Tagged as: AUB, Rem Koolhaas

* (and love Rem.)

Rem Koolhaas speaks in Beirut.

Renowned Dutch archi­tect Rem Koolhaas spoke this evening in Beirut about issues affect­ing not only the con­tem­po­rary archi­tect, but just about any­one who’s ever lived in a build­ing. He lamented the state of the pro­fes­sion and of the mod­ern city, where even “star­chi­tects” are rel­e­gated to design­ing glass sky­scrap­ers divorced from their his­tor­i­cal and social contexts.

Rem showed a slide of one of his designs…

… and had the same effect on his audience.

He sup­ported his cri­tique with graphs and tables that actu­ally mean some­thing (and were not just col­lec­tions of lines, fig­ures, and other half-baked data), argu­ing that even emerg­ing cities like Beijing suf­fer from too much intro­ver­sion (the qual­ity of being pri­vate) and too lit­tle intro­spec­tion (the qual­ity of think­ing). Cities are caught in a dilemma of preser­va­tion (today a 20-year-old build­ing can be qual­i­fied as “her­itage”) and hyper-modernization (he shows a pho­tomon­tage of sky­scrap­ers in the desert land­scape, a car­i­ca­ture that sadly applies to many more cities than imme­di­ately obvious).

In reac­tion, Rem Koolhass and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) designed the China Central Television Headquarters (CCTV) in Beijing by almost lit­er­ally turn­ing the mod­ern sky­scraper on its side. This was a bold move that under­scored his con­tro­ver­sial and much-criticized refusal to be involved in the recon­struc­tion of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the city about which his Delirious New York remains a sem­i­nal man­i­festo more than 30 years after its publication.

Rem is an archi­tect who sounds like any­thing but an archi­tect. Not once dur­ing his two-hour talk did the phrase “bird’s eye view” escape his lips. His approach is one that is piece­meal, that cel­e­brates celebrity not for its own sake but for the influ­ence it can wield on today’s urban­ists and archi­tects to real­ize that the mod­ern city is los­ing its liv­abil­ity, as pub­lic space con­tin­ues to be drawn and quar­tered into smaller and smaller pri­vate parcels.

He denounced the absence of archi­tec­tural man­i­festos from Europe in the last ten years, at a time when the world needs a new archi­tec­tural rev­o­lu­tion the most. He pleaded (as I do) for the return of an archi­tec­ture of sim­plic­ity, one that embraces its sur­round­ing, not turns its back on it in a pre­ten­tious show of bigger-is-better-ism.

“I am a tor­toise, the city my shell — it shel­ters me, and I must bear its weight.”

That’s not Rem Koolhaas, but an overly roman­tic Architecture stu­dent fif­teen years ago. However today with renewed hope, I heard those long-gone words echo in his.