Dinges

Rem Koolhaas The Dutch architect and urban visionary spotted a wealth of potential in our congested cities

By RICHARD LACAYO

MAARTJE GEELS / HOLLANDSE HOOGTE STEALING BEAUTY: Koolhaas creates new order from urban “junk space”

Neuroscience has a catchphrase: "consciousness lags behind reality." What this means is that perceptions take a split second to be absorbed down the brain's neural pathways. But this rule doesn't seem to apply to Rem Koolhaas. The Dutch-born architect-polemicist appears to outpace reality, to identify the emerging patterns of modern life before they are fully formed—and certainly before the rest of us wake up to them. For instance, it was Koolhaas, in his 1978 book Delirious New York, who deciphered what he called Manhattan's "culture of congestion." At a time when cities were in bad odor, especially that one, he saw in New York City a fertile disorder.

And he drew from that discovery lessons about the virtues of density—yes, the virtues—that other cities could learn from.

Or better still, that he could teach them. The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the Rotterdam-based firm that Koolhaas established in 1975, has tied the 21st century building into some very interesting knots. For the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, OMA devised an angular student center topped by a huge horizontal cylinder that contains the station platform of an elevated railway. The Seattle Central Public Library, an OMA project with jutting irregular floors, or the splendid contortion that will be China Central Television's headquarters in Beijing (now under construction), are both a thorough rethinking not simply of what of a building can look like but what it can be, how we can use it. As Mao might have said, if he had been an architecture critic, let a thousand contortions bloom.

The great Modernists—Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—were control freaks who tried to impose their vision on the messy realities of the street. Though Koolhaas is possessed of an ego every bit as formidable as theirs, his outlook is entirely different. In his view, the tumultuous disorder of the modern city—the hyberbolic megalopolis from Lagos to London to Lahore—imposes its will on the architect, whose work must come to terms with and even reflect the "junk space," as Koolhaas calls it, that's all around. In the enduring contest between the architect and his times, Koolhaas has arrived at a unique position—the man who simultaneously resigns himself to the chaos around him and sees in it an opportunity for an altogether new kind of order.