Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944, at the culminating year of World War II devastation. He was the eldest of three children, and his sensibility was first created by ruined landscape. “Ruins everywhere and really poor,” he says. His father, Anton Koolhaas, was a renowned Dutch novelist and journalist. His father, in his writing, had strongly supported the Indonesian cause for autonomy from the colonial Dutch, and when the war of independence was won he had been invited over to run a cultural programme for three years.

Rem experienced live in Indonesia when he moved to Jakarta at 8^th. “It was a very important age for me, and I really lived as an Asian.” Koolhaas recalls. He compares the two destroyed cities, and fell in love with its atmosphere of desperate. “Rotterdam was totally poor and destroyed, and Indonesia something like the same.” And when he came back in 1956 to Rotterdam he realized that everything had been fixed up straightly, made him boring. Later we can see that Koolhaas’s masterpiece as a manifesto to recreate his lost childhood excitement.

Rem began his career as a journalist with Haagse Post in The Hague, and even he started his career as scriptwriter both in the Netherlands and Hollywood. In 1968 he studied at the Architecture Association School in London, a prestigious radical school of architecture where in 1972 he received a Harkness Fellowship for his research in the United States. Rem continues his study at Cornell University for a year, and then became a visiting Fellow at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies leaded by Peter Eisenman in New York. Sometimes he mistaken as a man of the counterculture, and a rebel to global capitalism.

Rem is a man with ability to surpass reality, by identifying the emerging patterns of modern life before they are riped and before realized it. While other architects might think their profession as designing order and/or beauty on a given space, Rem Koolhaas has different comprehension by defining his work as ‘a chaotic adventure’ which dependent on forces and realities beyond his control. He prefers to claim that he doesn’t deign to design more than he has to, that’s why his buildings are episodic, multipurpose, improvised. No intention to creating icons, though some of his building is an icon.

Koolhaas anxious that the rapid growth of global economy will obsolete the development projects and decaying the urban’s quality. Megastructures projects that looks potential but in behind it was a vague investment, a common features for the city. Koolhaas suggests architect to discard traditional architectural values to improve the development.

It’s the time for Rem Koolhaas to not only depend on theory but also practical application. In London 1975, with Elia, Zoe Zenghelis, and Madelon Vriesendrop ~his wife~, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) established, with mission to define the new types of relations, theoretical and practical implementation between architecture in the contemporary dilemma. OMA’s office is in the 7^th story of a reinforced concrete building, where the windows are cracked and held together by wide strips of tape. The reason why OMA is located in the center of Rotterdam rather than Amsterdam is a form of ‘rebellion’ against the values of his architectural faith.When OMA threated to bankrupt, a crucial step had taken. For example, he teaches at Harvard in 1995, but not related to design. The first topic in the seminar is study of the Pearl River Delta in China, which includes Hong Kong and the area to its north. The region is rapidly growing, and it will triple in population in the next 20 years. As the time flows, OMA regained its power.

At OMA, you will see dynamic independence atmosphere. No stable architects here and no fix design until the last second of deadline. “You can’t do this work with total jerks,” says Ole Sheeren, OMA project managers, “but you can’t do it with total professionals either. They are far too knowledgeable about the normal way, and they get completely blocked.” Rem doesn’t like working neither with stupid nor stubborn people.

He has unlimited endurance. Once upon a time Rem had arrived from Singapore two days earlier, nonstop work, and then he had a late dinner with Thomas Krens ~the director of the Guggenheim~ in Rotterdam, after it he back to the Rotterdam office, and noticed that no one there. It was after midnight.

Rem Koolhaas introduces YES, also called Commerce Button used for the cashier of Prada, which is an acronym of Yen, Euro, and Dollar. It doesn’t mean rejection to economy idealism, but to coalesce with the world reality. Reality gives dynamism to the city. An architect who doesn’t concern with this issue rather only talks about the aesthetic is just outdated idealists.

Unlikely as other architects, Rem Koolhaas is known by his book of ideas before any of his buildings realized, at first. The book’s title is Delirious New York, a dwelling on New York City’s fertile disorder to retroactive manifesto he called Manhattan’s “culture of congestion”. Published in 1978 and it was a box office, also an endeavor of his premeditation about how the contemporary architecture world might look. Today the book is important literature about modern architecture and society.

One isn’t enough then the second. It’s quite thick sized, entitled S, M, X, XL. And because he had built several projects by then: a conference centre on top of the TGV station in Lille, a dance theater in The Hague, an art gallery in Rotterdam; so the book comprises Koolhaas’s buildings pictures. The content is more specific to architectural topic rather than Delirious New York. We still can found his unadorned writing style inside the book.

Rem also writes his manifestos there:

• Installation for the 1986 Milan Triennale | Less is more (a recollection).
• Morgan Bank | Typical plan (tradition through the type vs typical tradition).
• The Berlin wall as architecture | Field trip: (A)A memoir (Berlin diary; how does it work? 2).
• Text | Elegy for the vacant lot (Downtown Athletic Club reconsidered).
• Etc.

All of his writings strengthen his image to contemporary architecture issues, inevitably.

The Projects

Rem Koolhaas introduces “Megastructure” concept, a large size building or plan meant for urban improvement remain to the Manhattan grid. OMA applied Megastructure for its designs for a vast complex of shops, housing, and offices, together with a railway station, in Lille, France or Lille Masterplan. OMA also did it to a 1.2 billion Euro planned city center for the Dutch “new town” of Almere City Center.

Koolhaas designs three Prada stores for in America which belongs to Miucca Prada. “SoHo is perhaps the most dramatic territory to document the changes in the city, ten years ago, this entire domain was a cultural domain or an industrial domain, and now virtually every ground floor is commercial space,” Koolhaas says. He has finished this project for $40 million which opened in 2001.

