Final Project - English for Architects and Urban Planners (ID2126)

Welcome!This blog was created to publish our Final project for the English for Architects and Urban Planers class, at Simon Bolívar university. We have to choose an architect and describe some architectural element of some of him projects. This element studied in class are texture, color, circulation, rhythm, space & scale, acoustics and light.

So, We hope that you like our work about Rem Koolhaas's projects, because this page also was made for you, and i wait that it can serve as an educational source about this excellent architect. Enjoy it!

Circulation

The design for the Seoul National University Museum is driven by the relationship of the campus to the community and serve as a link between them. This linkage is the defining operation behind the project’s morphology. The operation is a slice through the maximum building envelope and establishes a pedestrian connection between the community and the campus.

The hovering mass generated by this slice is modulated by the circulation path and site topography. This mass is a cantilevered structural steel shell bearing on a concrete core.

Circulation through the building is a continuation of the defining slice, internally the path bifurcate and spirals inward. As one enters the building the circulation affords connections to the different programs.

Rhythm

In this building created by Rem Koolhaas we can see that the architect wants desing the facade using the repetition of forms in the windows and where he put them. Also, there are other projects where he used the same technique in differents ways.

Texture and Color

The Casa da Musica is situated on a travertine plaza, between the city's historic quarter and a working-class neighborhood, adjacent to the Rotunda da Boavista.

The principal materials are white concrete, corrugated glass, travertine, plywood, and aluminium.

The main auditorium, shaped like a simple shoebox, is enclosed at both ends by two layers of “corrugated” glass walls. The glass, corrugated for optimal acoustics and sheer beauty, brings diffused daylight into the auditorium.

Acoustic

The auditorium is a fixed rake rectangular box with very long straight rows of seats. The double skin end walls of sinuous corrugated glass provide acoustic enclosure and dramatically distorted views to the outside.

Light

In the McCormick Tribune Campus Center the almost all the light is natural that enter to the building by the diferent types of windows and the opening in the building.

Space & Scale

In the Music House of Rem Koolhaas, the form of the space is maded based in the acoustic of the building, the building has a rectangular box form. this spaces are very big, because the architect wants to give the buiding a big scale to highlight the important of the same.

Career & Work

Koolhaas first studied scriptwriting at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. Koolhaas co-wrote The White Slave, a 1969 Dutch film noir, and later wrote an unproduced script for American soft-porn king Russ Meyer.
He then was a journalist for the Haagse Post before starting studies, in 1968, in architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, followed, in 1972, by further studies at Cornell University in New York.
Koolhaas first came to public and critical attention with OMA (The Office for Metropolitan Architecture), the office he founded in 1975 together with architects Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis and (Koolhaas's wife) Madelon Vriesendorp in London. They were later joined by one of Koolhaas's students, Zaha Hadid - who would soon go on to achieve success in her own right. An early work which would mark their difference from the then dominant postmodern classicism of the late 1970s, was their contribution to the Venice Biennale of 1980, curated by Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, titled "Presence of the Past". Each architect had to design a stage-like "frontage" to a Potemkin-type internal street; and the OMA scheme was the only modernist scheme among them.Other early critically received (yet unbuilt) projects included the Parc de la Villette, Paris (1982) and the residence for the President of Ireland (1981). The first large project by OMA to be built was the Kunsthal in Rotterdam (1992). These schemes would attempt to put into practice many of the findings Koolhaas made in his book Delirious New York (1978), which was written while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, directed by Peter Eisenman

From Filmmaker to Builder

Rem Koolhaas was born on November 17, 1944, in Rotterdam, Netherlands, just four years after the major seaport city was destroyed by German bombing during World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan). His father, Anton, was a well-known Dutch writer and film critic, who, when Koolhaas was eight years old, traveled to Indonesia to serve as the director of a newly formed cultural institute. At the time, Indonesia had just broken ties with the Dutch, who had dominated the region since the seventeenth century. From age eight to twelve Koolhaas and his two younger siblings lived with their father in Jakarta, Indonesia. While there, the young boy developed a fascination with Asia that would continue into adulthood.
"The word 'architecture' embodies the lingering hope—or the vague memory of a hope— that shape, form, coherence could be imposed on the violent surf of information that washes over us daily."
After returning to the Netherlands Koolhaas eventually took up journalism as a career, writing for the Haagse Post. At the same time, he began socializing with film students and even dabbled in film school for a bit. In 1969 Koolhaas co-wrote a script called The White Slave, which was produced by Dutch director Rene Daalder. In interviews Koolhaas calls this early film a commentary on modern Europe using clips from B-movies (low-budget movies). The would-be filmmaker even wrote several screenplays for Hollywood directors, which were never produced.
One day, while speaking about film to a group of architect students at the University of Delft, Koolhaas realized that what he truly wanted to do was build. Actually, the idea was not so farfetched because his maternal grandfather had been an architect, and that particular career option had always been lurking in the back of his mind. So, Koolhaas packed his bags and headed for London, where he studied at the Architecture Association School. He quickly became known for being an unconventional thinker, especially after he published several controversial papers, one of which proposed walling off portions of London and asking citizens to decide on which side of the wall they wanted to live.

Biography

November 17, 1944 • Rotterdam, Netherlands
Architect

Rem Koolhaas is considered by his many followers to be the coolest, hippest, and most cutting-edge architect on the planet. But, like all things cutting-edge, Koolhaas is difficult to classify. Since the late 1970s the Dutch designer has earned acclaim as an author, a theorist, an urban planner, a cultural researcher, and a professor at Harvard. And, of course, he has amassed an array of projects ranging in size from small—The Bordeaux House (1998)—to large—the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, China (begun 2004)—to extra large—the Euralille complex, located in Lille, France (1994). Although his projects are viewed as visionary by most, they are also unusual and frequently constructed using inexpensive, everyday materials. As a result they have been described as inspired, weird, or downright ugly. A prime example of Koolhaas's mixture of beautiful and bizarre is the Seattle Central Library, located in Washington and completed in 2004. Some consider it to be a revolutionary structure that taps into Seattle's urban energy; others call it a blight on the city skyline. Regardless, it is the largest U.S. Koolhaas project to date, and it marks the clear beginning of his American phase. And, despite his critics, there is no doubt that the breakthrough designer is changing the face of contemporary architecture. As U.S. architect Frank Gehry (1929–) told Belinda Luscombe of Time, "I would say he's the most comprehensive thinker in the profession today. He's the hope for the cities."