Böck Ingrid - Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas has been part of the international avant-garde since the nineteen-seventies and has been named the Pritzker Architecture Prize for the year 2000. This book, which builds on six canonical projects, traces the discursive practice behind the design methods used by Koolhaas and his office OMA. It uncovers recurring key themessuch as wall, void, montage, trajectory, infrastructure, and shapethat have structured this design discourse over the span of Koolhaass oeuvre. The book moves beyond the six core pieces, as well: It explores how these identified thematic design principles manifest in other works by Koolhaas as both practical reapplications and further elaborations.

In addition to Koolhaass individual genius, these textual and material layers are accounted for shaping the very context of his works relevance. By comparing the design principles with relevant concepts from the architectural Zeitgeist in which OMA has operated, the study moves beyond its specific subjectRem Koolhaasand provides novel insight into the broader history of architectural ideas.

Ingrid Bck is a researcher at the Institute of Architectural Theory, Art History and Cultural Studies at the Graz University of Technology, Austria.

Despite the prominence and notoriety of Rem Koolhaas there is not a single piece of scholarly writing coming close to the length, to the intensity, or to the methodological rigor found in the manuscript by Ingrid Bck

Ole W. Fischer, University of Utah, Salt Lake City

an innovative and comprehensive analysis of all existing interpretative frameworks of the work of Rem Koolhaas. Albena Yaneva, University of Manchester

an excellent exploration that could pave the way for an advanced study of recent architectural history Carsten Ruhl, Goethe-Universitt Frankfurt am Main

Published with the generous support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): PUB 258-V26

Essays on the History of Ideas

Ingrid Bck

architektur + analyse 5

I would like to thank Kari Jormakka for his guidance throughout the research and writing process and for his encouragement to dive headlong into the ceaseless stream of publications on Rem Koolhaas and OMA. I kindly thank Anselm Wagner for his insights into the research question and for writing the second review as well as for his critical support and enthusiasm for my study. This research would not have been possible without enlightening conversations with Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, K. Michael Hays, M. Christine Boyer, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Frances Hsu, Michael Speaks, Drte Kuhlmann, and Albena Yaneva. Finally, the Institute of Architectural Theory, Art History and Cultural Studies, and the Faculty of Architecture at the Graz University of Technology at large have always provided a stimulating environment for my research projects.

With Kari Jormakkas unexpected death at the age of fifty-three, the scholarly community had to endure the great loss of a world-class theorist and extraordinary human being. Those of us fortunate enough to have worked with him will always remember his profound sense of academic rigor and clarity, his enthusiasm, and his unique leadership skills.

Who is speaking thus?, asks Roland Barthes. The answer offered by Michel Foucault is another question, one that originates in Samuel Becketts Texts for Nothing: What does it matter who is speaking? Whereas Barthes suggests that, in the end, there is nobody speaking since the author disappears in the text, for Foucault the original question does matter, because in his opinion, the significance of the work depends largely on who actually is speaking.

The idea of the author is connected to the moment of individualization in the history of knowledge, when the authenticity of the relationship between a work and its originary figure first started to be valorized. As myths compensate for the death of the Greek hero by providing him with immortality, it now seems that the text has the right to murder the author, to cancel out his individual being and to confirm his absence in order to reach textual immortality. His name surpasses being a reference and becomes a description and designation, so that any change matters in its function within the discourse.

Foucault argues that the methods of modern criticism for proving a works value for canonization and identifying a rightful author are still similar to the four principles proposed by the Church Father St. Jerome: first, any inferior work should be withdrawn from the record in order to save the stable value of the work; second, texts contradictory to the conceptual unity of other works have to be excluded; third, texts differing in stylistic consistency should be removed; fourth, to preserve historic unity, anything that describe events after the death of the author also must be rejected. The ideological function of the author figure is therefore to determine, limit, and constrict the signification of a certain workinstead of to produce meaning infinitely. This function creates constraints for a discourse that is indifferent to who is speaking, for the real questions are what are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? [And, after all,] what difference does it make who is speaking?

Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in short OMA, represent not only the architectural avant-garde as one of the most influential, honored, published, and copied architects today, Koolhaas is also one of the most controversially discussed and criticized figuresnot only for his work in the Middle East, China, and Russia. On the occasion of the Pritzker Prize presented to Koolhaas in 2000 in Jerusalem, he was characterized as a combination of

In historiography Koolhaass work tends to be either assigned to structuralist or postmodern theory and design practice, aligned with constructivist and surrealist sensibilities, or he is presented, in the traditional manner of architectural hagiography, as an original genius without identifiable discursive connections. In addition, the cumulative character of the work creates a web of various lineages, multiplied associations, and points of reference, as he employs a series of techniques to address the irrational side of modern architecture beyond its common notions of Sachlichkeit, rational structures, and functionalism. However, Koolhaass architectural practice tackles the challenging question of whether a unifying characteristic, style, and strategyor what Foucault calls the author functioncan be identified. Hence the basic inquiries of this research study are as follows: How can we identify conceptual ideas that recur as constant themes over an extended period of time? How can we conceptualize changes and adaptations within those motifs? What is then the function of the architect himself in the discourse and of his claim of reference and originality?

If architectural theorists agree on anything about Koolhaas, it is that his work and thinking are a tangle of contradictions or, at least, paradoxes. One group of theoristsCharles Jencks, Herbert Muschamp, Philip Johnson, Mark Wigley, and Liane Lefaivre (among others)deal with this agglomeration of contradictions by furthering postmodern readings of Koolhaass work. For Jencks, Koolhaas adopts a curious position between (and at the extreme ends of) strategies of differentiation, radical eclecticism, and collage, on the one hand, and the pressures for standardization and generic structures, on the other hand.