Even if you don't like to shop, go to the intersection of Broadway and Prince streets in SoHo to witness, and become part of, the spectacle of Prada's recently opened flagship store. The design by Rem Koolhaas is architecture at its most electrifying (and electrified) brilliance. Rumored to have cost $40 million, or approximately $1,700 per square foot, Koolhaas's renovation of the bottom two stories of the now-defunct SoHo Guggenheim -- work that Miuccia Prada and Koolhaas fatuously claim will help to "redefine the experience of shopping" -- is crackling with innovative ideas, outrageous compositional gestures, and high-technology theatrics. It reaffirms the Pritzker Prize-winning Koolhaas, founder and chief architect of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), as our greatest contemporary architect (at least in terms of vision, virtuosity, and flat-out creativity).
Walk into this relatively typical SoHo brick-and-cast-iron building and youare greeted by deliberate cacophony: zebrawood floors and a pixilated wallpapermural of brightly colored retro images and patterns recalling those that havemade Prada's clothing emblematic of the excessively rich. In front and to yourleft is a glass-enclosed, room-sized circular hydraulic lift -- the kind thatmechanics use to elevate your car -- that displays a row of dainty embroideredsweaters neatly stacked on a shelf. Looking beyond, you get an idea of theretailing netherworld into which this lift descends, as Koolhaas has removed a1,650-square-foot section of the ground floor in order to expose the basementlevel below. Slipped into the voided space is an indoor auditorium with zebrawoodstadium seating that cascades down to the lower level, which connects to aluxuriously waving wall lilting its way back up to the opposite side of thestreet-level floor. Embedded into the "wave" is a flip-out stage for fashionshows,theatrical events, musical performances, and who knows what else.
On the display floor opposite the entrance, mannequins encased in aluminum meshpose on squarish platforms that are suspended on motorized tracks from theceiling. A mixture of cut-rate and luxury materials, typical of Koolhaas'sarchitecture, is everywhere apparent. Lime-green, unpainted gypsum enclosesdisplay spaces filled with pricey merchandise; sleek panels of Privalite Glassedge concrete floors -- dressing-room walls that toggle from transparent toopaqueat the step of a foot switch.
The Prada store suffers from the OMA's usual problems: sloppy detailing,two-dimensional imagery (in this case, the mural) that is inadequate to thebrilliance of the spaces, and stunningly inattentive craftsmanship. In short, itneglects aspects of architectural design by which Koolhaas seems bored. Still,the resplendence, the borderline obscenity (on which side of the border isdebatable), the fawning critical response, and the exuberant public reaction tothe store confirm that Koolhaas's architecture -- not just as architecture but asasubstantial cultural phenomenon -- deserves careful, sustained deliberation. Andthis is something that it rarely gets.
Koolhaas may be our greatest contemporary architect,but thenature and volume of his production indicate that he wants to be more than that.He plays the game of cultural critic and theorist, visionary, urbanist, andshaper of cities for the globalized, digitized, commercialized world of thetwenty-first century. If we don't begin thinking critically about what he'sdoing,how our cities look and function might greatly reflect his influence -- and whatweget might not be what we want.
For Koolhaas, designing, theorizing, and making architecture is donerelentlessly and at breakneck pace. Here is a man who in 1993 spent 305 nights inhotels, and who published more than 2,000 pages of architectural theory andmanifestos in the year 2000 alone (this while running architectural offices inRotterdam and New York City). Koolhaas recently finished the Guggenheim in LasVegas; he also completed studies for a whole new town in Korea as well as aproject for a new European transportation hub -- a little "airport city" on anocean island for the Dutch Schipol Airport authority. He is currently working onthe Dutch embassy in Berlin, major additions to the Los Angeles CountyMuseum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the main branchof the Seattle Public Library, and a multiform theater for Dallas. He isadditionally designing master plans for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and itsimmediate neighborhood (in collaboration with Diller and Scofidio) and for a newsection of Almere, a suburb of Amsterdam.
