Rem Koolhaas

REM KOOLHAAS MÁS QUE UN ARQUITECTO
DOCUMENTACIÓN / ENGLISH TEXT: HEROES
HEROES
TEXT BY EDUARDO ARROYO-NO.MAD
“No details! Edu”
Rem Koolhaas
In 1989 I escaped to Amsterdam, madly in love with one of those women who occasionally descend from
the heavens and turn us into better men. Very close by, an unknown Dutchman who was experiencing his
own particular hell shared with me the secrets of his fascinating world. I am still grateful to both of them.
Since then, I have spent a long time thinking about the moment when we began to believe in fate, joining
up a whole series of apparently unconnected and casual events that give an overwhelming consistency to
our lives when we remember them across the distance of time. It may well appear banally personal to the
conscientious, academic reader that twenty years later I am spending my time writing this account of the effort
and implacable randomness involved in the instruction of a young architect striving for freedom of thought
with which to confront our obedient society. And if I had to point out to the new generation what remains from
that distant period of my relationship with Rem Koolhaas, it would be exactly this: the sustained struggle for
independence. (Fig. 1)
On my arrival at Schiphol at the end of February of that year, I was met by a human train of biblical proportions,
which lined me up among the African and Asian passports, while the true Europeans flowed freely and without
suspicion through an unguarded gate. As a voluntary exile I was able to live for a long time in a run-down attic
room between the Herengracht canal and De Pijp market, and this far on, I remember being tremendously
happy. Part of the reason for that mood was definitely the result of my work in Rem’s studio, my fellow
adventurers in what was then a small OMA (oma is Dutch for “granny”) and the morning trips on the Brussels
express with no possible camouflage among the diamond executives, the banks and all the rest of them. In
exactly forty-five minutes I was set down at Rotterdam station, wrapped up to the neck in a biker jacket with
The Clash scrawled on the back, where a friendly post-war tram that stopped at the lovely shelter built by Rem
years before (we called it the “chip”), took me to the Boompjes office with views of the River Maas, close to
the boats and trains and full of planetary expats - a true soup of nomads.
It was a grey March morning when I made that trip for the first time and I was met by a stunning secretary who
told me that I could leave my CV at the reception desk. I explained, as she nodded in polite boredom, all about
my complicated illegal status as a non-EU citizen, my previous expulsion from England for reasons that we
did not have to go into, the cost of the return train journey every day, and I think I also mentioned my passion
for two-wheeled vehicles. When I got home, there was an excited message from Rem on my answering
machine demanding that I return immediately to Rotterdam on the next train, no argument, whatever the time,
in what was a small taste of things to come over the next few months. And what else can I say? For a young
architect, hope is a powerful emotional fuel for those moments when intuition tells us that our dreams are
about to come true. So, as if the world were about to end, I ran, I travelled and I talked in fits and starts about
Tchernykhov, who I so admired, while trying to put a gloss on my university projects and the odd competition
that I’d managed to win. All of this while he smilingly admitted me into his private club. I still suspect that his
hidden love of collecting had something to do with it: “I am thrilled to have such an international office and
you are the first person from Spain. All I need now is a black man!” That was the first of many demonstrations
that I would hear of the inimitable Dutch irony, which I could understand and even use without too much effort,
and which they naturally share only with the Norwegians. I have thought about this subject quite a lot over the
years in different situations, and I have reached a strange conclusion that relates the subtle irony of the people
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from those two countries with the social liberty that they enjoy, which is not just a symbol of their personal
independence but also (and this can be extrapolated to architecture) the guarantee of their honesty. On that
damnably cold day I took a total of twelve different vehicles between trains and trams and, gripped by the
headiness of the future, I had one of the most prophetic nights I can remember. So that’s how I started work
at the OMA, surrounded by an atmosphere of keen but healthy, constructive competition accompanied by a
kind of depersonalisation of the creative process which removed us from any possible admirative cloning, to
which no small number of architects have historically succumbed with their employees and which Koolhaas
made his personal responsibility to eliminate. The long days of experimentation were softened by the loving
care we gave to our discoveries, accompanied by glasses of lager on the terrace and the discontinuous
presence of Rem, whose scant approval and validation of our intuitions added tension to the atmosphere.
