[in-enaction] superstars: Biography/Review Bigness! (Rem Koolhaas)

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ON ARCHITECTURE: Extra-Large

A friend recently told me that his most important pedagogical tool as an 
architect is this maxim: the architect's primary ethical responsibility 
is to be the guardian of the public realm, in contrast to the myriad 
others who currently configure our built landscape--clients, 
politicians, contractors, developers, and NIMBY-driven "community 
action" committees. The public realm includes not only cultural 
institutions, but also arteries of movement; not only urban plazas and 
public parks, but also abandoned blocks, suburban playgrounds, and 
brownfields; not only shopping malls, but also parking lots. And it 
includes not only the voids between buildings, but also the buildings 
themselves, exterior and sometimes interior.

Training architects to be urban designers is common in modern 
architecture, and it has engendered some wonderful places, such as Bruno 
Taut's functional and beloved modernist housing estates of the late 
1920s in Berlin. More notoriously, it has produced also some disastrous 
ones, such as the ever-collapsing Pruitt-Igoe project of the 1950s, in 
St. Louis. As a consequence of the disasters, the specter of architects 
designing urban (or suburban, or whatever) environments conjures up 
popular fears that singular, and singularly wrongheaded, visions will be 
visited upon precious and complicated social space. This certainly 
happens. Yet the alternative approach--confining the obligations of 
architects to a particular site's perimeter--is inordinately worse.

Architects often switch-hit between architecture and urban design. You 
might think, given their celebrity, that Daniel Libeskind and Frank 
Gehry are at the forefront of new thinking about the shape of today's 
and tomorrow's built public realm, but you'd be wrong. Rem Koolhaas is. 
Heart-stoppingly brilliant, Koolhaas owes his influence to his 
omnivorous curiosity about, and wide-angle lens on, the contemporary 
world; his extraordinary mix of nihilism, idealism, and wit; his 
institutional base at the Harvard Design School; his students' and 
apprentices' work; his facility for generating opaque and paradoxical 
aphorisms, many of which are mass-reproduced in his highly stylized 
publications; and, most importantly, his often prophetic ideas and 
buildings. From Koolhaas come some of contemporary architecture's 
most-reproduced forms and structures: the giraffe-legged Villa dall'Ava 
in suburban Paris, one of the greatest buildings of the late twentieth 
century, and the stupendous fishnet-steel-and-glass-covered Seattle 
Public Library, which opened in 2004. He has re-directed the 
architectural thought and practices of a generation....

....

n Koolhaas's hands, architecture and urban design are not just 
intermeshed, they are also conflated. His current work is giving 
physical form to an urban vision that has haunted him, in his mind's 
eye, for decades. But is it wise? Is it right? Is it socio-critical, as 
he maintains? If we consider his stated aims for his architecture, his 
abiding interest in Surrealism, and his accession to extravagant 
proclamations about the death of the public realm, OMA's occasional 
insistence upon the publicness of its master plans ("Let Almere be a 
place of maximum public interaction!") seems less than sincere. OMA 
proudly describes as Piranesian the Carrefour's spaces, intimating that 
they create the same sense of alienating solitude that the 
eighteenth-century Italian architect captured in his famous Carcerci 
engravings. But they depicted prisons! This and other such comments, 
Almere and other such urban designs, demonstrate the deep and 
unfortunate affinity of Koolhaas's architecture with his urban designs.

Even in the most public spaces, Koolhaas's true subject is the modern 
subject's inner musings. His urban universe asks no more of public 
spaces than that they stimulate private epiphanies, moments of 
philosophical reverie in which the alienated individual in the city 
might contemplate his finitude and his irrelevance among the teeming 
spectacle of urban life. This vision has issued in some show-stopping 
buildings, where the celebration of private truths is appropriate. Yet 
to apply it to today's panoply of conurbations is disastrously to 
conflate public with private, to make the public private and the private 
public. In the Koolhaasian city people are never really alone, but 
neither are they ever really together.


cont'd....
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=RS2KwHZj6DBUlRLzXeGEdC==