Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas wrote Delirious New York and founded the practice OMA. He questions what a building can be, with projects such as the CCTV building in Beijing and the library in Seattle, and he has influenced a whole generation of architects.
Remment Lucas Koolhaas was born in 1944 in Rotterdam. He grew up partly in Indonesia, where his father was a writer and journalist. He worked as a journalist and screenwriter before studying architecture at the Architectural Association in London and at Cornell in the United States. In 1975 he founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, OMA, together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp. The book Delirious New York, 1978, was a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan and the density of the metropolis.
OMA’s early buildings were the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague and the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. In 1995 Koolhaas published the large book S,M,L,XL with Bruce Mau. Among OMA’s best-known buildings are the Villa dall’Ava in Paris, the Maison à Bordeaux with a lift that is a moving room, the Casa da Música in Porto, the Seattle Central Library and the CCTV headquarters in Beijing. He also founded the research arm AMO, which works on studies of cities, media and politics, and he directed the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014.
Koolhaas received the Pritzker Prize in 2000. He has taught at Harvard, where he ran research projects on rapidly changing cities such as Lagos and the Pearl River Delta. Many of today’s leading architects, among them Zaha Hadid and Bjarke Ingels, have worked at OMA. His thinking about the city, the programme and bigness has shaped architecture since the 1990s.