With an astonishing clarity of vision, which only now I see was brilliant, he always managed to surprise us by
choosing the least obvious path and the only one to lead us to something really interesting. You could say that
our trust in him was almost celestial, and his trust in us somewhat more earthly.
Immersed in the Rotterdam Kunsthal project and others, now considered legendary, together with Xaveer,
Fuminori, Christian, Jim, Ron, Tony, Winy, Mark, Yves (who I am sure is resting in peace), Yushi, Petra and Hans,
we looked into the futility of the form when faced with a precise response to a well-formulated programme,
unprejudiced construction and structural limits, details that are not details, moving towards a higher plane of
combining apparently incompatible materials and the simple excitement of certain architectural actions of a
somewhat extraterrestrial nature but reassuringly close in terms of use. Of all the creative processes, what
most made an impression on me was the continual decision-making through elaborate systems of discussion
that always had a reasoned starting point of any kind which guided them towards a target devoid of all
stylistic expression. It was in that collective process, one in which Rem asked our opinions and Socratically
reserved the last word for himself, that our aim was to question that which was accepted as being for
common use, standard and coherent in recognisable situations in order to bring optimum solutions to our
work that responded to non-generalisable questions. Every single one of the objects, materials and nondetailsresponded to architectural provocations to interact with the user and make them experience the world
through the destabilising filter of construction; to think in a different way about the obvious and, deep down,
to awaken them to another kind of living that is not just the daily routine. I quickly understood at those thoughtprovoking meetings, in which I was very much the novice, that the true power of the architecture in which I
was participating and which has captured my enthusiasm ever since my first meetings with Rem, lay in an
unstable, blurred equilibrium of something that is neither said nor apparent but which somehow manages to
be implicit in the final result. (Fig. 2)
When Fuminori Hoshino was busy making sure that the construction of the homes at Fukuoka was going
smoothly, he would sometimes pass by my table and make sure that my Spanish architectural education
was not putting the Kunsthal project, which I was spending all my time on, in any danger. I had grown up
with a more formalistic and constructivist education, which I am sure was different from that of the others
at the OMA, and many of the decisions that I took were the result of pragmatic views backed by structural
dimensioning or installations accompanied by the pertinent constructive details, which left my colleagues
open-mouthed. I had understood that in Spain at that time, architects had two academic qualifications: that
of “European” architect and that of engineer (not counting the implicit title of town planner), and this filled
me with youthful pride and placed me in a much-respected position among my elders. But all that changed
one day when my vanity was somewhat raised while drawing some complex details of combinations of
multiple materials for the Kunsthal using different types of glass, concrete structures, metallic mesh floors,
moveable polycarbonate ceilings and some elegantly designed concealable fire doors (refined and, let’s say,
à la Catalana), when Rem appeared and came to stand next to me. I showed him all the constructive knowhow that I had accumulated during my years at ETSAM in the form of those details that I intuitively knew
would be the salvation of the complicated promises of the building when, to my surprise, he picked up one
of the edding 3000 markersthat were lined up on my desk (I still love that smell!) and continued unabashedly
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to draw straight lines where I had drawn complex joints, to eliminate complementary profiles that would avoid
the explosion caused by the expansion of impossible-sized panes of glass, to change the carpentry where it
was not necessary and to change aluminium structural mountings for glass ones (a solution I hated), without
saying a word for a good half an hour. When he had removed almost a dozen of the joints that I had produced
in a fruitful month’s work, he gave me an ironic, aggressive look and with masterly delivery said, “No details,
Edu!” I have never forgotten that that display of violent shyness made me instantly unsure of my knowledge,
after processing information that was completely the opposite of that which I had been taught as an architect,
and it destabilised me greatly but it also lifted me very, very high.
