Even architecture is not immune to the compelling momentum created by our information-age society. This postindustrial mood is expressed in the designs of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.
Koolhaas has always had different ways of engaging the modern than his colleagues -- most of whom (he feels) attempt to recover and renovate the historical rather then engage the new. "I was a student at the end of the '60s, the end of a period of an innocent way of looking at architecture in general. There was especially an optimism that architecture could participate in the liberation of mankind. I was skeptical about this, and instead of going to Mediterranean villas or Greek fishing villages to 'learn' (as most people did at that time), I decided to simply look at the Berlin Wall as Architecture, to document and interpret it, to see what the real power of architecture was."
His aesthetic is informed by his idea of the metropolis as a self-generating system of signs and symbols. Most European architects have concentrated too much on the historical centers of the continent and neglected the rapidly transforming formal elements of modern architecture, such as scale, population sizes and needs, technology, and programs.
Koolhaas' structures, including the addition to the Netherlands parliament, and the City Hall for the Hague are "polemical demonstrations" showing that "aspects of Modernism -- both American and European -- can be made to co-exist with the historical core, and that only a new urbanism that abandons pretensions of harmony and overall coherence can turn the tensions and contradictions -- that tear the historical city apart -- into a new quality. The projects celebrate the end of sentimentality."
In the mid-1980s, Koolhaas began, with the Parc de la Villette, to design buildings with transparent frameworks made up of pieces that appear to be suspended on nothing but air. Like structures from the alternate reality of William Gibson's cyberspace, these works seem to defy gravity, stress, and mass. Koolhaas takes things even further away from the realm of the concrete in his designs for buildings that double as movie theaters.
Fascinated by cinema (he used to write film scripts), which he sees as a fundamental aspect of modern culture, Koolhaas incorporates cinematic tropes into his buildings with metaphorical frames, clips, and screens -- sometimes even designing his facades to act as screens for projections of electronic information. Just as computers think but lack minds, Koolhaas' buildings seem to speak without voice.
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