Perhaps the most memorable project for Koolhaas is the Guggenheim Museum, an exhibition hall he designed for Thomas Krens. Not enough with recent museums in Venice, Bilbao and Berlin, he has asked Rem to build in Las Vegas. For Koolhaas, it’s an opportunity to verify his toughness and brutality to what was he believes about contemporary architecture. He wants to prove that the architects who try to neuter the contemporary city problem by creating pedestrian precincts and conservation are a mistake. What they really forgot are the intrinsic of city qualities.

The idea of the project is how to combine museum with casino. Thomas Krens describes it, “The museum has to make a very powerful statement that cuts right across the main themes of Las Vegas. If you see a city that has embraced artificiality, we will make something that is absolutely the opposite, a very aggressive, even brutal statement.”

Ironically the Guggenheim Las Vegas has been closed for less than two years after it opened. Also the Koolhaas ‘failed’ projects because of the over-budget of the projects, the realized plans are only about 10%. In November 2002, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art halted his project which will build there. In April 2003, The Whitney Museum of American Art announced that they have canceled the plans to build a $200 million project. He passes the redesign of Ian Schrager’s hotels and to rethink the Universal Studios theme park. He declined to join for the Ground Zero competition, with a reason he doesn’t want to working a ‘look behind’ project.

From sketch to reinforced concrete

The man behind Rem Koolhaas’s designs to reality is Cecil Balmond, the deputy chairman of Arup, a global design and business consulting firm. The Serpentine is one of his projects. “This is our chance to create a piece of fun in the park, we enjoy it, though it is a hard brief because you have to design the pavilion for the site, but it also has to be taken away and sold at the end,” he said. The first competition for Balmond and Koolhaas won is The Hague City Hall; nevertheless the juries deny them a first. For quite a long while that became a familiar response. People feared Rem’s ideas is only a preface and not to build, but Balmond notices Koolhaas potent as a brilliant thinker, and believes him.

The bond between them is very tight. “Rem and I like to do the minimum structure possible and then we come back to it and work out solutions to the things we missed out. That turns architecture to something more playful,” Balmond says, as he supports whatever his friend wants. He feels pity and dizzy to Rem’s China Central TV (CCTV) headquarters, “it is the most daring building we have done, It’s when that door shuts and Rem has caught a plane and the client has gone, that the engineering reality falls on you, after you having been flying out there with your pencil. You think: how does that really work?”

“If it’s a design problem my mind won’t let it go. You get up, come down at five in morning, do it in the taxi, or on a plane. If it is a more abstract idea, then music helps. There is only one piece of music I play then, Bach’s cello suites. But you have to go headlong at it. Rem is exactly the same. He is everywhere all the time, but he has an enormous capacity to focus,” he added.

Rem Koolhaas sets his doctoral students at Harvard, studying shopping for three years and wrotes a very dark side of architecture: Junkspace. It’s prediction about the future, eradication, artificial necessities. Koolhaas foresees that modern futures are outcast artificial zones that filled by blank costumers. The phenomenon of shopping has been overruling the world, making even museums and malls and hotels adopt its concept.

“If space junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junkspace is the residue mankind leaves on the planet…Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown.”

Koolhaas isn’t preferred to signature architecture, by designing things aesthetically, or in hiding from the realities of contemporary life by placing architecture as a craft skill. Why we should making ‘beautiful lies’, when this world cities are being overwhelmed by ‘bitter realities’?

Junkspace condemns everything. It tries to critic modern architecture, what people think it’s a good thing to do, in Koolhaas’s eyes, converse. Junkspace is the side effect of modernization which means routinizing to design; everything is similarly programmable and predictable. It is about what modernist architect done with space.

Rem Koolhaas targeting on every aspects of property design, which turned to conditioned and/or conditional space: shopping mall ~which he specialized~, filled with escalator, air conditioner, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain, etc. similarly appear to the other mall, or even building: that an architects claim they had been built a lot kind of building, but actually they only build one same thing, just in different place.

“…Patterns imply repetition or ultimately decipherable rules; Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code…”

Every product of modern architecture is, whatever it looks, are dead. The ornaments give nothing except only a stamp. A building, or object, which appears without meaning, is considered Junkspace.

Commercial capitalism brings monotonous pattern, uncontrollable expansion, which erodes architecture vision to its lowest grade, beaten by the financier’s need. Architecture project is used only for attracting YES, losing idealism for ‘honoring’, ’sharing’, ‘caring’, ‘grieving’ and ‘healing’. The knowledge of architecture is determined by standard, everything. It is forbidden thing to infringe it.

However there’s difficulty to free from Junkspace. The limitation of human itself is the cause. Architect’s wild design usually ends in the hand of the engineer, irrational cost, or client’s arbitrary; as Koolhaas experienced it in his architectural path.

Rem Koolhaas recommends us to keep away from Junkspace. He noticed that the effect has been infecting the whole mankind. Junkspace means not only limitation in design, but also our life quality. Rem gives his cure to it: escape to the world of virtual, a place where we can resettle ourselves, also probably retained AMO.

Junkspace is only Rem Koolhaas’s diary

“…Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends.”

It was very extraordinary essay, yet hard to read, that even critics couldn’t break the most surmises. But one to know, Koolhaas attacks anything committed to modern architecture, harshly. It is a manifesto of an ingenious minded architect paralyzed with reality ~that’s why AMO exist~. Junkspace is a creature that created by Rem Koolhaas himself, a third milennium over-phobia.

But the world where we live today is proudly Junkspace, we are happily condemned.