A Dutch Treat for LACMA

To make sense of its crowded campus, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has turned to a Dutchman schooled in Jakarta, Amsterdam and London; a playful thinker who teaches at Harvard and once co-wrote a screenplay for cult film director Russ Meyer; an architect whose works of severe geometry and unconventional materials are found in France, the Netherlands and Las Vegas.

Rem Koolhaas, the lanky 57-year-old who contains all these selves, was selected Wednesday evening by LACMA’s board of trustees as the man to very nearly rebuild the museum from scratch.

Standing beside his patrons that night in a black jacket, a tieless shirt buttoned to his neck, the man of the hour looked a bit like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” farmer in John Travolta’s “Get Shorty” wardrobe. He had just completed a sales job worth $200 million to $300 million--if the museum’s trustees can make good on their vows to raise the money--but his poker face was intact.

“We chose him because he was the tallest,” kidded Walter L. Weisman, chairman of the museum board.

“You know the statistics. It’s always the tallest,” the 6-foot-5 Koolhaas deadpanned back. “It helps to be firstborn too.”

In fact, his selection by LACMA’s leaders is the latest in a string of major commissions and awards he has won--including the 2000 Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in architecture--that have made Koolhaas one of the world’s most admired living architects.

The first part of his last name is pronounced “coal” in Dutch, but in English-speaking company, he is reconciled to being known as the architect called “cool-house.” That pronunciation is in keeping with his reputation as a cutting-edge international thinker who looks to pop culture notions of advertising, fashion and shopping in shaping his distinct vision of architecture and urban life.

Carrying a global resume, he has established a reputation as an international thinker who is trying to better understand the direction of advertising, fashion and shopping to shape an architecture of the future.

The admiration isn’t quite unanimous. He ruffled feathers at New York’s Museum of Modern Art with an irreverent expansion proposal in 1997. An underling accused him of a design plagiarism, setting off a four-year court fight in Britain that ended last month when a judge dismissed the charge. And even some who admire Koolhaas’ ideas note the author-educator-architect’s relative inexperience in getting buildings off the boards and into the sky.

A Notable Challenge

Choosing Koolhaas is “a gutsy decision,” says New York magazine architecture critic Joseph Giovannini. “He’s been a very provocative thinker for a very long time, but he hasn’t actually built that much.”

Koolhaas resides in London with his wife, painter Madelon Vriesendorp.(They have two children in their 20s.) But his 80-employee architectural firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, is based in Rotterdam, and his many projects keep him crossing continents and oceans.

In LACMA, Koolhaas has a notable challenge. Even in its own press releases, the museum now calls its six separate buildings, built in varying styles from 1939 to 1988, “a disconnected and disorienting experience for the public.” Koolhaas’ redesign proposal essentially means starting over on four central buildings with a scheme that involves layered levels of galleries and public spaces topped with a broad canopy. It leaves alone LACMA West (the former May Co. department store, where, he notes, the museum may choose to keep an exhibition presence going while most of the complex is buried in scaffolding). Architect Bruce Goff’s 1988 Japanese Pavilion, at the east end of the complex, is also spared.

“I like it,” Koolhaas said after winning the job. “I respect the architect [now dead], and I think it works very well together [with his new design]. I would find it really brutal to take it out.”

Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam--the firstborn of three children--and spent ages 8 to 12 in Jakarta, where his father, a writer, served as cultural director for the newly independent Indonesian government. Though the family moved to Amsterdam after that, Koolhaas says, “I had a life as an Asian,” and he calls that an influence that helped set him on an international course.

His career as an architect didn’t begin in earnest until he was 25, after several years as a reporter and designer for a newspaper. In that role, he covered everything from politics to film to auto racing (still a passion), then came back to lay out pages. “Every day, I had to orchestrate the coming-together of information,” he recalls. “And I think that was really a large preparation for what I’m doing now. For instance, what are the repercussions in one place from a decision taken in another place?”

His formal training came through London’s Architectural Association School; then Cornell University’s Graduate School of Architecture; then the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. Granted a scholarship that gave him near-total freedom to wander the United States, he came to Los Angeles for six weeks in 1974 for a creative collaboration in the Hollywood Hills with Dutch friend Renee Daalder.

Their goal: to write a script for B-movie king Russ Meyer.

