Here's the dirt on Koolhaas from the Perspecta 32 (2001) interview with George Baird, "OMA, 'Neo-Modern,' and Modernity"*. Apparently Baird has been tracking OMA (and Koolhaas) since the 1970s and has compiled a sizable dossier on the problem man-child of architecture.
One problem cited by Baird is Koolhaas' appropriation in the 1970s of Mies van der Rohe when the latter's reputation was at an all-time low (nadir). Koolhaas' quotational strategies involved, then, resuscitating some of the discredited operations of the Mies machine. This means Koolhaas, through OMA, was looking for the most trenchant material available to assault the sensibilities of the decade. He effectively sought (and helped achieve) a revival of mid-century modernist aesthetics while surrounded by neo-rationalist and post-modernist agitation. Koolhaas developed a 'Manhattanism' that was calculated to offend as many of the revisionist schools of the 1970s as possible. This was his own contribution to revisionism. This neo-modernism was not ideological but polemical and aesthetic. Why not embrace corporate modernism while everyone else is agitating for this and that avant-garde or rear-guard idiom, including the reactionary Gray movement fomented by Robert Stern? (Please note: Perspecta is undoubtedly now edited and controlled by Robert A. M. Stern, as Dean at the Yale School of Architecture. You may draw your own conclusions.)OMA was playing at contrariness to provoke a more provocative schism that later fueled the bonfire of architectural vanities in the 1980s. The canonical wars of this decade gave Koolhaas the chance to decamp to the Decon school and hide out till it was safe to re-emerge as the Miesian argonaut. Koolhaas' own revisionism was a necessary anodyne to the architectural doldrums of the time of his own emergence as an architect (post-AA). The suspect revisionisms of this time were merely countered by a more aggressive neo-modernist revisionism. Baird refers to the period as a "series of [unattractive] revisionisms"; i.e., one after another till the stomach turned. Koolhaas, interestingly, found neo-Brutalism to be the most nauseating of these resurfacings.
The editors of Perspecta later bait Baird by suggesting Koolhaas was indulging a proto-punk attitude problem. This is an excellent way out for OMA and Perspecta, giving the entire neo-modernist putsch an ironic edge that calls into question or makes relative any real commitment to the suspect values of mid-century modernism. This opt-out is the perfect foil to deflect criticism of OMA urbanism (a criticism which is highly warranted), which, like its predecessor, is essentially devoid or antagonistic toward social and cultural contingencies. The 'corporate' view embedded in mid-century modernism effectively adopted the avant-garde spirit of the modern movement and jettisoned anything that smacked of a social agenda. The utopian element was tossed, as was the anti-capitalistic élan of much of the early radical forms of modern architecture. Perhaps Mies was the best role model for Koolhaas after all.
Baird points to modernist stylistics -- pilotis, brises soleils, ramps, spirals, strip windows, etcetera -- to locate the Koolhaas appropriation in specific gestures. Baird also notes, in passing, Koolhaas' "ideological promiscuity" by pointing to various projects (please see the article for specifics) that early on showed a calculated effort on his part to be an architectural nuisance. Koolhaas' later adoption by the Deconstructivists (Baird says he was drafted versus enlisted) suggests that he has always played his cards close to his chest vis-à-vis ideology and critical, avant-garde polemics. Baird claims that Koolhaas' subversion was an anti-academic one and chief among the signs of this anima is his heavy hero-worship of Wallace K. Harrison and Morris Lapidus, plus Robert Moses. Koolhaas may be said to be a Nietzschean architect, not in the Ayn Rand mode however. He seems to be seeking a point of purchase beyond the grind of the academic-professional wheel (a point that is demonstrably outside the rank disorders of rote architectural warfare). The theory-praxis dialectic does not seem to be of much interest to his protean, pseudo-punk mindset.Finally, Baird repeats the now apocryphal tale of Koolhaas' outburst at the 1994 ANY (Architecture New York) conference in Montreal: "Why is the only respectable position a critical one?" This would seem to confirm, elicited by a fit of pique, that OMA and Koolhaas do not believe that ideology has a significant role to play in architecture; or, that OMA and Koolhaas are somehow, somewhere above and beyond, looking askance, at the redundancy of architectural debates -- i.e., the reification of the same dead issues -- and as bemused avenging angel, Rem has something else altogether in mind.
We would love to know what it is ...
The Editors (2002)
*Perspecta 32 (2001), pp. 28-36
Perspecta - The Yale Architecture Journal is published by the Yale School of Architecture and distributed by MIT Press (see link below). ISBN 0-262-52309-4, ISSN 0079-0958. Issue 32, called "Resurfacing Modernism", was edited by Annmarie Brennan and Brendan D. Moran, associate editor Nate Goodenow, and dovetails nicely with the recent "Saving Corporate Modernism" symposium held at Yale.
PLEASE NOTE: Kenneth Frampton's take on Koolhaas is very similar to Baird's. See the October 106 (Autumn 2003) interview with Frampton by Stan Allen and Hal Foster. For details and a link to the PDF, cliquez ici.
MIT Press
George Baird CV
Rem Koolhaas CV
