Speaking of Koolhaas, Frank Gehry says, "He's one of the great thinkers of our time"

Saturday 5 July 2008

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

1 comment:

Unknown said...

THIS IS A GREAT PROJECT, GUYS!
I loved your idea of creating a blog and adding to it your SplashCast project plus this wonderful interview of Koolhaas found in YouTuBe.
There are some details in the design of the blog, for example I saw no introduction to the project, What is this blog all about, what class is this? what was the main objective of creating the blog? and in the SpalshCast presentation I missed a conclusion. I think the architectural elements present in the work of this architect were well developed and presented, though. I also noticed some pronunciation problems but not much to really worry about.
Keep up the good work! :)

Rem Koolhaas

Conclusion

Rem Koolhaas is one of the world's most intriguing architects. He is also an acute observer of politics, economics, cities and the way buildings work. How he manages to balance the two is something of a wonder. Here is an architect who could happily sit down one day with God to design refined and purposeful public buildings knitted into the fabric of old cities, and the next with the devil to design the wayward architecture demanded by ultra-capitalism.For all this reason we choose this architect for our final english's project, because we want to show you all excellent projects about Rem Koolhaas, and know him a litter bit more.