Rem Koolhaas has some photographs to show me. Not glossy shots of some earth-shattering new building he has created but small snaps of street life in the age-old courtyards of Beijing. Known as hutongs (胡同), these are tight webs of hodgepodge homes and alleys gathered around wells.
"Most of them will soon be gone," says the architect, speaking in the Rotterdam headquarters of his company, OMA. "The Olympics next year will find them old-fashioned and unsightly. Those who live there are being given new high-rise flats. These are well-equipped and clean, but people, I think, miss their old life down below in the courtyards."
In their place, right in the changing heart of Beijing, no fewer than 300 air-conditioned office blocks and hotels are set to rise. The most dramatic of these hutong-gobblers will be the sensational new headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV), due in time for the Olympics next August, and a world away from the antique courtyards. Its architect? Rem Koolhaas.
This is exactly the kind of paradox this highly intelligent and self-questioning architect revels in. In public, he is the master of sock-it-to-me design; in private, he looks with affection at the people and places in his photographs, at an old way of oriental life likely to vanish. And even as the heroic structure of the CCTV building, designed with visionary Arup engineer Cecil Balmond, climbs up noisily into the smog of Beijing, Koolhaas is working quietly on the discreet new headquarters for the banking arm of the Rothschild empire in London. You would be hard-pressed to guess that it was from the same hand and eye as CCTV.
The CCTV tower is nothing if not ambitious. Its steel structure forms a continuous spatial loop climbing up and around the volume of the building. Inside, there will be a "media village," complete with places to eat and play, and a sensational public viewing gallery.
And yet, for all this free-thinking design, the one thing CCTV lacks is freedom of expression. Daring new architecture, yes. Radical internal planning, sure. Yet, for all this, CCTV remains a sub-ministry of the government of the People's Republic of China, its news programs controlled by the Propaganda Department.
Koolhaas may have designed some of the most challenging, controversial and critically acclaimed ultramodern buildings of the past decade - Seattle Public Library, Casa da Musica in Porto, Portugal, the Dutch embassy in Berlin - yet I can't help thinking that, for all the excitement of working with CCTV, his heart belongs to a world closer to Beijing's hutongs.
Koolhaas, born in Rotterdam in 1944, spent four years of his childhood in Jakarta, Indonesia. "The country was newly independent," he says. "I lived as if I was an Indonesian."
Koolhaas' father, Anton, was a distinguished Dutch journalist, novelist and scriptwriter, who became a friend of Sukarno, Indonesia's first president. Somewhere in the young Koolhaas' mind, I can't help thinking, a taste of the exotic was already mixing with a love of writing and of buildings and places that would lead him to work first as journalist, with the Haagse Post, and then as a scriptwriter in the Netherlands and Hollywood, before turning to architecture in 1968. That's quite a resume for any man, let alone one who had just turned 24.
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