GSD's Koolhaas Heads 'Project on the City

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

The Harvard Project on the City is a new initiative at the Graduate School of Design, founded by the internationally known Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who was appointed professor in the practice of architecture and urban design last July.

But the name that Koolhaas initially chose for the project and then discarded -- "The Center for the Study of (what used to be) the City" -- may reveal more about what he has in mind.

"I am convinced that the kind of settlement now being designed and built all around the globe can no longer be called 'city;' it is another condition," Koolhaas wrote in an article in the winter/spring 1996 issue of the GSD News.

Koolhaas, 51, a highly original designer whose work was the subject of a 1994 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, plans to direct a sustained research effort aimed at discovering what this other condition is.

"What this basically means to me is commitment to research as a prelude to design, like two things that are almost bonded or laminated together. Conditions are so incredibly quickly evolving that without continuous cross-reference, architecture becomes an increasingly inappropriate activity," Koolhaas said.

Koolhaas' first research efforts as a GSD faculty member are focused on a part of the world where the growth of this new "condition" is taking place with particular intensity -- the part of southern China known as the Pearl River Delta.

This year Koolhaas taught a studio course that immersed eight second- and third-year students in the economics, politics, social conditions, and architectural and urban design issues of this densely populated area that includes the cities of Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Guangzhou.

These cities are growing at an enormous rate and merging into one giant metropolis, but it is hardly a metropolis in the classical sense of having a coherent overall unity based on relatively homogeneous conditions.

"On the contrary, it is a new type of metropolis that we have called a 'city of exacerbated difference,' whose character is based on the extreme differentiation of its parts," Koolhaas said.

Koolhaas and his student researchers have found that architecture is a very different profession in the context of the Pearl River Delta, hardly comparable to its position in the West. The construction rate in the area is approximately 30 times that of the United States, but is being accomplished with one fiftieth the number of architects, relative to the population.

"So a small number of architects are working very, very fast, and working with minimal education and minimal honoraria, compared with Western standards. We still have the same name for the profession, but in terms of what it does and what it can do, it's a totally different profession," Koolhaas said.

The course included a site visit to the area as well as exhaustive library research in which each student took responsibility for investigating a different aspect of the region. The reports, constituting the eight students' master's theses, will be brought together to form a single volume, which Koolhaas hopes to publish.

As both a theorist and a designer, Koolhaas has more than earned his credentials as an explorer of future urban conditions. His influential book, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, published in 1978 and republished in 1994, took a contrarian view of urban design by celebrating the city's congestion and architectural diversity.

His second book, S, M, L, XL (1995), a five-pound tome containing more than 1,300 pages of words, photographs, and drawings, portrays the activities of Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in a way that emphasizes his conception of architecture as "chaotic adventure." The title refers to the range of sizes in which an architect is required to work.

"An architect has no control over the next project," he said, "so therefore you never know what your next involvement will be, whether it will be with a religion or a prison system or with the World Bank."

As a designer, Koolhaas has forged a worldwide reputation for his original and startling designs. His firm has undertaken projects in Holland, France, and Japan, which have been analyzed and praised by architectural critics around the world.

Koolhaas may be best known for his designs for Lille, France, site of the French entrance to the Channel Tunnel, a complex known as Euralille and financed by the European Community (EC). Koolhaas' chief contribution is the Grand Palais, also known as Congrexpo, a 200,000-square-foot oval convention center comprising a concert hall and three auditoriums. The design won the 1992 Antonio Gaudí Prize.

Koolhaas' designs have won praise from critics for their originality and their effort to organize space in ways that do not depend on earlier styles for inspiration. Koolhaas rejects postmodernism -- a style based on recycling older architectural forms.

"It's my theory that postmodernism has nothing to do with style or aesthetics, but is simply a way of doing architecture in less time with less sophistication. It's very expensive to invent. You need time and therefore you need money."

Instead of an architecture that recycles styles from the past or one that imposes a stylistic hegemony on a variety of cultural contexts, Koolhaas favors an approach that uses research to discover the unique characteristics of each situation and then proceeds with sensitivity and sophistication.

"I don't believe that globalization necessarily implies

homogenization," he said. "If you look carefully, there are vast and enormous differences, and so my own particular fascination is to see globalization not as an assertion of one kind of architectural model, but to see it as an occasion to intervene in different ways and at different levels in a variety of different cultures."