By virtue of his media empire, of his teaching at Harvard and other topschools, and of OMA's recruitment of talented architecture students from aroundthe world, Koolhaas has achieved an almost cultlike status among a generation ofarchitects and architecture students. He became the darling of the avant-garde in1978, when he published Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto forManhattan. Still in print, DNY is a surrealist-inspired, wittily illustrated celebration of architectural modernism and, more broadly, the cultural phenomenon of modernity in what Koolhaas believed was the world's greatest metropolis. When the book was published, the world of architecture was deep in the throes of postmodernism, a misnamed antimodernist movement that revered traditional architecture, the historic fabric of the city, and small-scale developments. Yet Koolhaas admitted in his essay "The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century" that maybe all his arguments about the vibrancy of the contemporary city "are in the end mere rationalizations for the primitive fact of simply liking asphalt, traffic, neon, crowds, tension, the architecture of others, even." Shortly after the release of DNY, Koolhaas established the OMA -- architecture for the metropolis.
In the subsequent two decades, Koolhaas has helped to reorient architectureaway from postmodernism by navigating a different path through modernism's legacythan that of the International Style (think skyscrapers on Sixth Avenue), whichhad been so vilified when Koolhaas first started developing his ideas aboutdesign.To be sure, Koolhaas learned from the modern masters, Le Corbusier and LudwigMies van der Rohe. He also absorbed ideas from other, disparate sources. From thework of the great Finnish modernist Alvar Aalto, he came to appreciate thesurfeit of haptic stimuli that comes through assembling many differentmaterials. From pop-art-inspired critiques of the International Style byinsurgent modernist architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson, helearned to celebrate the commonplace and the contemporary city. From surrealistpainting, with its flagrant rejection of minimalist abstraction, he came to hispenchant for the witty, the unexpected, and the grotesque.
The ideas Koolhaas developed in DNY and thereafter first achieved solid form in 1991, in the breathtaking Villa Dall'Ava on a hillside in a Paris suburb. A riff on Le Corbusier's famous Villa Savoye in Poissy, France, the Villa Dall'Ava was a small home for a refined, architecturally autodidactic Parisian couple with the determination to move architectural culture forward. A good portion of the ground floor is transparent, edged in glass-panel walls that open to a garden in back; the roof has a lap pool on axis with the Eiffel Tower. Koolhaas loved the irony of a transparent and figuratively weightless ground floor supporting a heavy, if ever so elegant, sliver of a swimming pool that, in a second ironic twist, floats on top of the house. He solved stringent zoning requirements and an idiosyncratic domestic program (almost no kitchen) by creating a house that promotes voyeurism within the family while shutting out prurient neighbors. Like Aalto, Koolhaas brought together many different materials; but unlike Aalto, who reveled in luxurious textures and hand-carved teaks, Koolhaas delighted in the honky-tonk materials of the street: exposed concrete, corrugated plastic, steel. The Villa Dall'Ava (like its recent successor, a house in Bordeaux finished in 1998) is suburban yet stunningly urbane -- a historical meditation on modernism that points the way to its future evolution.
In a number of concurrent and subsequent projects, most of which were notbuilt, Koolhaas worked on breaking apart and recomposing the horizontal layers ofspace between typical building-floor slabs in order to emphasize, in architect-speak, designing in section (imagine slicing a building in half andthen designing vertically as well as horizontally). Into a gridded, rectangularprism, Koolhaas would drop egg-shaped voids and chutes of light, and he wouldfold entire floors into ramps that started as one floor and became the next. In earlypublicprojects, such as his competition scheme for the Bibliothèque nationale inParis, such techniques let a building offer spatial and visual experiences on theinside that were not obvious from the outside, which appealed to Koolhaas'spassion for surprise. ("I've always been interested in shocking people," heavers.) Later, even when he started flamboyantly expressing his sectionaltheatrics through his facades -- as with his Educatorium at the TechnicalUniversity in the Netherlands (1997), in which a slanting concrete floor supporting the school lecture hall folds in a curve over onto itself tobecome the room's ceiling -- his buildings continued to afford a series ofunexpected spatial moments meant to evince the vibrancy of the contemporarymetropolitan experience.
