Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas, born Remment Lucas Koolhaas on 17 November 1944 in Rotterdam, is a Dutch architect, theorist, urbanist, and a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is frequently described as a deconstructivist and wrote *Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan*. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2000, was named to *Time*’s list of the world’s most influential people in 2008, and became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014.

His father, Anton Koolhaas, worked as a novelist, critic, and screenwriter; his mother was Selinde Pietertje Roosenburg. His maternal grandfather, Dirk Roosenburg, was a modernist architect who trained under Hendrik Petrus Berlage before starting his own firm. Koolhaas has a brother, Thomas, and a sister, Annabel. His paternal cousin, Teun Koolhaas, was also an architect and urban planner. The family moved several times: Rotterdam until 1946, Amsterdam until 1952, then Jakarta until 1955, and back to Amsterdam. His father, a supporter of Indonesian independence, was invited to run a cultural program there after the war, and Koolhaas has said that living in Jakarta at a formative age made him feel “really… as an Asian.”

In 1969, he co-wrote the Dutch film noir *The White Slave* and later wrote an unproduced script for filmmaker Russ Meyer. At 19, in 1963, he worked as a journalist for the *Haagse Post* before beginning architecture studies in 1968 at London’s Architectural Association. In 1972, a Harkness Fellowship allowed him to study under Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University, followed by time at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York.

Koolhaas first gained notice with OMA—the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—which he founded in 1975 in London alongside Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp. Zaha Hadid, then a student of Koolhaas, later joined the firm before building her own career. A key early project that set OMA apart from the postmodern classicism of the late 1970s was their contribution to the 1980 Venice Biennale, curated by Paolo Portoghesi and called “The Presence of the Past.” While most architects designed historical-referencing façades for a Potemkin-like street, the ones by Costantino Dardi, Frank Gehry, and OMA avoided postmodern motifs entirely. Other early, well-regarded but unbuilt projects included the Parc de la Villette in Paris (1982), a residence for Ireland’s prime minister (1979), and the Kunsthal in Rotterdam (1992). These works put into practice ideas from *Delirious New York* (1978), which Koolhaas wrote while a visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies under Peter Eisenman.

In *Delirious New York*, Koolhaas examined the random, addictive quality of city life, describing the city as a machine from which there is no escape and as a collection of “red hot spots.” He acknowledged that this approach echoed the Japanese Metabolist Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. A central concept he interrogated is the “program”—the idea, rooted in modernism’s “form follows function,” that design should edit human activities. He first questioned this in his analysis of Manhattan skyscrapers, proposing “cross-programming” that introduced unexpected uses, like running tracks in high-rises. Later, for the Seattle Public Library project (2003), he unsuccessfully suggested including hospital units for homeless people.

His subsequent publications grew out of his Harvard teaching role in the “Project on the City.” These include *Mutations* (720 pages), *The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping* (2002), and *The Great Leap Forward* (2002). All three compile student research on what others might call “non-cities”—sprawling, infrastructure-poor areas like Lagos, Nigeria, which the authors argue remain highly functional. They also examine the impact of shopping habits and China’s rapid urbanization. Critics have called Koolhaas cynical, pointing to the books’ suggestion that “In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop.” Others see this as a realistic view of how cultural life has changed, with airports and even museums relying on gift shops to stay afloat.