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Review [published November 2004]
Rem Koolhaas: Content
Edmund Hardy
Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about Big Brother
and has come up with a new concept: Big Vermeer. I
imagined contestants marooned in very detailed interiors.
Actually, the connection is more an art-historical
musing: we want to see people doing things indoors,
and in 1667 it was ‘A woman writing a letter’ whereas
now it’s ‘A contestant in the diary room’. It is “an
alchemy of transparency and daylight” which trades
in intimacy. This is one of around 80 articles, features
and graphic presentations rearranged into a book from
their original place in Content, the magazine of Rem
Koolhaas’ OMA-AMO firm.
There’s something ineffably cool about Koolhaas,
that wiry and opinionated architect who is utopian
and Postmodern, who floats in “the amniotic fluid of
global fashion” and who has designed many a dazzling
project – see his in-construction fortune-cookie shaped,
criss-cross silver design for China Central Television
in Beijing. In his practice the idealism and breadth of a
Mies van der Rohe or a Walter Gropius is fused with a
political and social engagement with the world.
OMA’s previous statement book was SMLXL, a big,
BUY Rem Koolhaas books online from and
heavy, brick-like publication. Content is paperback
and flimsy, colourful and kaleidoscopic. “Dense,
cheap, disposable” as the editor says on page 16. “It
is almost out of date already. Content is dominated
by a single theme, ‘Go East’. It is an attempt to illustrate
the architect’s ambiguous relations with the
forces of globalization, an account of seven years
spent scouring the earth – not as business traveller
or backpacker but as a vagabond – roving, searching
for an opportunity to realise the visions that make
staying at home torturous. Content is, beyond all,
a tribute to OMA-AMA’s commitment to engaging
the world by inviting itself to places where it has no
authority, places where it doesn’t ‘belong.’” Koolhaas
wants this book to be the equivalent of doing
the splits in classical ballet: a moment, immobile,
stretched between realization and speculation, as, I
suspect, he believes architecture to be.
This book is a compendium, a glossy cabinet of idea,
observation, wit from Rem and his associates. It has
politics but no single viewpoint. It arcs from the US west
coast to Japan. It is various but always interesting like a
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