Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1944. He initially studied at the Dutch Film Academy and later worked as a journalist for Haagse Post before beginning his studies in architecture in 1968 at the Architectural Association in London, from which he graduated in 1972. He then pursued further studies at Cornell University in New York. In 1975, along with architects Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis, and Madelon Vriesendorp, he founded OMA (The Office for Metropolitan Architecture). Some of their most iconic buildings include the Maison à Bordeaux (1998) and Kunsthal (1992). His written works include Delirious New York (1978) – a manifesto for New York and metropolitan culture – and S, M, L, XL (1995, with Bruce Mau) – an iconic collage-style book on architecture. In 2000, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize.
Excerpt from the lecture:
I am happy that, for the first time, I will be giving a lecture in Greece. As you know, my professional life began with a Greek collaborator, Elias Zengelis, so I had a certain level of knowledge about construction and a kind of interest in the issues that concern you. Basically, a lecture like this is always difficult because, on the one hand, you want me to show you one thing in depth, but on the other hand, the expectation is to show many different things. That’s why I chose a mix which I believe currently represents what our previous work has been. Perhaps the topic will surprise you, because the main focus of our work at this stage is political, in the sense that for the last five years, we’ve been trying to find a way to become independent from the market economy. In this image, you can see something we discovered two years ago. If we take the Yen, the Euro, and the Dollar, we form the word YES, and I think that is a powerful symbol of the current conditions in architecture. We are working more and more on a private scale, and we are much less able to define the agenda in our projects. Of course, it is always very interesting to work within this YES regime. Ten or twenty years ago, certain things would not have been possible in terms of the creativity that now exists in the private sector. But of course, this creativity is not for the benefit of the wider public, and if it happens to be, it’s just a coincidence. After ten years of researching the potential offered by this YES regime, I think now we can… I’ll try to get a bit more comfortable,” says the speaker. “So, I think we can now move forward… I believe the biggest step I took was when I began teaching at Harvard, simply because it was a university that allowed me to become a professor under the condition I required: that I would have no involvement in design, and instead take on a mission of research and study of the transformation of urban conditions, as well as the mutation of architecture within the framework of our office. This endeavor allowed us to have a kind of independence from the YES regime, while also enabling us to investigate what the consequences of this regime are. The resources from these investigations led to two books this October and two more next year. The first two books, as you can see, are the Harvard Guide to Shopping, and they deal with the capitalist monster we are facing head-on, and shopping, that is, how the market economy has completely changed our cities, the conditions within our cities, and the very experiences we live in our cities. The second book to be published this year is a study on the acceleration of urbanization and the effects of the market economy within the economic system of China. In other words, it refers to urbanization in China…