Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has proven twice - with Delirious New York and S,M,L,XL - that he can engineer dazzling and grandiose books as well as striking and bawdy structures. Over the last year, he has also proven quite adept in the role of celebrated artist. A fountainhead of paradoxes, artspeak, and glib-yet-acute observations, his mode, writes editor Sanford Kwinter in Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students, is "to convert optimism into danger and make that danger speak."
Yet, if anything, Koolhaas's splashy press reception kept me from fully appreciating his work. Between The New York Times's swoon and his confessional moments in S,M,L,XL, he risked becoming the Henry Rollins of urban planning. After reading Kwinter's collection, however, I've become one of his pupils. Rem Koolhaas, a thin, handsome, paperback that a young architect at my corner bar insist I read, contains a witty lecture, a smattering of Q&A, and Kwinter's essay, "Flying the Bullet, or When Did the Future Begin?" Like Koolhaas's own books, it mixes text with graphics; unlike his works, which this book has helped me better appreciate, it distills rather than inflates the architect's thoughts.
The takeaway from Rem Koolhaas is, I admit, somewhat elusive. It is not a quick and easy lesson, nor does it nicely illustrate the habits of a highly effective person. Koolhaas grasps the rhetorical and practical advantages of systems out of control. Like René Magritte, he likes it surreal. And, as critic Ian Buruma has pointed out, Koolhaas has made global cultural confusion an asset. He's at ease with contradictions. He likes them.
Here's what I can say for sure: Rem Koolhaas offers a way to pierce the hype surrounding its subject and may inspire you to look at your own profession the way he views architecture: as a will-o'-the-wisp, as something you want unknowable so that you may continue to make discoveries.
##### Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students, by Sanford Kwinter (editor) and Sze Tsung Leong (designer): US$14.95. Chronicle Books: +1 (415) 537 3730.
STREET CRED
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