Rem Koolhaas Discusses Current Preoccupations at the GSD

On Oct. 4, renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas spoke about four of his current overseas design projects at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Born in 1944, the Rotterdam visionary has created some of the most acclaimed and controversial architecture of the last four decades. Currently, Koolhaas is a professor of the practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the GSD. As crowds of students, professors, and art lovers gathered at the GSD’s Gund Theater to hear him speak, there was a tangible excitement.

Koolhaas opened the talk with a discussion of the state of his native Europe. As one of the designers of a possible new flag for the EU in 2002, Koolhaas has had the opportunity to attend many summits and referendums discussing the future of the organization. “There is a tendency for those over 50 to worry and those under 50 not to care,” Koolhaas said. From here, Koolhaas transitioned into talking about four recent or ongoing projects that he and his creative firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, have been involved in: the Taipei Performing Arts Center, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, the Qatar National Library in Doha, and the Prada Foundation in Milan.

For each building, Koolhaas detailed his and his partners’ visions, discussing their inspiration and the common themes of each building’s architecture. With the Taipei Performing Arts Center, Koolhaas envisioned three theaters in a single building that would be centrally located above and around street life. In fact, the shape of the building was inspired by a deep-dish pan found in typical Cantonese street restaurant. As a picture of this bowl flashed across the projector, the audience burst into laughter. Local screenplay writer Mollie D. Miller, who attended the lecture, later commented on Koolhaas’s unusual source of inspiration. “The whole lecture was worth it for me because of the picture of the bowl of soup. That was fabulous! Who would look at a bowl of soup and say: ‘Oh my God! I can put three theaters and connect them all!’” she said.

For the Garage Museum building, Koolhaas remodeled a previously standing Soviet building, a restaurant that he had once visited on a trip in 1967 and that had become a ruin more than two decades ago. “I was astonished to see, against expectation, how luxurious or how generous Soviet architecture even at that late point could be,” he said. The idea of this building was to resurrect the generosity that Soviet architecture embodied with minimal modification, while at the same time lending the building a sense of modernity. The solution was to use a skin of polycarbonate that not only preserved some of the original building but also exposed the functional aspects of the building as decoration.

The National Library in Doha is located within the confines of Education City, an ambitious project composed of different universities. Koolhaas created a building from two mirroring concave shapes of white concrete with the entrance placed in the middle. “Therefore, you are surrounded by this amphitheater of books that enables you in one glance to see everything and every book that is in the library. [It is] a direct invitation to reading,” he said. Koolhaas explained that he intended the modernity and flooding daylight to create a space that would do justice to Qatar’s long history of literacy.

Returning to European issues, Koolhaas ended his talk with a discussion of the Prada Foundation. “The Prada Foundation tries to make sense of the new Europe,” he said. Built on the periphery of an old industrial region, Koolhaas and his team created a creative space amidst an industrial one. “It creates a kind of metaphor of Europe,” he said. “It is also very ancient and decrepit but capable of genuine invention.” One of the buildings in this complex uses aluminum mirrors to create a hardcore modernity amidst the antiquity, while another is covered in gold to restore what Koolhaas has termed “aura.” Master of Architecture student Marysol Riva Brita, who described herself as an avid lover of Koolhaas’s work, said that she felt inspired by his talk not just because of what he has produced, but also because of what he represents in the world of design. “He has this role in which he claims bigger agency for design,” she said.

Travis Dagenais, communications manager at the GSD, also noted the interdisciplinary nature of Koolhaas’s work and thought. “I appreciate that Rem Koolhaas combined insight from across disciplines and some of his recent and current projects to give us a fusion of architecture, design and culture in the current moment,” he said. And judging from the many raised hands during his question and answer session, Koolhaas found an eager audience for those ideas Tuesday night.