Sometimes, handwritten messages would appear on my desk without warning, always in the morning, in
which Rem would explain some of the aims and details of the projects we were working on and they were
marked with the time they had been written, which was always at four or five in the morning. Feeling a little
incredulous about the whole matter, after several consecutive missives, I caught Ron and Fuminori during
a break and asked them about this recurrence; they looked at me with surprise that I was not working at
that time, confirming that the boss not only slept very little but also that he went running every morning at
dawn. I was rather embarrassed to admit that I also slept very little and so I defensively omitted the fact that
cosmopolitan Amsterdam kept me busy with other nocturnal activities. There was another kind of message
that I found even more fascinating (although, which in those days were still not commonplace) in the form of
the faxes that arrived from different points of the globe containing intuitions about new details and finishes
for the Kunsthal. One day, on the letterhead of the Tokyo Sheraton, there was a draft design for pillars with
spotlights built into the concrete, and the next day, some initial ideas for pillars covered with logs for the
exhibition hall in front of the park arrived on Sheraton San Francisco letterhead. And this went on continually,
with the ideas becoming increasingly consolidated over time. That frantic kilometric pace was exciting and,
at the same time, it scared me stiff, but I have to recognise the evocative force, full of freshness, in his
sporadic gaze, outside the continuity of the creative process, that managed to bring us back to earth with
his unexpected invectives.
Among the skills that we acquired as a group was that of drawing the famous and much-copied black and
white drafts using edding 1200 markers on A3 sheets of tracing paper, some of them shaded in with edding
3000s (which we used to refill with ethyl alcohol and during the odd night-time emergency, with gin!) that
were the true trademark of the studio at that time. The competition was tough because Mark Schendel worked
incredibly well, especially in the introduction of profiled or shaded figures of people in the image which, once
photocopied, lost their translucidity and became dense marks on the white of the paper with an intense
presence. I had been in the office for a few months when the first colour photocopier appeared - a Konica,
with enormous possibilities very similar to the graphics that we produced, since it was able to invert tones.
We therefore began to work with white lines on a black background and produce drafts in impossible colours
based on complementary drawings, which was a complete revolution in our efficiency and graphic mastery. It
is true that similar objects had been produced previously such as the Zeebrugge Interchange or the floors of
the Très Grande Bibliothèque in Paris, but always using a complicated and expensive photographic process
from inverted laboratory negatives followed by a positive produced by the photographer Hans Werlemann
on extra large paper. We used this system for a while during the preparation of the first booklets: client
information dossiers on A3 for the urban planning of Lille city centre and on A5 for the Rotterdam Kunsthal.
Everyone saw and treated the Konica as the miracle that it was - a graphic queen, always clean well-fed and
stroked by loving fingers. (Figs. 3 and 4)
Our work was, essentially, mental and totally manual, composed in almost equal parts of all versions and
techniques of the drawings and working models, and also presentations in all imaginable combinations whose
main feature was the large quantity of compressed, blue polystyrene cut with a hot wire. For these projects,
the maestro was unarguably a Belgian student called Eric van Daele, who was capable of laminating pieces
as fine as a piece of cigarette paper and as a result of his insurmountable efficiency he spent most of the
time in the office intoxicated. I have to admit that I never liked that technique, nor did I like the ugly machine
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deposited most unfortunately next to our queen of photocopiers, nor the smell it gave off, but above all I had
a negative intuition about the exclusively formalist informational homogeneity lacking in architectural attributes
that the pieces transmitted. They were used more than anything for quick checks of volumetric occupation
and availability (sometimes they were painted with coloured sprays) and in some failed projects such as the
Groningen Sports Complex, in which for the first time the project start up became a multidirectional testing
site of possibilities, and we became fed up with producing them on such a large scale. That building was the
first contact with an object whose use changed over time, with proposals among others such as an open-air