This formal strategy of stretching the possibilities of the sectional aspectsof design, an approach that Koolhaas has been developing since the late 1980s,is perhaps his most important contribution in architectural terms. There aremoments in the work of Le Corbusier that are harbingers of Koolhaas's. (There's awonderfully dynamic instant in Le Corbusier's Villa la Roche-Jenneret in Pariswhere one stands on a third-floor walkway and looks down through two levels ofbanded space, with a bridgelike room one level below and a foyer on the groundfloor.) But Koolhaas takes the idea further, making whole buildings into problemsof sectional space. (As a measure of Koolhaas's influence, younger firms such asMVRDV and UN Studio in the Netherlands -- some of whose principals onceworked for Koolhaas -- and Diller and Scofidio in the United States have adoptedthis idea as their own.) In Koolhaas's Kunsthall in Rotterdam, for example, abuilding that was finished in 1992, you can walk up a ramp and look to one sidetosee people's feet at the level of your head, or stand in a ground-floor galleryand look up at shadowy images of people walking in the gallery above.
Such experiences constitute some of the best moments at Prada: At the basementlevel, Koolhaas has extended the store beneath the sidewalk, paving the ceilingswith glass block so that as you try on shoes or sweaters you can hear, and lookup to see, people exiting from a subway station onto the sidewalk above yourhead. In a Koolhaas building, public spaces are often not enclosed. Just as inpublic moments of being in a city, you voyeuristically survey others whileconscious of being surveyed.
As Koolhaas earned larger and more prestigious commissions, the attentionsthat he had lavished in his writings on very large buildings and on urban designwere rewarded. For an architect infatuated with the metropolis, Koolhaas'sinsistence on his aptitude to solve the problems faced by the contemporary cityis hardly surprising. It is also entirely within the modernist tradition. In 1995he published a compendium of his architectural designs and essays: S, M, L,XL, the title conveying the different scales at which the OMA worked. In it, and even more so since, Koolhaas has set his sights on the realms of L and XL. He joined the faculty at the Harvard Design School in 1995 not to teach design, as most architect-pedagogues do, but to direct his Project on the City. This annual, yearlong group-thesis project studies and conceptualizes contemporary urban phenomena such as the rapid development in the economically liberalized regions of China, urban changes in the former communist world, and the impact of global retailing on contemporary cities of all kinds. (The study of China was recently published as the book Great Leap Forward, and the examination of global retailing as the Harvard Design School Guide toShopping.)
Koolhaas is greatly disturbed by architecture's growing irrelevance to ourcontemporary built environment. He insists that if the profession is to survive,architects need to take seriously the kinds of spaces and urban developments thatconstitute the bulk of today's built environment -- and that many progressive architects either deplore or ignore: big-box retail, shopping malls, genericoffice towers, and so on. He has confronted his colleagues with the preciousnessof their profession and exhorted them to insist upon a larger say in thestructure and look of today's built environment.
What would a Koolhaas city look like? As in his architecture, soin his urbanism: He calls for architects to embrace the existing environment(whether urban, ex-urban, or suburban; whether garish, disorderly, ormonotonous) and try, in the words of the Smithsons, to "drag a rough poetry" outof this everyday life.
Koolhaas's first full-scale attempt at master planning was Euralille, atransportation hub and urban complex in Lille, France. The French governmenthired him in 1989 to create the master plan for, among other things, a new high-speed train station nearthe city's center that would connect France to Belgium, Germany, and theNetherlands; Lille was to be the first stop in Europe out of the Chunnel. Thedevelopment -- which includes a convention center designed by Koolhaas and atrainstation, business offices, retail shops, public services, and housing designed byother architects, whom Koolhaas helped to select -- was intended to link downtownLille to its suburbs and to stimulate an economic renaissance in this region ofnorthern France.
Koolhaas used the Euralille commission to propose what he claimed was a newparadigm of urbanism, which, he said in 1992, "must not rest on order and power"but "must incarnate uncertainty." Like his architecture, today's metropolisshould thrive on disjuncture, discordance, opposition, ambiguity, and everydayfunk. Thumbing his nose at the preservation-minded contextualists, Koolhaasmaintained that architects and urbanists should promote forms in the samevicinity that "have no architectural relation whatsoever to one another."
