Rem Koolhaas:
Contemporary Urbanism and Social Architecture Automatic translate

Rem Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, theorist, and urbanist, born on November 17, 1944, in Rotterdam. For five decades, he has remained one of the most provocative figures in the profession: his buildings defy conventional categories, and his writings have changed the very language with which architects speak about the city.

Biography and formation

Koolhaas’s childhood was spent in two cultures. He spent several years in Indonesia, where his father headed a cultural institute. This early encounter with a non-Western city left its mark on how he later viewed Lagos and other megacities of the global south.

Returning to the Netherlands, the future architect worked as a journalist for the weekly Haagse Post in The Hague, a publication that was actively experimenting with new forms of journalism in the late 1960s. It was then that he interviewed the artist Constant, whose utopian project "New Babylon" made a strong impression on him. At the same time, Koolhaas tried his hand at screenwriting, first at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy, then on several independent projects.

He received his architectural training at the Architectural Association in London, graduating in 1972. This was followed by a Harkness Fellowship, which enabled him to undertake a research period in the United States – at Cornell University with Oswald Mathias Ungers and at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in New York under Peter Eisenman.

Thesis project and the birth of ideas

In 1972, even before receiving his diploma, Koolhaas, along with Elias Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, presented a thesis entitled "Exodus, or Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture." The project proposed an alternative scenario for the contemporary metropolis: an enclosed area in central London, cutting through the existing urban fabric and offering residents a fundamentally different social environment.

It was a manifesto in storyboard form — a visual narrative that depicted architecture not as a service for urban development, but as a tool for creating social conditions. The work became the catalyst for the founding of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and, in a sense, anticipated all of Koolhaas’s subsequent themes: enclosure, control, and voluntary submission to the city.

"Mad New York" and the concept of Manhattanism

In 1975, Koolhaas, along with Elias and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Friesendorp, founded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) in London. Three years later, the book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan was published, bringing him fame in the architectural world even before he had completed any actual buildings.

The book describes the development of New York City from its "prehistory" to the mid-20th century as a continuous experiment with modernity. Koolhaas introduces the concept of "Manhattanism" — a theory about how the island developed a unique model of urban existence, where density, chaos, and commercial pressure give rise to architectural forms unforeseen by any theorist.

Congestion as a resource

The central idea of "Mad New York" is the "culture of congestion." Koolhaas views urban congestion not as a dysfunction, but as a source of energy and unexpected social connections. For him, Manhattan is a laboratory, where each block, each skyscraper, operates by its own rules, without any coordination with its neighbors. This is the city’s lifeblood.

It was this idea that clashed with the dominant urban planning discourse of the time — with its emphasis on zoning, control, and "ordering" the urban environment. Koolhaas proposed a different framework: disorder is not a problem to be solved, but a condition to be understood.

The Big Theory

In 1994, Koolhaas published the essay "Bigness, or the Problem of Bigness," in which he formulated another concept, subsequently cited in all textbooks on architectural theory. The gist is simple: when a building reaches a certain scale, it ceases to be simply architecture. It begins to compete with the city, replace it, and sometimes even become it.

“The ‘big’ does not need the city: it competes with it, represents it, displaces it, or is itself the city,” wrote Koolhaas.

This idea wasn’t just a provocation. It was based on an observation: in the era of globalization, more and more programs (retail, housing, offices, entertainment, transportation) were being concentrated within a single structure. Such mega-objects no longer succumb to the usual architectural logic of façade, context, or scale. They require new thinking tools.

S, M, L, XL

In 1995, Koolhaas’s collaboration with designer Bruce Moe , S, M, L, XL , was published. According to the author, he conceived it as an "architectural novel" — a series of fragments that change character every few pages, simultaneously subverting and reinforcing notions of architecture. The book contained OMA projects of varying scales, theoretical essays, personal diary entries, statistics, and anecdotes. It was approximately 1,400 pages long.

Koolhaas described it as a kind of critique of his own office, written at a time of financial difficulties and a near-existential crisis in his practice. Nevertheless, the book became one of the most widely circulated architectural publications of recent decades.

"Generic City" concept

The same publication, S, M, L, XL, published an essay, “Generic City,” in which Koolhaas addressed a phenomenon that most critics either ignored or condemned: the faceless, standardized city, devoid of a historical center and character.