skating ring for speed-skating races which would become the track for all types of sport in the summer. We
also researched a series of internal spatial relationships using visual crosses between the different sports
tracks, all covered by a giant canopy held up by a completely unconventional structure. I still cannot believe
that we didn’t even make it over the first hurdle with the politicians. (Fig. 5)
In the office was the perfect artefact that I had looked for and never found. I saw it for the first time the day
we finished the large model of the Kunsthal on a scale of 1:50. It was 1.20 m2, with all the materials, structure
and qualities to scale, and it was my first high-precision project. Jim Noo and I made it together under the
instructive eye of the most sensitive model-maker I have ever met – Ron Steiner, who in those days was
Rem’s partner. The apparatus in question was an Olympus and we called it The Scope, with a capital ‘T’
and a capital ‘S’. It was a kind of manual focus lens with a long metal bar that held a small periscopic lens
on the other side, and which had something medical about it but also something sadistic. When you placed
it inside the models, its right-angle view had the astonishing quality of transporting us to a future reality that
was completely non-existent, reproducing a perfect view of the world from 1:1. The first time I looked through
it I realised that I was spellbound and when I had the opportunity to use it I was like a child with a new toy. I
seem to remember that it was kept in a special place in the office but I never knew where. (Fig. 6)
The first computer appeared almost unannounced, to coincide with the expansion that the office was
undergoing on the other side of the canal, behind the Boompjes, and what turned out to be the start of a
bigger extension that took place after I left. It was a 286 (I think it was incredibly expensive and very exclusive
at that time) with a computer-assisted drawing programme that didn’t even carry the Autocad name, and
which was used exclusively for the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) plans. Of course, nobody knew
how it worked and we had never seen anything like it for producing architecture, so we had to call a specialist
from the world of industry to make the first, now famous, 3-D line drawing, which was an X-ray of the ZKM
with all its entrails on view, involving great conscientiousness and laboriousness. The drawing was hung in
large format on the wall beside its alter-ego, the 1:50 model which was 2 metres high and being used for
structure and materials tests by the engineering firm Ove Arup (Cecil Balmond, specifically), and for a few
weeks it robbed the model of all the potential for captivating that it had offered up to that point. The computer
opened up an enormous new field and undoubtedly the future that was to come but, sadly, its effectiveness
was limited and it was too slow to match our mental and creative capacity. (Figs. 7 and 8)
After a long period in the office, everything became quite familiar to me; it was hard work but also fun and the
productive atmosphere was a perfect place for learning for a young architect who experienced every scale
from the small Villa Dall’Ava, which was being built by a friendly, extrovert Frenchman called Loïc Richalet, to
the large-scale Lille planning project in which the late Yves Brunier played a direct part, travelling on the back
of his Harley Davidson (we had more in common with the bikes than with the landscaping) with his dog in
his jacket. There was a confidence in the atmosphere that everything was flowing positively until two bombs
dropped together that took away almost everyone’s energy and left our leader violently torn in half. The first
was losing the TGB competition in Paris by a hair with the most schematic (if not the most diagrammatic)
project of the 20th century, which captured the pure limitless essence of the architecture that Rem sought.
The second was the cancellation of the Karlsruhe ZKM project and with it the financial tap that had associated
us for months with long-term development projects with English and German engineers. I had always had
the intuition that the ZKM offered values such as transparency and permeability of the light through its
facades, the lightness and vertical interrelationship of the programmes or peripheral circulatory spaces and
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internal panoramic spaces, but that little by little they were becoming weakened with the introduction of the
restrictive German fire regulations and the revised costs of a powerful structure, until the point came where
its architectural promise had become so blurred that it had become a different kind of object. Of course, this
is a very personal view, and I have never known the real reason behind it, but it affected Rem greatly.
