugated plastic ceiling and an exposed insulation wall in the large auditorium. Koolhaas's ostentatious frugality is very Dutch. Similarly, his transparent glass boxes recall the Dutch habit of leaving living rooms undraped -- not, as in a Mies glass house, so that the inhabitants can look out but so that passers-by may look in. And at Villa Dall'Ava, the slanted pillars that support one cantilevered wing resemble the birch woods in Holland's countryside. Whatever its Dutch inflections, however, Euralille is mainly big, and OMA grew to handle it, tripling in staff until it employed about 60. At the same time, in the late 1980's, the office was entering big competitions. ''In the pre-'95 period of the firm, we nearly bankrupted ourselves by participating in important competitions that were open to everyone, or competitions where we were only partly paid,'' Koolhaas says. ''They are life-threatening, but the only potential source of future life.'' Koolhaas says that the firm was entering about five competitions a year, spending close to $500,000 at a time when OMA's entire annual income was about $2 million. The firm made back some of the money by selling architectural drawings and models. At last, in 1989, Koolhaas won a major commission, for a center for art and media technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. The project galvanized his imagination. And then those unpredictable forces that buffet the architectural economy swept through OMA. In the final hours, the city fathers of Karslruhe backed off from their audacious building, which, years in advance of the new Times Square, featured a facade that was a projection screen. Karlsruhe having sneezed, OMA caught cold. ''At one point, everything collapsed,'' Vriesendorp says. ''Like Karlsruhe -- that was one of his most brilliant buildings. He was really in mourning over that. He was down to designing doorknobs when they stopped it. It was like when you cut off a leg and you still have an itch. It's very hard to stop thinking about it.'' Along with Koolhaas's deep disappointment came financial embarrassment. ''He had to fire everyone almost, there was no money and incredible debts,'' Vriesendorp says. When Koolhaas tells the story more laconically, he uses his hands to suggest an inflated balloon, then mimics the contraction as the air goes out. The office shrank back to 24 people. ''But he doesn't let himself stay depressed,'' Vriesendorp says. ''He immediately throws himself into the next thing.'' A Dutch engineering company acquired half of OMA and paid off the debts. Koolhaas looked for something new to do. It was time to write another book. Working with the graphic designer Bruce Mau, he composed a weighty (six pounds) record of his architectural projects, memorializing the unbuilt along with the constructed and categorizing them by size. He included essays he had written as well as buildings he had designed. A long list of quirky quotations, assembled by the book's editor, Jennifer Sigler, runs down the left-side margin. The book, titled ''S, M, L, XL,'' is a ramble through Koolhaas's mind. The elements are in a state of visual and textual collision, and the real and the virtual are given equal importance. Like a three-ring circus, there is more than you can take in. ''I have always had a psychological thing of wanting to recreate or destroy,'' Koolhaas says. ''The book was an initial way of examining what we are doing and have been doing. It was also a deliberate suspension of the office to make a new beginning.'' Koolhaas resists biographical explanations. ''He loves pictures that don't look like him,'' Vriesendorp says. ''I'll say, 'That photo doesn't look at all like you.' He'll say, 'Yeah, I like that one.' I think he's terrified that anyone will know what he's really like.'' He was born in Holland at the close of World War II, the eldest of three children, and his sensibility was first marked by that vista of destruction. ''Ruins everywhere and really poor,'' he says. His father, Anton Koolhaas, edited a leftist newspaper that supported the Indonesian struggle for independence. When that cause prevailed, the elder Koolhaas was one of the few Dutchmen welcome in the new state. He took a position as the director of a cultural institute, moving his family there when Rem was 8. They stayed for four years. If you are looking for the point where radical oppositions and discontinuities entered Koolhaas's consciousness, postindependence Jakarta may be the place to start. The city was divided geographically and psychologically into remnants of the highly structured colonial past and eddies of the chaotic present. ''It was a strange coexistence between very ordered sections and disordered sections,'' he says. ''That is the source of a kind of fundamental division of loyalties or stretch of extremes in my work.'' As unfamiliar as Indonesia was, Holland when he returned was even weirder. ''It had gone from postwar suddenly to reconstructed neatness,'' he says disapprovingly. Because Koolhaas's maternal grandfather was an architect, the profession always hovered as a possibility. In his youth, however, he worked as a reporter for an Amsterdam weekly. At the same time, he consorted with a theory-laden band of young film devotees and considered a career in the movies. (Jan De Bont, the director of ''Speed,'' became the best-known moviemaker of that group.) Koolhaas dates his professional conversion to a speech on the movies that, at age 24, he gave at the behest of a friend who was studying architecture at the University of Delft. As he was talking about movies to a crowd of architects, Koolhaas says, he realized that he wanted to switch places with his audience. He wanted to build. Typically, when I asked him about choosing between cinema and architecture, he replied that the two fields are more alike than they are different. ''You are considering