"Generic City" is literally a city without history, created on a flat surface. It embodies urban sprawl, repetition, and shopping malls as substitutes for public space. But Koolhaas doesn’t condemn it: he describes it as an honest response to the pressures of globalization. An identity based on a historic center inevitably becomes diluted and loses its power as the city expands.

This essay sparked heated debate. Critics accused Koolhaas of apologising for spiritual emptiness. He responded that description is not approval, and an architect has no right to ignore reality simply because it is ugly.

OMA: Practice and Projects

Netherlands Dance Theatre

OMA’s first major project, which brought widespread recognition, was the Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague, completed in 1987. The building consists of three functional zones: a stage with an auditorium, a rehearsal studio, and an administrative and technical block. The theater’s composition broke with the traditional symmetry of cultural buildings, demonstrating that programmatic complexity could become a principle of form-making.

Kunsthal Rotterdam

The Kunsthal, built in Rotterdam in 1992, is a typical example of what Koolhaas calls "cross-programming": the combination of functions typically housed in separate buildings. The building does not house a permanent collection; it is designed exclusively for temporary exhibitions. Its design allows for a continuous route through all levels, deliberately blurring the boundaries between street, lobby, and exhibition hall.

Euralille

OMA’s first large-scale urban development project was the masterplan for Euralille, a new urban district in Lille in northern France. OMA won the commission in 1988, beating out a competition from Vittorio Gregotti, Norman Foster, and Ungers.

The program spanned 120 hectares and envisioned approximately 800,000 square meters of development, including a shopping mall, offices, housing, a convention center, hotels, and a new TGV station. In terms of scale, it was OMA’s largest completed urban development project at the time. Koolhaas later admitted that the only reason the team wasn’t paralyzed by fear was their disbelief that it would actually be built.

Euralille revealed Koolhaas’s fundamental approach to urban design: no "healing" of the old urban fabric, no return to historical patterns. The new quarter exists as a distinct entity alongside medieval Lille, without pretending to be its continuation.

Villa Dall’Ava

Among OMA’s early buildings is the Villa Dall’Ava in Paris (1984–1991), commissioned, according to Koolhaas, as follows: the client wanted glass, his wife wanted a rooftop pool. The project became a "chronicle of the office’s maturation": numerous delays and revisions turned the building into a living document of how OMA learned to work with complex clients and regulatory constraints.

De Rotterdam

The De Rotterdam complex, completed in 2013, consists of three towers united into a single structure. The building was conceived as a "vertical city," housing offices, a hotel, restaurants, shops, and residential units. Koolhaas deliberately designed it so that the view changes depending on the vantage point — as one passes by on a highway bridge, the towers sometimes merge into a single monolith, sometimes diverge into separate volumes. This technique reflects his interest in architecture as something fundamentally non-static.

House in Bordeaux

The Bordeaux house (1998) is often cited as one of OMA’s most thoughtful responses to a specific social situation. The client, following a car accident, was confined to a wheelchair. Instead of adapting a standard house for a person with disabilities, Koolhaas designed a home whose main space was a moving elevator platform measuring approximately 3 by 3.5 meters. This platform also served as the owner’s office, connecting all three levels of the house.

The solution fundamentally changed the traditional hierarchy: not corridors and staircases, but mechanical movement became the building’s structural principle. The house didn’t adapt to the constraints — it was built around them.

Seattle Public Library

The Seattle Central Library (1999–2004) is one of OMA’s most studied public architecture projects. Koolhaas approached the project in an unconventional way: instead of designing a "beautiful building for books," he posed the question of what a library even is in the age of digital media.

The building’s program was divided into clearly defined "platforms" — stable areas for book storage, reading, administrative functions, and meetings. Between them were flexible interstitial spaces. The outer shell — a mesh steel façade enveloping the entire volume — records the activity within, without disguising the shifts and inclinations of the individual levels.

The building sparked controversy in the professional community: some admired its functional logic, while others criticized it for its "conceptual intellectualism" divorced from the everyday experience of its readers. Nevertheless, the library became one of the most visited public buildings in Seattle.