Following that slightly disheartening time was a dramatic and hyperactive period of socialisation in the office
production. First there was the exhibition in the Stedlijk Museum in Amsterdam and then the grand presentation
of OMA in the Institute Français d’Architecture in Paris in parallel with the beginning of an exhaustive compilation
of all the graphic and personal material by Jennifer Siegler for a book which would years later become the
voluminous S,M,L,XL. The first exhibition was impressive, a powerful breath of fresh air that filled the main hall
of the museum with two plaster and aluminium models of the TGB on a scale of 1:50 and almost three metres
high. From their twin positions, one spoke of the conceptual scheme of the empty interiors, produced inverted
in indeterminate plaster forms that gravitated illusively over aluminium bars representing communication nuclei,
and the other showed the solid presence of the exterior volume made lighter by the peculiarities of the facades,
the perforated clouds, the plane intersections of these interior empty spaces until they reached the perimeter
and the crossed porticoes of the lower lobbies. It is difficult to express in words what I felt when I saw those
immense objects that spoke of such abstract concepts and whose imperfect execution demanded proximity
and touch, but I would venture to say that my impressionable position of youth had something to do with
the magic. I think they are the best pieces of scale architecture that I have ever seen and there, together,
they were insuperable. The second exhibition brought together all the mock-ups of the office, represented in
exquisite models using a range of different materials and in large scale formats, with the special presence of
the Zeebrugge, the TGB, the ZKM, the Agadir Hotel, the Kunsthal (we still didn’t know if it would be built) and
the Den Haag city hall, which won the indisputable admiration of the Parisian crème de la crème. Jean Nouvel
was taken, glassy eyed, around the exhibition by Rem and at each enraptured stop he chanted the same
mantra over and over as if in a trance: This is the future! It was an exhibition full of tricks and automatic light and
sound, reflected to scale in some of the more recent architecture from OMA and which - I imagine - had a more
impressive than progressive function at the beginning of the nineties in response to an unconscious desire to
inject a bit of life and eliminate (now that I really understand it) the bad taste that results from looking at the
inert creatures in our creations. Curiously, and despite what those now impossible objects signified, the Fin de
siècle exhibition was a world showcase and a media launchpad for OMA. When all the lights were switched
off on the opening night (in the main hall to ensure there were no faults) the shadows wrapped themselves
around a ghostly formation of silent soldiers awaiting the orders of their commandant to build a world that did
not want to come and free from any special effects, they lined up “astrally” to form something indefinable that
I have never seen again since. (Figs. 9 and 10)
On our return from a slightly longer than normal journey, while we were looking for solutions for the
polycarbonate hyperboloid that was to cover the interior space of the ramp at the Kunsthal and for which
we had already made several proposals, Rem insisted that we should postpone the discussions until the
next day and leave our favourite solutions hanging on the model before leaving. In the morning there was
a peculiar silence hanging over the office when I arrived and Fuminori told me that there was a personal
message for me hanging on the model. “Ghastly! R. K.”, it said plainly. At that time I considered I had pretty
good English, but that word wasn’t yet in my vocabulary, so I approached mark from Ohio for a translation.
He blushed when he realised that the results of weeks of internal debate and work by the whole team
could be summed up in a message that he translated roughly as “Sick-making!” I took the blow hard and
something unidirectional happened in my relationship with Rem and with the office. Of course we found
a solution (one that I now think was a failure in one of the most intense points of the building) and, also,
nothing improved as a result of that unfortunate event. But there was something onomatopoeic in those
unknown letters that made me unavoidably start to look elsewhere. A short time later we finished the
Kunsthal execution project with infinite doubts about its future construction in the midst of an economic
crisis, while the office went bankrupt and could no longer guarantee our salaries, with no commission and
no tenders in sight. Meanwhile, I had struck up a good friendship with Christian Basset and enjoyed being
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with him, without knowing that these were my final weeks at OMA, while he was in charge of the design and
construction of the beautiful bus station at Groningen. With our tables placed together, we killed ourselves
laughing about Mies, doing handstands at 90 degree angles, thinking of all the words that sounded most
perverse in all the different languages (I could now speak Dutch) to include them in the video-bus-stop or,
if we preferred, the television or green marble, together with all kinds of deep reflections that we disguised
as jokes to lighten the atmosphere, and which were delivered to Rem in exquisite architectural language