episodes, and you have to construct the episodes in a way that is interesting and makes sense or is mysterious,'' he said. ''It's about montage also -- whether it's making a book, a film or a building.'' Whatever the general similarities between the disciplines, it is more interesting to observe that Koolhaas practices architecture in the spirit in which a director makes a film. ''It's very scripted, the way people move and the possibilities he leaves for people in his buildings,'' Vriesendorp points out. ''The experiences are laid out. You go up and you have to look where you're meant to look. He sees a space and he sees what could happen -- a scene in a space.'' Architecture was the right profession for Koolhaas. Because it is fundamentally concerned with stability, the discipline gave him something to push against -- hard. ''All the work I do with Rem is on the edge,'' says Cecil Balmond, a director at the London-based engineering firm, Ove Arup, who has been collaborating with Koolhaas for 15 years. For the Jussieu Library at the University of Paris, one of OMA's most influential unbuilt projects, Balmond helped Koolhaas design floors that warped until they became continuous without ever losing their separateness (that is, without merging into a spiral ramp, like Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York). In another unbuilt Paris project, the Parc de la Villette, he essentially laid a skyscraper, with its interchangeable generic levels, on its side, dividing the park into bands that could be adapted to different programs as its use changed over time. For a third unrealized Paris scheme, the Trs Grande Bibliothque, Koolhaas proposed an enormous glass block of horizontal storage layers in which public spaces were suspended like blobs, accessed by nine banks of elevators. These plans were so bracingly intelligent that you could feel them redefining what is a park, what is a library. When OMA fell apart financially, Koolhaas embarked on a course of personal redefinition, seeking, he says, ''a replenishment of themes and issues.'' A crucial step was accepting a teaching position at Harvard in 1995, on condition that he would not have to teach design. Instead, he would direct one small graduate seminar a year on a subject about which he wished to learn more himself. As the first topic, he chose to examine the Pearl River Delta in China, which includes Hong Kong and the area to its north. To say that the region is rapidly urbanizing is a gross understatement: it will triple in population, to 36 million people, in the next 20 years. This building explosion is occurring with only the fleeting supervision of architects. ''The Chinese architect is 10 times as rare, 10 times more badly paid and produces 10 times as much as the European architect,'' Koolhaas says. That the architecture could be critically dismissed did not incline Koolhaas to dismiss it. ''I have, as opposed to a love for architecture, an unconditional love for the city,'' he says. Even people who could forgive Koolhaas's nonjudgmental examination of the hypertrophy in the Pearl River Delta raised their eyebrows at the subject of his next seminar: shopping. ''Shopping is surreptitiously becoming the way in which urban substance is generated,'' he says. He has compiled figures on the square footage of real estate devoted to shopping, categorized per capita by nation: the United States leads the list, with 31 square feet per person. But the sheer bulk of it is only part of the story. ''Shopping has infiltrated every category of building -- churchgoing, education, transport,'' he says. He notes that when shopping, like a stealthy virus, insinuates itself into another slice of life, sales per square foot increase markedly. The gift shop at the Museum of Modern Art does far better business than stores in a mall -- probably because shopping has been redefined as cultural entertainment. Shopping at London's Heathrow airport does 10 times the average mall's business, preying on captive customers who have been lured early to a territory in which there is nothing else to do. Koolhaas, whose political leanings are progressive, nonetheless seems quite happy working within the capitalist system, analyzing and refining it. ''He doesn't have a spiritual agenda, ecological agenda or cosmic agenda,'' says Charles Jencks, who adds: ''It must be hard being Rem. He knows what's going on. He has a heart. But he decided to put that on ice.'' In the way that in ''Delirious New York'' he examined the technological innovations that made the growth of Manhattan possible, Koolhaas directed his students to investigate the mechanical necessities that shoppers take for granted. The escalator, for example, first appeared in world's fairs in the late 19th century; then it was adopted by the department stores that were being developed at the same time. Harrods took the lead in 1895. ''The moment that the escalator arose is when consumerism took off,'' says Sze Tsung Leong, who was one of Koolhaas's students and is now helping prepare books on the Pearl River Delta and shopping, scheduled for publication at the end of the year. The shopping industry continues to pursue technological advances, and Koolhaas has encouraged his students to investigate topics like fake trees, which shopping-mall developers install to bamboozle shoppers alienated by man-made spaces. It was his casting of a fresh eye on shopping that brought Koolhaas to the attention of Miuccia Prada. By the time the fashion designer called last year, OMA was humming again. It had won a coveted commission to build a headquarters for Universal Studios in Los Angeles. (The project is stalled, waiting for Universal's management to stabilize.) The Dutch government had accepted an OMA design for a new national airport built on a man-made island, one that would function as a self-contained city for global travelers. (This