Rem Koolhaas
‘rationalism’s gravedigger’ and ‘pied piper of a team of
global city enthusiasts’ who see architectural history ‘as
man’s self-imposed imprisonment within walls and
skyscrapers
‘"in the twentieth-century metropolis architecture
becomes an instrument whereby people can
redesign themselves.’
Theory of BIGNESS
1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a BIG Building. Such a
mass can no longer be controlled by a singular architectural gesture, or even
by any combination of architectural gestures. The impossibility triggers the
autonomy of its parts, which is different from fragmentation: the parts remain
committed to the whole.
2. The elevator-with its potential to establish mechanical rather than
architectural connections-and its family of related inventions render null and
void the classical repertoire of architecture. Issues of composition, scale,
proportion, detail are now moot. The ‘art’ of architecture is useless in
BIGNESS.
3. In BIGNESS, the distance between core and envelope increases to the
point where the façade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The
humanist expectation of ‘honesty’ is doomed; interior and exterior architectures
become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic and
iconographic needs, the other-agent of dis-information- offering the city the
apparent stability of an object. Where architecture reveals, BIGNESS
perplexes; BIGNESS transforms the city from a summation of certainties into
an accumulation of mysteries. What you see is no longer what you get.
4. Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good
and bad. Their impact is independent of their quality.
5. Together, all these breaks-with scale, with architectural composition, with
tradition, with transparency, with ethics-imply the final, most radical break:
BIGNESS is no longer part of any issue. It’s exists; at most, it coexists. Its
subtext is fuck context
BEIJING CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT , CHINA,
BEIJING, 2003
OMA's CBD Core proposal evolved from the observation that the
tower has made the Central Business District into a structure that is
identical everywhere. At the same time, however, global economic
pressure and extraordinary advances in information technology have
dramatically changed the nature of office work. The increasing
ubiquity and mobility of information technology paradoxically stresses
the importance of face-to-face human interaction so that, at the dawn
of the 21st century, business is communication.
The CBD Core, therefore, has to define a typology
that promotes human interaction and
communication. However, with the understanding
that the Beijing CBD will boast over 300 towers, the
essential question became one of how the CBD
Core could distinguish itself in a forest of towers with
isolated cores that minimized interaction.
The realization: The same amount of urban
substance can be configured in many different ways
from a compact tower to a dispersed network. CBD
Core evolved to become a lowrise network of
dispersed cores and flexible office courtyards
combined with commercial and recreational
activities that not only maximize interaction, but also
offer the opportunity for a CDB with a 24-Hour urban
life. As a compliment to this series of dispersed
horizontal nodes, a dense network of vertical
connections (including offices, apartments, and
hotels) is proposed over one of the peripheral urban
highways. Beijing’s CBD Core ultimately becomes
100% Park 100% Program
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CCTV tower
There is a historical parallel here: the CCTV project in Content is to
China what the Rockefeller Center in Delirious New York was to
Manhattan. The latter was an architectural high point and a symbol of
the greatness of Manhattan culture. There, on a city block, a building
was erected with ‘the simultaneous existence of different programs on
a single site, connected only by the common data of elevators,
service cores, columns and external envelope … the very medium
that denies the need for congestion as condition for desirable human
interaction.’ [Delirious New York
Koolhaas’s intervention in China is CCTV project, a
formalist–functionalist architecture, not phallic but
vaginal, one that contributes both to the modernization of
communist culture and to the definition of architecture
In Koolhaas’s view the proliferation of towers contributes
little of value to contemporary Beijing 北京:
‘In Beijing, you have these needles and they collect their
own little pathetic communities while breaking down the
larger community around them. It’s an incredible
squandering of the potential for exchange. It creates
isolation right in the center of the city.’
The Koolhaas/AMOMA proposal unites architectural and
urbanist theory: ‘I think you can invent new forms that are
about street life. That’s what interests me: to maintain the
specificity of this city.’ How does he want to do this? Not
by relegating modernization in Beijing 北京 to the sprawl of
the periphery, but by dividing the central city into different
zones with different urbanist and architectural turnover
rates so that the city is in a permanent state of
modernization, and every block is a pivot in the urban
culture: ‘The contrast between past and present will
become more relative – “older and newer” will share a
permanent interface. …It also means that new
architecture could appear anywhere, and that new
“building” would be distributed instead of concentrated in
predictable “extensions”.’
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DESIGN STRATEGIES
inspired by Rem Koolhaas.
The “stacking Diagram” , design Strategy:
Rem Koolhaas & OMA Architects Bangkok, Thailand 1996
The Hyperbuilding , A self-contained city for 120,000 inhabitants with
housing, education, culture, welfare, medical facilities, amusement,
industry, retail .
MVRDV Architects Mirador residential building
Sanchinarro Madrid-Spain ( in Collaboration with Blanca Lleo’
Asociados)
2001-2004
Bjarke Ingels group- BIG architects
seoul , korea published 2012
REX architects
Museum Plaza Louisville Kentuky
USA published 2005
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