and a set of precious drawings and models. Christian couldn’t stand that strange atmosphere which Rem
created in the office at the beginning of 1991 and he returned to Paris, but not before giving me a recipe
book of futuristic cookery and cocktails written by Marinetti, which has survived all my house moves and
which I still use to flummox my friends. (Fig. 11)
Many knowledgeable people have written about the architecture of Rem Koolhaas and his influence over
the last twenty years. Since I cannot be academically objective in my descriptions I can only add temporal
clarifications of when certain subjects which were later exported to other constructed pieces were proposed
and when research on them began. From the multitude of occurrences and experiences in the creation of
the Rotterdam Kunsthal many posterior products emerged and, in my subjective view, they mark the first
extensive manifestation of OMA with intentions that would push the office into the future. In the last model of
the building to be made, all the possible synergies of its development were made explicit, together with the
definition of all the atmospheres, materials and objects (something that had already fascinated me before in
Ron Steiner’s model for the Villa Dall’Ava).I still wonder if that hyper definition was a resource in the face of
the constant doubts about the construction of the buildings we had taken on at that time, or whether it was
a personal challenge for Rem to remove any element of chance in all the possible variations. On a structural
level it anticipated the Maison à Bordeaux in the complexity of its transfer of loads or the Seattle library with
its detailed, unscrupulous solutions for a number of the inconsistent loads.. On a spatial and circulatory level
it anticipated the continuation of the Jussieux Libraries and the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, and the spatial folds
of the Utrecht Educatorium, and on a material level the whole of the posterior spectacle of chromatic-material
multiplicity in the Congrexpo in Lille and the Dutch Villa. Combinations in variable quantities, according to the
project, of an expanded space from the modern Movement and a postmodern informative effectism, amplified
in recent times with an excess of media technology make up, in my mind, and just as Picasso did for painting
a long time before, the conceptual lid of the pressure cooker that was the 20th century. Almost all the lines
of investigations left open by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer and some of the Russians
converge, amplified and resolved in the spatial proposals of OMA, finally closing the conjectural parenthesis
that had been left open. During this time of conceptual development, the period of Smithson-Friedman, to
which no small number of young architects today cling to as a driving force for continuing the progressive
battle, was intentionally ignored. (Figs. 12, 13, 14 and 15)
With the filter of time, which prevents us from remembering what cannot be reduced to its essence while
bringing to mind apparently banal situations that signalled an alarm bell for the future, I would go as far as to
say that after Rem Koolhaas the person who most impressed me in that office was Xaveer de Geyter. More
ambitious colleagues would take leading jobs in the modern media that was still to come, demonstrating
their great value from the new spheres of architecture, in which appearance was valued over presence. One
such person was the Dutchman Winy Maas, and it has given me great pleasure to see from the output of
that quiet Belgian that my intuition was more than right. The OMA that was to come later produced a much
larger number of talented professionals, and I suspect that this was not only as a result of becoming a pole of
attraction for CV collectors, but also for becoming a place where liberty of expression and production allows
the development of keen young architects. Naturally, I am not the best qualified to comment on the immense
office into which it was turned and all of my intuitions may be no more than voluntary conjectures extrapolated
from my own experiences.
However much we might want to, there comes a time when we can no longer give or receive more than a
few people and that is what happened. The person who provided me with that magnetic attraction to Holland
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was lost in the happy Caribbean of altered states of consciousness, and Rem, who was the same age then
as I am now as I write this article, disappeared into the dazzling firmament of mediatic global architecture.
Luckily, as a young boy I had read in Conrad that everything becomes unblocked when you cross the great
ocean with no luggage, and so I left the country in the direction of the Atlantic and with something that I sense
is inerasable now that I recall it again, I submerged myself with a siren who delayed my return to Spain for
many years.
The little “granny” gave some great moments to the group of hopeful twenty-somethings who, by sheer
coincidence, were working together under the exciting mental whip of Koolhaas, and who managed to lay
down somewhat naively the roots of part of the architecture of the 21st century. I don’t think I’m being punchdrunk on the sparkly memories of those times of learning and growing when I say that we were, without
knowing it, a real bunch of heroes.
Eduardo Arroyo
Trysyl 2009
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