SPIEGEL: Can the development that is going up in Dubai be compared with the "Science Center" you designed in Hamburg, a spectacular ring of stacked containers?
Koolhaas: What is comparable is the fact that, in both cases, we are dealing with large projects driven by real estate developers, that is, with a very abstract substance. As a result, people often fail to recognize the differences between such projects. But the real differences lie in the conditions in Hamburg and Dubai, the political environment, the freedom and the amount of latitude an architect is given. This, in turn, highlights a characteristic of contemporary building: In essence, we are trying to pour the same materials everywhere into molds shaped by local circumstances.
SPIEGEL: You complain that modern architecture subjugates itself to the primacy of the iconic, making it arbitrary. On the other hand, you yourself have created a few of the most memorable icons around, especially the building for the Chinese television network CCTV in Beijing.
Koolhaas: I am a critical spirit and an architect at the same time, and I do not feel obligated to constantly validate my own theories in my specific work. There are contradictions, and the possibilities we have at our disposal today provoke such contradictions. Nevertheless, we try to build structures with unstable identities -- that is, buildings with depth. Take the CCTV complex, for example. Now that it's almost complete, the way it functions becomes clear. It looks different from every angle, no matter where you stand. Foreground and background are constantly shifting. We didn't create a single identity, but 400 identities. That was what we wanted: To create ambiguity and complexity, so as to escape the constraints of the explicit.
SPIEGEL: Does that mean that the icons of the 20th century, skyscrapers, sheer vertical structures, are on their way out?
Koolhaas: There were many typologies of building in the early 20th century. Today we have essentially only two of them: the house and the tower, and nothing in between. I see few indications that this is changing. In fact, we are experiencing a veritable apotheosis of the tower in Russia and China. But perhaps some typologies only experience their mystification when they are in fact already dead.
SPIEGEL: How do you feel about the towers that are competing for the title of the world's tallest building? Do you like any of them?
Koolhaas: I think it's ridiculous. Objectively speaking, I even like a few of them -- the Burj Dubai, for example, simply because it looks so ludicrous, a building that is much taller than anything else that ever existed. I cannot completely resist this temptation, but from an intellectual standpoint I'm certainly capable of rejecting this race.
SPIEGEL: What comes after the skyscraper?
Koolhaas: Height is becoming less and less of a factor, while size -- "bigness" -- is getting more important. In the Middle Ages, a large building had about 200 square meters (2,152 square feet) of space, by the Renaissance it might have been 10,000 (107,600 square feet), and in the 19th century it was 40,000 (430,400 square feet). Today we build complexes of 500,000 square meters (5.4 million square feet). The change in quantity has consequences. One of them is that we are dealing with multifunctional buildings, because a building of that size can no longer be filled with a single function.
SPIEGEL: So that we have, in the case of the Burj Dubai, 50 floors of offices, 50 floors of hotel rooms and 50 floors of apartments.
Koolhaas: Another consequence is that our attention shifts to the interior, because the bigger a building the less contact it has with the outside world. But we are now dealing with different zones in the interior of such complexes, zones that are occupied at completely different speeds, have a completely different metabolism, are constantly in motion, are being renovated, repairs or altered to perform a new purpose.
SPIEGEL: A few years ago you were in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, and you returned with a message of humility: Architects, allow things to take their natural course and adjust to reality!
Koolhaas: The first time I went to Lagos, I encountered a completely dysfunctional city that forced its 10 million inhabitants to find ways to survive. To me it seemed like a process of sheer self-organization -- a term that was in vogue at the time. Meanwhile, I have studied the history of that city at length, and it has become clear to me that this self-organization does in fact take place within the framework of a structure created by a series of modern thinkers, architects and urban planners.
SPIEGEL: You coined the term "junk space" in Lagos. What does this mean in Europe?
Koolhaas: The expression describes the effect commerce has on architecture, how it affects the beauty, authenticity and acceptance of a building. The irony is that in the West, of all places, an overemphasis of the economic forces us into permanent chaos. In the past, an airport could be proud of the fact that its paths, from the airport entrance to the gates, were short and direct. Nowadays the large numbers of shopping areas have turned airports into labyrinths. In other words, starting at the paradigm of clarity, it has taken us only 20 years to end up in a paradigm of chaos.
SPIEGEL: Can architecture and urban development do anything to counteract the forces you describe -- the omnipotence of commerce, the atomization of society?
Koolhaas: When we were planning the Universal Studios headquarters in Hollywood, a problem we had was that the company's individual components are scattered across a large area -- so we designed the building as a sort of machine, which brings the components together again. And now we have done something similar with the CCTV building. It includes something we call a "Visitors' Loop," a common space where people who would normally work away in disparate offices are likely to run into each other.
SPIEGEL: In doing so, are you taking up a concept, in a modern way, that American architect Louis Sullivan defined with the phrase "form follows function?"
Koolhaas: Some of our buildings fulfill this basic concept completely. Ironically, this functionalist idea is so forgotten, so unknown today that it seems completely new once again. Modernity is ultimately shaped by the idea of enlightenment, of progress. As unsteady as these concepts may seem to us today, it would be absurd to abandon them, because it hasn't been until today that we, as Europeans, are in a position to share them with the world. This, in turn, is what makes up the credibility of European architecture in an age of globalization: That we are able to execute our formulas in a less formulaic way than others, and that we can pay closer attention to the circumstances under which other people live.
Interview conducted by Stephan Burgdorff and Bernhard Zand.
Post to other social networks:
Stay informed with our free news services:
| All news from SPIEGEL International | Twitter | RSS |
| All news from World section | RSS |
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2008
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH
