Tearing Down Even as He Builds

Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect long considered one of the profession’s most revolutionary urban thinkers, has won the 2000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture’s highest honor, to be announced today.

Among architects, Koolhaas, 56, has become a colossal figure, because of his ability to challenge preconceived notions about the modern metropolis and to reinvigorate architecture’s avant-garde. Projects such as his 1989 competition entry for Paris’ Tres Grand Bibliotheque, for instance, reexamined the urban condition by exploring the hidden tensions between building and city, the individual and the collective, conscious and unconscious worlds.

Other influential works include the unbuilt Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany--a remarkable composition of interweaving ramps and platforms--and the Grand Palais conference center, completed in 1994, in Lille, France. Together, such designs have had a profound impact on how architects view the contemporary urban landscape.

Koolhaas recently landed several high-profile projects in the United States. Two years ago, the Illinois Institute of Technology hired him to design a student complex at the heart of its landmark Mies van der Rohe campus. More recently, Koolhaas won the commission to design Seattle’s Main Branch Public Library. An earlier commission to design MCA/Universal Studios’ Los Angeles headquarters, which would replace Lew Wasserman’s famous black tower, stalled after the company encountered problems with neighborhood zoning entitlements.

“In some sense, getting the prize now is ironic,” Koolhaas said during a telephone interview from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, his firm in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. “Because this is precisely the moment when we are trying to deal with the issue of our identity as an office. We are trying to kill the whole notion of signature architecture, or at least make it less blatant.”

Commenting on the award, executive director Bill Lacy said: “Koolhaas has amassed an intriguing array of projects that continually blur the line between urban design and architecture. He has a rare talent and ability to think in design terms that range from the smallest construction detail to the concept for a regional master plan.”

Before beginning his career in architecture, Koolhaas dabbled in screenwriting, once completing a screenplay for the cult director Russ Meyer. Like many of the architectural luminaries of his generation, he was deeply affected by the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, and his earliest work was an effort to come to terms with the collapse of the great utopian experiment that the Modernists had once envisioned. Eventually, he found his way to London’s Architectural Association, an architecture school that was then considered a hotbed of radical thought.

1972 ‘Prisoners’ Project Displayed Early Promise

His talent was evident from the beginning. For his 1972 thesis project, titled “The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,” Koolhaas envisioned a linear, Berlin Wall-like scheme that cut right across the heart of London. Inside, a world of total psychological bliss is laid out as an alternative to the decaying city that surrounds it. A hospital promotes the ability to cheerfully accept the inevitability of death. Inhabitants purge themselves of violent tendencies in a “Park of Aggression.” It was a powerful critique of the Modernist desire to rationalize away the chaos of the city.

From there, Koolhaas traveled to New York, where he studied under the German neo-rationalist Mathias Ungers at Cornell’s Graduate School of Architecture and continued to explore his fascination with the modern metropolis. His celebrated book “Delirious New York,” which portrayed Manhattan as a vast city of congestion driven by unfettered desires, made Koolhaas an instant cult celebrity.

Koolhaas’ early designs were an elaboration on these broad urban themes. His use of a stripped-down aesthetic, with hard-edged, almost diagrammatic forms, revealed an affinity for the language of Modernism. But he imbued his projects with many of the elements that the Modernists shunned, using translucent materials and large pieces of urban infrastructure to evoke a surreal world, as if the unconscious had suddenly broken free to run rampant through Utopia.

The design for the Tres Grand Bibliotheque, for instance, was conceived as a solid block of information, with vast public reading rooms carved out of layers of library stacks. Koolhaas likened the forms to multiple embryos floating in a field of memory.

The Grand Palais conference center allowed Koolhaas to engage the evolving metropolis more directly. Set at the intersection of two freeways, the egg-shaped building is sliced into a series of urban layers, with a grand staircase leading to a conference hall and an exhibition hall. With the use of mechanical partitions, the two halls can be transformed into one massive urban space, as if huge chunks of the city had been lifted up and carefully reconfigured within this new, corrugated plastic envelope. In the exhibition hall, fields of columns evoke the underbelly of a freeway. The imposing stairs seem like a stage set for large public rallies. The entire project, in fact, could be the setting for a political uprising.

“I think at that time, we were mostly working on state commissions, and we saw architecture as the last place where you could articulate collective values,” Koolhaas said. “That has become much harder. Now the work is mostly private, and that in itself represents an important shift in the culture.”

In more recent projects, Koolhaas seems to have shifted tactics. His 1997 competition entry for a major expansion of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for instance, is an aggressive effort to reveal the hidden political and economic forces that shape the contemporary museum. To emphasize the museum’s function as a social meeting place in the life of the city, Koolhaas turned the ground floor into a large public plaza, with a glass-enclosed forum for lectures and art openings. A tower, dubbed MOMA Inc., rises out of one corner of the site, a testament to the museum’s role as an institution that both traffics in great wealth and manufactures artistic tastes. Enormous elevator cars that move diagonally throughout the building complete the picture of a vast machine geared for the distribution of art. MOMA was so offended by the submission that officials rejected it outright.

Embracing Social, Psychological Issues

Even in smaller commissions, however, Koolhaas has shown an ability to grapple with broad social and psychological issues. In Bordeaux, France, he created a house that is a remarkable analysis of the social forces that shape the contemporary family. Built in 1998 for a wealthy publisher who was paralyzed in a car accident, the structure is essentially a taut glass box, pierced by a mechanical platform that allows the owner to reach the house’s various levels. But the house is also divided into three independent circulation zones--one for the husband, another for his wife, and a third for their children--allowing Koolhaas to create a complex diagram of individual isolation amid the communal warmth of the family.

“In the past two years, we have made even more radical changes, in a way,” Koolhaas said, speaking of his 90-person firm. “For the first time, we are serious about addressing the relationship between the actual and the virtual [worlds]. And we have sought to generate a kind of economy of imagination. In some projects, we are repressing the desire to make sculptural forms, in an almost classical Freudian sense. I think that gives our work a new energy.”

The prize, which is presented at a different architectural landmark each year, will be awarded at a ceremony May 29 at the Jerusalem Archeological Park in Israel, along with a $100,000 grant.