The script, “Hollywood Tower,” never got made. Daalder went on to a career as a writer and director in the genre, including the 1976 release “Massacre at Central High.” And Koolhaas had more interdisciplinary grist for his mill.

“As a scriptwriter,” he has said, “you invent events and stitch them together. In architecture, you imagine episodes, and you organize them in a way that is very close to montage.”

He doesn’t remember his first visit to LACMA. “And that may be the first explanation of this project,” he said, smiling.

Those looking for clues to what’s ahead for LACMA may find that Koolhaas books are at least as helpful as Koolhaas buildings. It was his writing that won him his first broad recognition.

Drawing on research and impressions from his time as an architecture student in New York, Koolhaas wrote a book called “Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.” Published in 1978, it celebrated the multifarious, changeable nature of that city, along with its “culture of congestion,” at a time when many lamented Manhattan’s prospects.

In the years that followed, Koolhaas began to produce his own architecture while keeping up the provocative writings--and, since 1995, teaching at Harvard.

By his own estimate, no more than about a dozen of his designs have been built. And he doesn’t bring to boardrooms the broad grin and easy charm that many leading architects can employ. Yet Koolhaas’ profile has risen steadily.

His Netherlands Dance Theater in the Hague (1987) has been acclaimed as one of the best performing arts buildings in recent decades. His Grand Palais conference center in Lille, France, (1994) has been widely noted for its low cost and innovative use of materials.

In 1998 Koolhaas accepted a private home commission from a wealthy publisher in Bordeaux, France, who uses a wheelchair. The project included a 10-foot-by-11-foot library that doubles as an elevator, and later prompted the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury chairman, J. Carter Brown, to call the home one of the great private houses of the 20th century.

Between designs have come more books. During a three-week stint as a visiting scholar at the Getty Center in early 1993, Koolhaas began an experimental collaborative writing project that evolved into “S, M, L, XL,” a 1995 tome teeming with images of his buildings (built and unbuilt) and jottings of his thoughts. Described as “a novel about architecture,” it was produced in collaboration with graphic design guru Bruce Mau and editor Jennifer Sigler. The book further burnished Koolhaas’ reputation as a man proceeding unconventionally and thinking big.

In 1996, Koolhaas was chosen to design a new master plan for MCA/Universal Studios, but the project was aborted over neighborhood zoning issues. Still, the architect says he harvested valuable fruit from effort. Mulling the awkward relationship in that venture between the lightning-quick business environment and “the incredible slowness of architecture,” Koolhaas and associates came up with a think tank sister company to OMA, which aids clients on projects examining “the relation between society and the built environment.”

A year later, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (which had given Koolhaas a show in 1994) gave the architect his most notable rejection. He submitted an irreverent proposal that included a tower to be dubbed “MOMA Inc.”--part of an overall scheme to highlight the inevitable intermingling of commerce and culture at that powerful institution. His plan was rejected in favor of a more conservative effort by Yoshio Taniguchi.

Since then, Koolhaas has said he welcomes assertive clients--a description that LACMA’s leaders say fits them well--and suggested that having ideas challenged can lead to better work.

Deborah Jacobs, Seattle’s city librarian, who spoke in detail with LACMA officials before Koolhaas’ selection, said the architect’s project there, a $159-million central library due to be completed in fall 2003, has moved forward on time and on budget, amid a reassuring amount of give and take. “I’ve worked with a lot of architects,” she said, “and he’s among the most responsive to client interaction.”

Shopping’s Effect on Architecture

Since April 2000, when Koolhaas won the Pritzker, he has been in near-constant motion. In addition to the Seattle library, he is tackling a concert hall for Porto, Portugal; a new Netherlands Embassy in Berlin; and Prada stores in Beverly Hills, New York and San Francisco.

In October, Koolhaas flew to Las Vegas to celebrate the opening of his twin casino museums, the Guggenheim Las Vegas and the Guggenheim Hermitage, both branches of New York-based Guggenheim, both housed amid the lagoons, gondolas and faux frescoes of the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino.

On Dec. 4, the night before LACMA announcement, Koolhaas was in London, celebrating publication of “The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping”--not a shopping guide but an analysis, undertaken with a team of his students, of the interplay between global commercialism and culture.

“It’s my theory,” says Koolhaas, “that the pervasiveness of shopping has completely mutated architecture, and we haven’t taken that into account.”