Casa da Musica in Porto

The Casa da Música concert hall in Porto (1999–2005) owes its origins to an unrealized project — a single-family home. When that commission was cancelled, Koolhaas redesigned the space for a completely different program, retaining a principle unusual for a concert hall: large, undulating glass walls behind and in front of the orchestra provide views of the surrounding city during performances.

This solution is more than just a dramatic gesture. It breaks the traditional sealed-off concept of the concert hall as a "temple of music" and situates the performance within the urban context. The audience sees the street, and from the street, the orchestra. The boundary between the cultural institution and the urban space is reduced to glass.

CCTV headquarters in Beijing

The China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing (2004–2008) is a building that has become a symbol of the new China in international architectural discourse. Its form — a closed loop of two leaning towers connected by a horizontal cantilever — defies all conventional notions of the skyline and how a skyscraper functions.

The traditional skyscraper is vertical. It’s a metaphor for growth, strength, and individuality. The CCTV loop offers a different metaphor: a closed cycle, a collective process. All television production functions — from studios to editorial offices and administrative services — are integrated into the continuous movement of the loop.

The project sparked heated debates beyond its formal aspects. Working with a state-owned media operator in an authoritarian state raised questions for Koolhaas — and the profession as a whole — about the ethics of large-scale architectural commissions. The architect himself typically shied away from direct political responses, insisting that architecture could not serve as a satisfactory instrument of political critique.

City Project: Lagos as a Mirror

In the 1990s, while working as a professor of architecture and urban design at Harvard, Koolhaas launched a large-scale study called the Harvard Project on the City. Its goal was to document and understand new forms of accelerated urbanization that defied traditional categories of urban planning.

Lagos occupied a special place in this study. For several years, Koolhaas and his students regularly visited the Nigerian metropolis, studying its street markets, transportation hubs, informal neighborhoods, and self-organization systems.

An urban organism without a plan

Koolhaas’s central conclusion about Lagos was provocative: "Anxiety about the inconsistency of traditional urban systems obscures the reasons for the relentless, vibrant existence of Lagos and other megacities. These inconsistencies have given rise to inventive, critically important alternative systems."

In other words, Lagos isn’t a failed Western city. It’s a different kind of urban organization, one in which residents turn every perceived disadvantage into an advantage. Markets spring up right at intersections. Transportation systems operate without timetables. Spontaneous employment patterns permeate every neighborhood.

This position has drawn significant criticism. A number of scholars have pointed out that by stripping Lagos of its colonial history and political context, Koolhaas is transforming a real city with real social suffering into an abstract "laboratory" for Western theoretical experiments. This tension between analytical insight and ethical responsibility has become a recurring theme in his work.

The results of the study were included in the book Mutations (2000), published by Arc en rêve centre d’architecture in Bordeaux.

Social program in architecture

When discussing the social aspects of Koolhaas’s work, it’s important to avoid oversimplifications. He is not a "social architect" in the traditional sense — not someone who designs housing for the poor or speaks at rallies for citizens’ rights. His interest in the social is analytical: he studies how space produces behavior and how behavior produces space.

One of the key observations running through all of his theoretical texts is that architecture is not neutral. Every design decision — about the entrance, the corridor, the ceiling height, the relationship between public and private — predetermines social interactions. This observation dates back to his early student work and remains a recurring theme in OMA’s projects.

Program as a social text

In Koolhaas’s lexicon, the concept of "program" signifies more than a list of rooms and their areas. A program is a scenario for human interaction, ingrained into a building at the design stage. "Cross-programming" signifies the intentional blending of functions that are usually separated: a library with a coffee shop, uninterrupted by a barrier; an office flowing into a public atrium; a concert hall open to the street.

This technique isn’t decorative. It reflects the belief that rigid functional zoning — whether Soviet or Western — kills the chance encounters and spontaneous use of space that create urban life.

Elements of Architecture and the 2014 Venice Biennale

In 2014, Koolhaas curated the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, titled "Fundamentals." The main exhibition in the Central Pavilion, "Elements of Architecture," was radically different from all previous biennales.

Instead of inviting architects to present current projects, Koolhaas transformed the exhibition into a two-year historical research project. Each fundamental building element — floor, wall, ceiling, roof, door, window, façade, balcony, hallway, fireplace, toilet, staircase, escalator, elevator, and ramp — was given its own room-like space. The exhibition spanned the century-long history of each element on a global scale.