gargantuan scheme is advancing slowly and uncertainly through a political obstacle course.) OMA was also proceeding with a student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which ingeniously fragmented the building block along pre-existing paths that people used to cross the campus. Only in the last couple of years has OMA been able to rely on architectural design, along with urban planning, as a primary source of income. It has reached a point where it is able to negotiate a fixed fee, based on the number of work hours required, instead of exacting a percentage of the total building cost (in Europe, conventionally 4 to 9 percent). OMA now employs 90 architects. In the last year, for the first time, the firm generated enough profit so that some could be distributed to the principals. A lot is going on. Yet it is the Prada work that appears to be closest to Koolhaas's heart these days. In part, it is the potential scope of the relationship, in which he can not only design three buildings but also help to midwife Prada's Web site and rethink the conventions of shopping. He is excited about combining work for a client in both the virtual and actual realms. He is also not immune to the allure of fashion. I got into Koolhaas's metallic gray Peugeot coupe this spring for a very fast drive to Schiphol Airport. He was off to yet another speaking engagement, one which Miuccia Prada would be attending. I observed that he was wearing the unmistakable blunt-toed Prada loafers and what could have been an entire Prada outfit. I asked. He denied it. ''It would be too craven to be completely Pradified,'' he said. Later, when he removed his long brown coat, I discreetly checked the label. Prada. OMA and its virtual twin, AMO, are rethinking Prada. The same Harvard-trained team that is shepherding the China and shopping books into publication is also pondering what purpose the Prada Web site should serve. ''We're in a very luxurious position with AMO,'' says Jeffrey Inaba, who coordinates Koolhaas's Harvard course. ''It's like a think tank, really. What should this thing be? What are its possibilities? Why would some avenues have more potential than others?'' Lest all this theory seem too airy, consider the Prada store that is under construction in downtown Manhattan. ''SoHo is perhaps the most dramatic territory to document the changes in the city,'' Koolhaas says. ''Ten years ago, this entire domain was a cultural domain or an industrial domain, and now virtually every ground floor is commercial space.'' Capitalizing on the insight that people spend more money in spaces that are not seen as purely commercial, Koolhaas has designed the Prada store in New York to be adaptable to cultural performances. Most of the garments on display will be in movable overhead towers that can be pushed to the back of the store. A sine-curve ramp that cleverly divides the space into two levels and ordinarily displays shoes can be converted into seating. A stage flips out of the upswing end of the undulating ramp. Voil! A clothing store has become a theater. True to its all-encompassing mission, OMA is reformulating not only the space in which you shop but also the way in which you shop. The office team compiled a list of the annoyances in shopping and devised many clever improvements. The dressing room, like the escalator, has not been updated since its invention -- and it could use updating. Why should you swelter when trying on a winter coat? The Prada dressing rooms will provide microclimates. Why should you have to put on your shoes and leave the dressing room, all so that your companion can assess whether you look like a complete fool in that bathing suit? The glass door on the changing room will adjust in transparency. Do you want to try on the blouse in a different size or color? You will be able to communicate directly with the inventory room via telephone. How can you judge whether that skirt makes your rear end look enormous? A video camera, linked to a plasma screen beneath the surface of the mirror, will present all sides of you in real time if you turn slowly, with a delay if you move fast. Once you think about it, it seems obvious. Nowhere is Koolhaas's sensibility expressed more beautifully than in the house he completed two years ago in Bordeaux for a newspaper publisher, his wife and three children. In the early 90's, the husband had been in an automobile accident that left him paralyzed. The family wanted an architect who could accommodate the husband's requirements. ''We really needed to have someone that it would be easy to talk to about all these very intimate details, like the shower, that my husband had to face,'' says the wife. At the same time, they wanted a house for the whole family. ''It's a combination of two lives -- his life and our regular ordinary lives,'' the wife says. ''We wanted a house where my husband is free, but not a house for disabled people.'' The site, on a hillside overlooking the French city, was also hampered by a web of restrictions: the house could only be nine meters high, it had to be surfaced with local materials and so on. Despite these constraints, Koolhaas eagerly took on the project. ''For Rem, the more difficulties you give him, the better he is,'' the wife says. When Koolhaas speaks, in the way that he speaks, about the need ''to negotiate in terms of your own preoccupations through a field that is defined by the demands of others,'' you might wonder what, if anything, he means. The design process for the house in Bordeaux illustrates what he means. Preoccupation 1: Horizontal layering. The architect designed a house that is a sandwich. Below, partly buried into the hillside, is a concrete kitchen and a wine cellar. Above is a massive concrete box divided into separate wings -- one for the parents, one for the children. Between is a living area that is bounded entirely in glass, a void