Rem Koolhaas (Theorist)
Introduction
Remment Lucas "Rem" Koolhaas He is one of the representatives of deconstructivism and author of Delirious New York (1978), a manifesto in favor of metropolitan congestion.[1].
In the book S,M,L,XL (1995) with texts and images, he proclaims that everything is better when it is bigger.[1] Among the messages he proclaims: if you cannot fight against the chaotic forces that rule the world, join them.[1].
Some see him as one of the truly important architectural thinkers and urban planners of his generation, and others as a self-important iconoclast. In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize.[1] In 2008, Time placed him among the 100 most influential people in the world. He was elected director of the Biennale di Venezia and the American Philosophical Society in 2014.
His work abandons the prescriptive commitment of the Modern Movement "Rationalism (architecture)"), announces the impossibility of the architect to install new beginnings in everyday life and practices an architecture that uncritically crystallizes the sociopolitical reality of the moment.
Biography
He was born in Rotterdam and lived for four years of his adolescence in Indonesia. Having finished his school studies, the son of a writer and grandson of an architect, he absorbed both professions to develop them throughout his life.
In 1963, at the age of nineteen, he dedicated himself to journalism, working at Haagse Post, a newspaper in The Hague[2] before beginning his architectural studies in 1968 at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, where in 1972 he presented his thesis project titled Exodus or the voluntary prisoners of architecture (in Spanish, Exodus or the voluntary prisoners of architecture). He carried out the project together with Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis and Elia Zenghelis, who would later be his first partners at the O.M.A (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) from 1975.
After submitting the thesis in 1972 he pursued additional studies with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, followed by studies at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City.
In 1975 he returned to the Netherlands where Koolhaas established his architecture firm together with three partners, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, his wife and Zoe Zenghelis, which he named (OMA).[3] Koolhaas later created AMO to develop the theoretical needs of OMA and apply theoretical thinking in books, research and other projects.[4]