Koolhaas’s conceptual statement was this: contemporary architecture has become so obsessed with signature forms, branding, and imagery that it has lost control over even the most basic building components. In one room, he displayed a typical suspended ceiling from an office building, cut away to reveal the depth of the utility lines hidden above — "a space so deep that it begins to compete with the architecture," and "an area over which architects have completely lost control."

The Biennale had a huge impact: some perceived it as an act of self-criticism of the profession, others as too academic and dry.

Theoretical heritage and criticism

Over five decades of active work, Koolhaas has amassed a body of criticism as extensive as his admirers. The critics’ arguments typically boil down to a few lines.

First, his theoretical concepts are brilliant on paper, but in the completed buildings they often give way to expensive extravagance that doesn’t justify their cost. Second, his work with structures like CCTV or large-scale development projects in the monarchical states of the Persian Gulf calls into question the declared values of the city as a space for citizens. Third, his interpretations of non-Western cities — Lagos in particular — often reproduce a colonial lens, turning living communities into material for theoretical constructs.

Koolhaas himself never presented himself as a moral authority. In interviews, he tends toward pragmatism bordering on cynicism. He believes that an architect works with forces he doesn’t choose: capital, the state, technology, and demographics. The challenge isn’t to escape these forces, but to find space within them for something that would be impossible without architectural thinking.

Impact on the profession

Despite the controversy, his influence on generations of architects is difficult to dispute. Concepts such as congestion, cross-programming, "Big," and "Generic City" have become part of the professional vocabulary — applied, contested, revisited, but never ignored. In 2000, he received the Pritzker Prize, the most significant international award in architecture. In 2004, he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and in 2010, the Golden Lion for his contribution to architecture at the Venice Biennale.

OMA is now an international practice with completed projects in Europe, Asia, North America and Africa, including the recently completed Aviva Studios in Manchester (2023) and Simon Veil Bridge in Bordeaux (2024).

Architecture as a way of thinking

The further you move away from Koolhaas’s individual buildings, the more obvious it becomes that his work is, first and foremost, a way of thinking about the city. Not a recipe or an ideology, but a methodology for observing and asking questions.

He studies shopping as a form of social behavior. He examines the corridor as a political structure — who uses it, where it leads, and whom it divides. He analyzes how shopping center lobbies reproduce the logic of public space, despite being legally private property.

This perspective stems from his journalistic background — a habit of noticing details that professionals take for granted. And it also makes Koolhaas an awkward interlocutor for those who want simple answers from an architect: what should be built, what a good city should look like, what constitutes a mistake.

Writing as a practice

Koolhaas’s texts are not a commentary on his architecture. They are a distinct practice, existing alongside his buildings. "Mad New York," S, M, L, XL, "Generic City," "Bolshoi," "Elements of Architecture" — each of these texts defines its own frame of reference within which his buildings acquire meaning, but are not exhausted by it.

It’s no coincidence that his father was a novelist and critic, and his maternal grandfather was the modernist architect Dirk Rosenburg. Koolhaas inherited both traditions and never considered them incompatible. Building as text, city as narrative — for him, these metaphors operate not figuratively, but methodologically.

Urbanism without illusions

If there’s a common thread in Koolhaas’s work, it’s a rejection of the utopian impulse that has long fueled the architectural profession. He doesn’t propose a "new urbanism" that will correct everything that’s gone wrong. In 1994, he wrote bluntly: "If there is to be a ’new urbanism,’ it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence."

According to Koolhaas, globalization produces homogeneity not because architects do a poor job, but because that’s the logic of the system itself. Generic City doesn’t emerge from someone’s malicious intent — it emerges from the collective rational decisions of thousands of developers, investors, and municipal officials. An architect’s leverage within this process is limited — and Koolhaas’s honesty lies in not pretending that these leverages are unlimited.

This makes him an inconvenience for political movements that seek to enlist architecture as an ally — whether environmental activism, the protection of historic environments, or the fight for affordable housing. He doesn’t reject these goals, but he also doesn’t promise that architecture will achieve them. Whether such a position is a sign of sobriety or an evasion of responsibility depends on who’s asking the question.