above which the bulk of the house floats. Passing through these layers is a circular platform at the core of the house that moves up and down on a piston. It is a levitating study that allows the husband to go from his bedroom level to the wine cellar without leaving his desk. Near the desk is a wall of shelves; by raising and lowering the platform, the husband can reach his books with ease. Preoccupation 2: Scripting the space. The upstairs concrete box affords a view of Bordeaux through portholes. ''We didn't want a panoramic view over the city, but something more intimate,'' the wife says. The portholes were placed very precisely. For instance, an OMA team measured the height of the wife's eyes when she was standing, sitting or lying in bed. Other drawings calculated her line of vision from the bathtub. The portholes dictate what she sees. Preoccupation 3: An insistence on instability. In the Bordeaux house, a mirrored cylinder contains a staircase for the wife and children to move between floors. The cylinder is also a column that helps to support the upper level. Had it been placed in the center of the house, the engineering would have been relatively simple. But Koolhaas wanted asymmetry. Accordingly, his engineer, Cecil Balmond, tied a cable to the house's overhead beam, which rests on the cylinder and from which the upper floor is in part suspended; he then attached a counterweight to the other end of the cable to compensate for the asymmetrical placement of the beam. When Koolhaas heard the idea, he was thrilled. ''Rem said: 'Great! Let's have a boulder to accentuate the instability,''' Balmond recalls. ''I said, 'No way.''' Leaving the counterweight as a boulder above ground would be dangerous. But even as it is now -- sunk deep into the earth -- the cable evokes, in a poignantly apposite place, Koolhaas's constant theme: instability is inescapable; contain it, don't conceal it. Ever mindful of uncertainty, Koolhaas is perpetually trying to exercise control. ''The moment he gets up, he rings everyone to see if they are all in place, all the chess pieces,'' Vriesendorp says. ''He rings, 'Is everything O.K.?' And then I say, 'Rem, let me ask you something.' And he says: 'I can't talk now. I'm in a meeting,' or 'I'm in a taxi.''' Because he spends so much time traveling, Koolhaas holds on to what continuity he can. He will stay in the same hotel each time he returns to a city. He determinedly finds a swimming pool wherever he lands. He once swam in seven different pools -- from Lagos to Basel to Milan to Bordeaux -- in one week. With the newfound commercial success, the demands on his time have become staggering. ''I don't have a mobile'' -- phone -- because I would be completely at their mercy,'' he says. But like a reformed smoker, he will bum one from companions. It was hard for me to imagine him in a relaxed mode, yet he assures me that he has that dial on his control panel. ''I can be on the beach for two weeks with no problem,'' he says. ''I can go completely nothing.'' Last year, he was forced to ''go completely nothing'' after he underwent 15 vaccinations in preparation for a visit to Lagos. ''The 14th injection went wrong and I developed meningitis and almost died,'' he says. ''It completely changed my character. For a period of eight-months' recovery, I became a peaceful observer with a contemplation of architecture.'' And the end result of this meditative respite? He grew ''very invigorated but very intolerant of any delay,'' he says. He fired a client who kept posing new objections to a residential commission. He rushed into the Porto music-center project, which has a punishingly short deadline. In short, he worked even harder. He is not driven by materialist ambition. After a lecture he gave in Milan, a student asked why he hasn't designed prototypes for consumer products. ''I'm a hopelessly uncommercial person,'' he replied. ''It's not my interest to become rich. It's my interest to have an interesting life.'' He has an international group of friends -- museum directors, graphic designers, journalists, philosophers. They provide him with information, which does not go to waste. ''Everything he knows, he uses,'' Vriesendorp says. When you talk to him, he emanates the calm of a frog at the edge of a pond. If you say something that intrigues or amuses him, he grins slightly, signifying -- as with the flick of a frog's tongue -- that he has assimilated it. He has been thinking recently about filmmaking. ''For a very long time I was never interested in making film myself again,'' he says. ''But being in Lagos has made me want to document it in a way that is more movielike than you could do in a book. It's a really curious city. If you take photographs, you almost never capture what is going on.'' At times, he gives the impression that he has taken up architecture in the way that Michelangelo or Raphael or Jefferson did: not as a primary vocation, but as an intellectual and humanistic challenge to undertake before moving on to something else. With the possibilities created by new technology, architecture has recently become more compelling for him. ''There is an extremely new domain being constructed, which partly undermines architecture or eliminates the reason for being of architecture -- the electronic domain,'' he says. ''Now is an existential moment for a discipline that will decide whether it will be a dinosaur or whether it will be reinvented.'' It is this passion for upending tradition, more than architecture itself, that keeps Koolhaas engaged. He loves to rethink dinosaurs. Reinvention is his calling. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Organizations mentioned in this article: Related Terms: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ You may print this article now, or save it on your computer for future reference. 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