Koolhaas's critique of contemporary urbanism is correct, timely, andimportant, and aspects of his ideas are appealing. It is refreshing that herevels in modernity and modernism, especially in light of the nostalgic,antimodernist, reactionary urbanism that has so dominated urban planning circlesfor the past 20 years. Moreover, it is indisputable that architects need to takeseriously a wider range of contemporary building types, no matter how ostensiblyunappealing. The problem is not Koolhaas's critique but rather his proposedsolution. In essence, he replaces one reactionary set of urban principleswith another. The very same qualities that make Koolhaas'sarchitecture -- especially his houses and smaller-scale public buildings, such asPrada -- so stunning become desolating when executed on a very large or, worseyet, urban scale.
Koolhaas's Euralille turned its back on the city's old center, which by footis less than 10 minutes away: A highway visually severs the pedestrian-scaled oldcity from the "bigness" -- one of Koolhaas's favorite words -- of the newdevelopment. Euralille, Koolhaas asserts, is scaled to be seen from a movingtrain or a speeding automobile. "What is important about this place is not whereit is," he said, "but where it leads, and at what pace -- in other words, isto what extent it belongs to the rest of the world." Koolhaas designed thegeneral massing (but not the interiors) of the shopping mall-cum-housingdevelopment, which stretches monotonously like a beached whale along 350 metersof a street. Such megastructures, which Koolhaas is reprising in his master planfor Almere, constitute "the only architecture capable of accommodating aheterogeneous proliferation of events [characteristic of today's metropolis]within a single container."
The approach to urban composition that Koolhaas took at Euralille -- andtakes again (with minor alterations and a very different program) at Almere --doesnot vitalize or revitalize the metropolis. It kills it. No matter how muchtoday's world differs from yesterday's, no matter how many high-speed trains,fast-moving automobiles, and video monitors populate and enliven a city, when youget out of your moving vehicle, you remain imprisoned in the unchanging containerof our lives: the human body. And whatever else a successful city may be, itneeds to be attuned to the scale of the people who use it.
Koolhaas wouldn't be the first talented architect to fall flat when working inan unfamiliarly large scale. But it would be letting him off too easy to supposethat a lack of experience is all that prevents him from handling largeconurbations with the same finesse that he does his houses or his small-scalepublic buildings. It's the social and phenomenological principles with which he'sdesigning that are wrong.
We've seen an urban strategy of radical disjuncture before: in Houston, wherelocal governments have consistently blocked any substantive zoning regulations,resulting in ostentatiously large corporate skyscrapers abutting the poorest ofneighborhoods. At an urban scale, embracing disjuncture and the commonplace doesnot spell radicalism or progressivism; it spells consensualism and conservatism.Wielded as an urban policy rather than as an occasional design tool, it amounts,politically and economically, to laissez-faire urbanism, the public realm bedamned.
Koolhaas has proven that taking cheap, everyday materials and massaging theminto the domiciles and leisure spots of the cultivated and wealthy can producewonderfully imaginative and fresh environments. But when he uses the samematerials in a megastructure, paying little attention to craftsmanship ordetail, he creates environments that look depressing and cheap. The aesthetic andpsychologically transformative process on which the power of Koolhaas's workdepends is thus lost.
Koolhaas wants to build huge, multipurpose buildings and to design cities, butat the same time he eschews permanence, a concept he finds retrogressive andembarrassing. This may be a good sales pitch to municipal governments orbusinesses pinching pennies, but as a design strategy it disregardsarchitecture's traditional social responsibility to take part in thecross-generational conversation that contributes to a truly vital metropolis. Theenduring pied piper of the avant-garde, Koolhaas can say that his designstrategies "don't feel complacent inside" because at the original scale in whichhe conceived them they aren't. Yet while they lead to architecture that isvibrant and inventive, they produce urbanism that is cloddish and mundane. And asa set of urban-design principles, they make unfriendly, almost dehumanizingenvironments that also perpetuate some of the worst aspects of the status quo.
Can Koolhaas find a way to jettison his urbanism and keep his architecturevibrant? It's hard to predict. In the meantime, go to Prada -- or, for thatmatter,to any other Koolhaas building you can find (smaller is better) -- and enjoy theprovocative drama of contemporary architecture's living paradox.
