Because he has been willing to take risks, and because he is unlike most architects, Koolhaas has had his professional ups and downs. When OMA's first major building project, a center for art and media technology in Germany, fell through, Koolhaas worked on his eye-popping book S, M, L, XL, with graphic designer Bruce Mau. Published in 1995, this outlines Koolhaas' belief that the sheer bigness of cities and their buildings today means that the old rules of design, proportion and planning are largely meaningless. "The market economy thrives on spectacle and novelty," says Koolhaas. "Its buildings are ever more dramatic. It offers the promise of total freedom, but in architecture this quickly leads to the danger of grotesqueness. The media, of course, encourages this teenage architecture; it gives most attention to extreme capitalist buildings, to this ever-growing accumulation of architectural extravagance, to fanciful museums full of shops. Perhaps there is still a residual nostalgia for refinement, but the pressure is on the other way."
Only too aware of the absurdities of the bigness of today's cities and their architecture, he nevertheless designs big "iconic" buildings himself, while decrying the practice and researching and designing smaller alternatives. Small wonder that, when I inquire what he plans to do next, he says: "write more." Asked recently to remodel the Hermitage Galleries in St Petersburg, Koolhaas suggested doing as little as possible.
Rem Koolhaas is one of the world's most intriguing architects. Here is an architect who could happily sit down one day with God to design refined and purposeful public buildings knitted into the fabric of old cities, and the next with the devil to design the wayward architecture demanded by ultra-capitalism.
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