Böck Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas

Essays on the History of Ideas
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-3-86859-892-6
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 5, 368 Seiten

Reihe: architektur + analyse

Rem Koolhaas (geb. 1944) zählt seit den 1970er Jahren zur internationalen Architektur-Avantgarde. Neben zahlreichen weltweiten Auszeichnungen wurde er im Jahr 2000 mit dem Pritzker-Preis für sein Lebenswerk geehrt. Im vorliegenden Buch werden erstmals Koolhaas’ zahlreiche Bauten und Projekte mithilfe seines umfangreichen theoretischen Werks interpretiert, das sich aus Polemiken, Manifesten, kulturwissenschaftlichen Büchern wie Delirious New York und sogenannten Entwurfspatenten zusammensetzt. Zwischen Theorie und Praxis hat Koolhaas eine evolutionäre Entwurfsmethode entwickelt, wobei eine Idee in mehreren Projekten angewendet, unterschiedlich mit anderen kombiniert und so immer weiter entwickelt worden ist. Das Buch verbindet dieses Architekturwissen nicht nur mit der Ideengeschichte der Konzepte, sondern interpretiert auch die Funktion des Autors/Architekten – und seine Originalität – im aktuellen Diskurs neu.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Böck, Ingrid

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architekten & Architekturbüros

Leseproben

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Half a century ago, in the nineteen-sixties—that fabled era of free sex and free access to drugs—serious young radicals took aim at institutions, in particular big corporations and big government, whose size, complexity, and rigidity seemed to hold individuals in an iron grip.[40]
Richard Sennett Well … I would leave out the ‘quasi’… And the ‘utopian’! [laughs] The ‘idea’, yes … working for a political idea, as a propagandist for the political idea.[41]
Rem Koolhaas Born on November 17, 1944, in Rotterdam, Remment Lucas Koolhaas (abbreviated to Rem) spent his first eight years in the Netherlands before his family moved to Indonesia in 1952. In 1956, they returned to Amsterdam after a short stay in Brazil. His father, Anton Koolhaas (1912–92), was a novelist, screenwriter, critic, and director of the Amsterdam Academy of Film; Koolhaas’s mother is Selinde Pietertje Roosenburg (born 1920). His grandfather Dirk Roosenburg worked for Hendrik Petrus Berlage before he opened his own architectural office.[42] In 1963, Koolhaas started to write articles for the weekly magazine De Haagse Post about artistic and cultural topics. In this capacity, he also conducted interviews, for example, with the Dutch architect and artist Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. In addition to his journalist work, Koolhaas studied scriptwriting at the Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. His interest in cinema led him to become a member of “1, 2, 3, enz,” a group of filmmakers including Rene Daalder. There he was involved in producing film, writing screenplays for Russ Meyer, and also acting in several short movies, like A Gangstergirl in 1966, Body and Soul in 1967, and The White Slave in 1969. From 1968 to 1973, Koolhaas studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, whose teachers at the time included architects and artists like Peter Cook, Cedric Price, Peter Smithson, Charles Jencks, Alvin Boyarsky, and Elia Zenghelis, who would be one of the founding members of OMA. During his time at the AA, Koolhaas also carried out several theoretical investigations, which demonstrate both the school’s educational focus and Koolhaas’s central themes found in later works. For example, the study The Berlin Wall as Architecture (1970–72) analyzes an existing architectural object that is not only a rigorous means of separation but also embodies “the secret but true sacred symbol of Berlin.”[43] Koolhaas argues that the wall forms an insurmountable barrier that, by encircling one part of the city, creates fundamentally different conditions for the inhabitants because it does not imprison them but makes them “free.” Koolhaas adopted this method of interpretation in his examination of metropolitan sites when he moved to New York City as a Harkness Fellow in 1972. From 1972 to 1973, he studied at Cornell University, and was subsequently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) from 1973 to 1979, at the same time that Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton were program participants. During his stay in the USA he collaborated with O. M. Ungers and taught at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1976, he also started lecturing at the AA and at Delft University. Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) was founded with Madelon Vriesendorp and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis on January 1, 1975 in London. In 1980, it expanded in collaboration with Zaha Hadid, moving its headquarters to Rotterdam and opened offices in other cities, including New York and Beijing. Choosing the name OMA signifies the group’s central concept of architecture as urban configuration and not as single object. They started with a series of commissions, studies, and competition entries. Their work includes the Koepel Panopticon Prison in Arnhem (1980), the Parc de la Villette in Paris (1982), the Netherlands Dance Theater in The Hague (completed in 1987), the Très Grande Bibliothèque in Paris (1989), the Zeebrugge Sea Terminal (1989), the Nexus Housing in Fukuoka (completed in 1991), the Jussieu Libraries in Paris (1992), the Kunsthal in Rotterdam (completed in 1992), the master plan for an entire new city—Euralille with the Congrexpo in Lille (1994), the Educatorium in Utrecht (1997), the New York and San Francisco Prada Stores and Catwalks (starting in 2000), the EU Flag (2001), the extension for the Whitney Museum in New York (2001), the CCTV and TVCC in Beijing (2002–08), the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (completed in 2003), the Public Library in Seattle (completed in 2004), the Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), and the Dee and Charles Wyly Theater in Dallas (2009), as well as projects in Kuwait, Dubai, Singapore, Mumbai, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen Hong Kong, and Moscow. In the last two decades the firm has spread by launching further offices in New York, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Doha, and by expanding in regards to both the content and the geographical scope of their work. In 1999, AMO was established as a research studio, or a so-called think-tank, beyond the conventional field of practice in order to apply architectural knowledge commercially for companies like Prada, Ikea, and Volkswagen. AMO also produced a study for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and one called “The Image of Europe,” which are both panoramic surveys showing the history and iconography of the subject. In addition to running his architectural office OMA, since 1995 Koolhaas has taught as a professor in the Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. As a scholar, he analyzes themes like China’s Pearl River Delta in Projects on the City I: Great Leap Forward (2002) and the spaces, techniques, and ideologies of retail and consumption in Projects on the City II: The Harvard Guide to Shopping (2001). In addition to his design practice, Koolhaas’s work consists of his writings about architecture, which are a critical re-reading of the modern movement as well as the constructivists and surrealists. In his first book, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto of Manhattan (1978), he gives an account of the functional attainments of the New World and their surrealist application in the paranoid critical method proposed by Salvador Dalí. His opus magnum, co-authored with Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (1995), is a volume of over 1,000 pages that compiles OMA’s work up to that point: their numerous projects, competition entries, and realizations. It also includes a series of essays by Koolhaas that quickly became canonical texts: “Bigness, or the Problem of Large” (1994), “The Generic City” (1994), and “Typical Plan” (1993). For the book-length publication, Content: Triumph of Realization (2004), he took the role of editor in a move that clearly reflects the OMA–AMO conjunction of providing a basic research context to architectural practice. He did, however, contribute the essay “Junk Space” (2001) and several shorter texts co-authored with students and other collaborators. Other key publications by Koolhaas (and collaborations with other authors) are as follows: Euralille: The Making of a New City (1996), Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students (1996), OMA Rem Koolhaas: Living Vivre Leben (1998), Mutations: Harvard Project on the City (2000), Projects for Prada: Part 1 (2001), The Dutch Embassy in Berlin by OMA/Rem Koolhaas (2004), CCTV by OMA (2005), OMA in The Hague (2006), Project Japan: Metabolism Talks (2011). When presenting the Pritzker Prize to Koolhaas in 2000 in Jerusalem, the jury characterized his work as both visionary and pragmatist, intented to extraordinary dimensions, a free-flowing circulation, and unprecedented shape.[44] His numerous international awards include the Progressive Architecture Award (for a residential house in Miami he created with Laurinda Spear) in 1974, the Antoni Gaudí Award and Olympics Award (for Euralille) in 1992, the Book Award (for S,M,L,XL) of the American Institute of Architects in 1997, the French Chevalier de Légion d’honneur in 2001, the Japanese Praemium Imperiale in 2003, the RIBA Gold Medal in 2004, and the Mies van der Rohe Award (for the Netherlands Embassy) in 2005. In 2008, he was invited to join the European Group of Wise. Two years later in 2010, he received the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture for his lifetime achievement. In 2014, Koolhaas was curator of the Fourteenth International Architecture Exhibition of the Biennale in Venice and, for the first time, invited the national pavilions to respond to a single theme, “Fundamentals – Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014,” in order to re-visit key moments from a century of the modern movement.   [40] Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 1. [41] Rem Koolhaas et al., “Propaganda Architecture.” [42] Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, 3; Wikipedia Contributors, “Rem Koolhaas,” in Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed March 6, 2011, http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rem_Koolhaas; OMA, “Homepage,” accessed March 6,...

Über Autor(innen)

Ingrid Böck

Ingrid Böck