Rem Koolhaas
Author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
About the Author
Rem Koolhaas is principal of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, and the author of Delirious New York and S,M,L,XL. He is the recipient of the 2000 Pritzker Prize. (Bowker Author Biography)
Image credit: Roberto Santoroni (2005)
Series
Works by Rem Koolhaas
The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping / Harvard Design School Project on the City 2 (2001) — Editor — 162 copies, 1 review
Rem Koolhaas & Hans-Ulrich Obrist: The Conversation Series: Volume 4 (Conversation (Verlag Der Buchhandlung)) (Pt. 4) (2006) 32 copies
Fundamentals: 14th International Architecture Exhibition-- La Biennale di Venezia (2014) 15 copies, 1 review
Singapore songlines. Ritratto di una metropoli Potemkin... O trent'anni di tabula rasa (2010) 6 copies
Atlanta 3 copies
Casa da Musica / Porto 2 copies
Al Manakh 1 copy
Lagos, wide & close an interactive journey into an exploding city ; [based on research by the Harvard Project on the… (2005) 1 copy
Six Projets 1 copy
Associated Works
Architectural Theory: From the Renaissance to the Present (2003) — Contributor — 287 copies, 2 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Koolhaas, Rem
- Legal name
- Koolhaas, Remmert Lucas
- Birthdate
- 1944-11-17
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Netherlands
- Birthplace
- Rotterdam, Netherlands
- Places of residence
- Rotterdam, Netherlands
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Jakarta, Indonesia - Education
- Netherlands Film and Television Academy
Architectural Association School of Architecture
Cornell University
Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies - Occupations
- architect
architectural theorist
urbanist - Relationships
- Koolhaas, Anton (father)
- Organizations
- Harvard University
- Awards and honors
- Pritzker Prize (2000)
Chevallier de Légion d'honneur (2001)
Praemium Imperiale (2003)
Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal (2004)
Honorary Doctorate (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven ∙ 2007)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary ∙ Art ∙ 2000) (show all 10)
Leone d'oro alla carriera (2010)
Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (1999)
Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture for lifetime achievement (2010)
Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2018)
Members
Reviews
Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for… by Rem Koolhaas
Koolhaas's immensely influential "Retroactive Manifesto" for Manhattan architecture. The dust jacket image derives from a painting by Madelon Vriesendorp, Koolhaas's wife. In it the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, their forms softened like a pair of Dalí watches, lie together in bed in apparent post-coital exhaustion while Rockerfeller Center, playing the jealous husband in this surreal architectural drama, emerges from a doorway at stage left and shines his spotlight onto the guilty pair.… (more)
I remember reading 'The Generic City' by Rem Koolhaas (pdf) when I was a masters student and greatly enjoying it. His analysis is entertainingly idiosyncratic and yet curiously illuminating. His selective account of New York’s architectural history is likewise fragmentary yet instructive. It contains a wealth of strange anecdotes, a forest of illustrations, and several underlying theses about the nature of New York City. Inevitably, the most memorable elements are weird details, such as Gaudi’s never-built skyscraper (pictured here), everything about Dreamland on Coney Island (which deserves the many pages Koolhaas devotes to it), the 1931 costume ball at which architects dressed as the skyscrapers they designed, and Dali’s arrival in NYC:
Theoretical points are raised in a similar, vaguely impressionistic fashion. The concept of ‘reality shortage’ was particularly intriguing, as were the culture of congestion and the analogy between hotels and movies. Much like Lefebvre in [b:Writings on Cities|1010140|Writings on Cities|Henri Lefebvre|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347635147s/1010140.jpg|996264], Koolhaas is no great fan of Le Corbusier, although he discusses his views on New York in some detail. This description is both acute and comical:
The most alarming unrealised proposal in the whole book, though, is Harvey Wiley Corbett’s vision of traffic planning. He thought not only that pedestrians should be relegated to first floor walkways to leave the entire street for cars, but that the front of buildings should be cut into for additional parking and traffic lanes, culminating in twenty lane streets. Can you imagine if this dystopian scheme had materialised.
'delirious new york' is by no means a systematic or full history of its architecture and planning, nor is it meant to be. Koolhaas provides detailed insight into the antecedents of iconic buildings such as the Rockefeller Centre and a real sense of the spirit of the city in the first three decades of the twentieth century, in his inimitable style.… (more)
For shock effect on arrival, Dali decides to realise - retroactively - a Surrealist project originally intended to upset Paris, the baking of ‘a fifteen metre loaf of bread’.
The baker on board ship offers to bake a version 2.5 metres long (the maximum capacity of the ship’s oven) with ‘a wood armature inside it so that it would not break into two the moment it began to dry…’ But when Dali disembarks an ‘utterly disconcerting thing’ happens: “Not one of the reporters [of a waiting group] asked me a single question about the loaf of bread which I held conspicuously during the whole interview either in my arm or resting on the ground as if it was a large cane…”
The disconcerter disconcerted: Dali’s first discovery is that in Manhattan Surrealism is invisible. His Reinforced Dough is just another false act among the multitudes.
Theoretical points are raised in a similar, vaguely impressionistic fashion. The concept of ‘reality shortage’ was particularly intriguing, as were the culture of congestion and the analogy between hotels and movies. Much like Lefebvre in [b:Writings on Cities|1010140|Writings on Cities|Henri Lefebvre|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347635147s/1010140.jpg|996264], Koolhaas is no great fan of Le Corbusier, although he discusses his views on New York in some detail. This description is both acute and comical:
The Parisian authorities do not take the Radiant proposal seriously. Their rejection forces Le Corbusier to become a Cartesian carpetbagger, peddling his horizontal glass Skyscraper like a furious prince dragging a colossal glass slipper on an Odyssey from Metropolis to Metropolis.
The most alarming unrealised proposal in the whole book, though, is Harvey Wiley Corbett’s vision of traffic planning. He thought not only that pedestrians should be relegated to first floor walkways to leave the entire street for cars, but that the front of buildings should be cut into for additional parking and traffic lanes, culminating in twenty lane streets. Can you imagine if this dystopian scheme had materialised.
'delirious new york' is by no means a systematic or full history of its architecture and planning, nor is it meant to be. Koolhaas provides detailed insight into the antecedents of iconic buildings such as the Rockefeller Centre and a real sense of the spirit of the city in the first three decades of the twentieth century, in his inimitable style.… (more)
This is a non-fiction book focusing on the history of New York's architecture, explaining how this city architectually exploded into what it is now. It's from the 70's so it's not exactly up to date, and the writing style lives up to it's "delirious" title sometimes.
Not every chapter is captivating, but altogether it's a very interesting history lesson on New York. I was especially surprised by the rich history of Coney Island, considering the sad (but somehow beautiful) little beach it is nowadays.… (more)
Not every chapter is captivating, but altogether it's a very interesting history lesson on New York. I was especially surprised by the rich history of Coney Island, considering the sad (but somehow beautiful) little beach it is nowadays.… (more)
(This installment in the "Elements of Architecture" series is discussed in my review of "The Ecologies of the Building Envelope," Alejandro Zaera-Polo's repackaging of the same:
https://archidose.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-ecologies-of-building-envelope.html
https://archidose.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-ecologies-of-building-envelope.html
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- Rating
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