Rem Koolhaas

The Maison à Bordeaux (1998) is one of Koolhaas’s most humane works. The client was paralyzed in a car accident; Koolhaas designed a movable room-sized lifting platform — simultaneously elevator, study, and bedroom — allowing the wheelchair-bound client to move freely through the entire house vertically. This building proves that Koolhaas’s design can respond profoundly not only at the gigantic scale of global cities but also at the most intimate domestic scale. Architecture is not a static container but a dynamic apparatus that changes with the user’s needs.

The CCTV Headquarters (2012) is the ultimate manifesto of Koolhaas’s theory of Bigness. This 54-story, 234-meter-tall looped building breaks the convention that a skyscraper must be a vertical tower, bending the building into a three-dimensional continuous ring. Its true innovation lies not in the exterior but within: all production, editing, management, and broadcasting functions inside the building flow continuously through the loop, forming a “vertical city.” Koolhaas contends that CCTV is not a building but a microcosmic society — 20,000 people work within it, and the building itself is a functional ecosystem.

The Seattle Central Library (2004) demonstrates Koolhaas’s spatial philosophy in yet another dimension. The library is no longer a quiet repository of books but an urban living room. The building is decomposed into five “platforms” — parking, office, books, mixed social, management — with open “trading zones” between each platform, allowing for unexpected encounters and programmatic drift. Visits tripled in the first year after opening. Koolhaas redefined the library as “the cathedral of the information age,” a democratic space for equal access to knowledge.

Koolhaas’s architecture cannot be understood apart from his urban research. Since Delirious New York in 1978, he has consistently taken the city — not the individual building — as the fundamental unit of thought. His teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (1995-2002) centered on “The Urban Project,” studying explosive urbanization in Lagos, Shenzhen, the Pearl River Delta, and beyond. His students (including Bjarke Ingels and Winy Maas) diffused OMA’s methodology into one of the most influential architectural networks of the 21st century.

OMA’s practice model is also distinctive. Koolhaas deliberately avoids establishing a “Koolhaas style,” instead encouraging young architects to work at OMA for a few years and then spin off with the methodology — which is why OMA’s “alumni” include MVRDV, BIG, RCR Arquitectes, WORKac, and many other important contemporary practices. This is not a heroic-individualist view of architecture but an ecology of knowledge production: a gene pool of design methodology that continually splits, proliferates, and mutates.

Critics argue that Koolhaas embraces global capital too readily, and that his iconic buildings are often symbols of authoritarian or capitalist power (CCTV is Chinese state media, Prada flagship stores are luxury consumption). But supporters contend that this is precisely Koolhaas’s honesty — he does not pretend that architecture can escape the operations of power, but instead seeks critical space from within power. In 2020, citing “a pessimistic view of the world,” he announced his withdrawal from large-scale building projects to focus on research and writing. His Guggenheim exhibition “Countryside: The Future” (2020) proved once again that his thinking is inexhaustible.