ELEMENTARY MY DEAR WATSON! REM KOOLHAAS, THE SHERLOCK HOLMES OF ARCHITECTURE
Architecture
His 3.5 kg, 2,500-page new book, Elements of Architecture, compiled with the help of Harvard GSD students, is a rich, fascinating and prescient investigation into the past, present and future of architecture as a discipline.
Besides being a world-famous architect, Rem Koolhaas is also an acclaimed author. His 1978 “retroactive mani festo for Manhat tan,” Delirious New York, introduced readers to his idiosyncratically sardonic and polemical approach, as well as his uncanny talent for looking in places that no one else had thought to scrutinize, à la Sherlock Holmes. In 1995 he had the architecture world atwitter once more with his prodigious doorstop of a book S,M,L, XL, which examined the workings of his practice, OMA, through a welter of statistics, tall stories, travelogues, manifestos, essays, etc. Later publications have included Junkspace (2006) – “what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout” – and Project Japan: Metabolism Talks... (2011), for which he and Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed all the surv i v ing architects of the 1960s Japanese Metabolist movement.
Now he’s back at the helm of a giant new 2,500- page multi- author
megalith of a book, Elements of Architecture, which, expanding on the four elements identi f ied by the 19th- century architect and theorist Gottfried Semper, analyses the discipline through the lenses of 15 categories: floor, wall, ceiling, roof, door, window, façade, balcony, corridor, fireplace, toilet, stair, escalator, elevator and ramp. The result is not only an alternative history of architecture, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a philosophical enquiry into its place and possibilities in the world today.
NUMÉRO: Before being a book,
Elements of Architecture was an exhibition, and before that it was a design studio at Harvard GSD. What’s your approach to teaching?
REM KOOLHAAS: After being invited to teach at Harvard in the mid 90s, I discovered there was something of a mismatch between the students and the teaching staff, because the s tu dent body hadd ras tic ally changed, having become much more international, particularly Asian. But the professors were still teaching classic architecture subjects. I remember one class where the professor talked about rehabilitating an abandoned harbour pier in Boston, which I realized meant nothing to 80% of the student body because they came from a culture that’s all about the new. So I tried to think about a shift in methodology where you consider students as being in certain ways more expert than teachers, and use that hypothesis to clarify things you don’t know anything about and which haven’t yet been studied. The first thing we looked at was the presence and scale of shopping worldwide. The second was the Pearl River Delta, which at that point was not really a known or even a named entity, trying to make a prediction of how China would evolve. It worked out in those two cases, and since then we’ve had a yearly influx of around 12 Harvard students. After that we looked at Africa, then at the Roman world as a prefiguration of globalization, then we began the elements of architecture, and we’re currently looking at the countryside.
It’s made very clear in the book that this is not a definitive list of elements. Were there any you rejected? And if so, why?
The column was one, because we felt it was burdened with too many other roles. For me, I think this is it. But it’s a book that launches many offshoots. Giulia Foscari, a friend and associate, has already done a wonderful book on Venice, looking at the city through the prism of these elements [ Elements of Venice, Lars Müller, 2015]. It really demonstrates how productive this way of looking is. Someone else is currently doing Hanoi.
The compilation of countless different sources, voices and types of writing in Elements is reminiscent of S, M, L, XL. Is there a link between the two books?
Basically, in S, M, L, XL I was much more in charge myself – I was away from the office for something like seven months to do it, and I couldn’t afford to do that this time. There are many connections but also many differences. For one thing, S, M, L, XL was about us, partly about me, and Elements is not at all about us. Among my most interesting books – also because it’s not at all about me – is one I did with Hans- Ulrich Obrist. We spent five years in Japan interviewing all the Metabolist architects when they were really old. It’s a kind of portrait of the post-war period and the first Asian avant- garde.
When I was young, we were constantly being told that the digital age was going to kill off paper – the paperless office was round the corner, and books would become redundant too. But actually digitization has had the opposite effect – there’s more paper and there are more books than ever. Why this attachment to the book? After all,
Elements could have taken the form of a CD- ROM or a database.
Well, there are two things. The format of a book is much more flexible and open- ended than people typically think, and has already been deeply influenced by digital technology. We make totally different books now than we did before – there’s much more appetite for wandering through a book in a more-or-less random way. Also, contrary to what people say about the internet confusing everybody and not being able to assert things with authority, I think that people are much better at capturing the value or the tone of di f ferent narratives in a book. A book can now also contain many different voices.
Book designer Irma Boom was essential in helping you shape this huge amount of material.
If I’ve been working with Irma it’s because we’re both very interested in the history of the book, particularly because of its supposedly imminent death. I recently visited the Vatican Library with her, and when you see the first pocket book produced in 1500, or the first produced not as a scroll but as a real book, with incredibly funny illustrations, you understand that the book is an immensely rich and unstable medium that can contain thousands of different interpretations. Irma and I met in 1995 because it turned out that, without knowing each other at all, we’d done exactly the same book. She did one for a corporation in which there were pretty drastic intrusions of the economic wor l d, and I had done S, M, L, XL, and the two books were almost to the millimetre the same size. And so that became the basis of a friendship – a type of friendship I’ve also had with some engineers, where they let me in on their territory, I let them in on my mine, and it becomes a very fertile sort of merger.
In between being a design studio and a book, these elements were an exhibition, at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Architecture is notoriously difficult to exhibit, and often the result ends up looking like a book stuck up on the wall. How did you go about displaying the elements in Venice?
The biennale enabled us to showcase a visceral manifestation of elements. For example there was a real false ceiling, there were real toilets, there were real walls, and for that reason you could really see the drastic transformations or the precariousness of certain elements.
Was there text in the exhibition?
Well you could read texts if you wanted to, but the idea was that you would get it without necessarily doing so. Of course that’s also why many architects were very critical of the exhibition – I think they felt slightly offended by the way attention was shifted to issues other than pure architectural design.
One of the stated aims of Elements was “to reconsider forks in the road that weren’t taken, territories sidelined in history that can become fresh projects for the discipline.” Do you have any favourites you discovered?
It’s in a way too early to say, but I think it will definitely have a huge impact on my own work. For instance, I was always interested in ceilings and walls, and during my lifetime I’ve seen the wall go from something solid to something that’s practically immaterial. So there were some elements I was already deeply fascinated by, but others about which I learned an incredible amount. Stairs and doors in particular. It’s shocking how many things you simply take for granted.
I was amazed to discover in the book that the Germans have a word for the study of staircases – Scalalogie.
Yes. In that sense the book was also a kind of alternative history of architecture. For instance the guy who thought of handicapped access – he probably did more to change postwar architecture than any architect. This is a really hilarious part of the book, in the section on ramps. It’s about two people: Tim Nugent, an American academic, and the French architect Claude Parent – born the same year, died three months apart. Nugent was in the American army in World War II, and many of his friends came out of the conflict handicapped. Since these were vigorous people in wheelchairs, he thought about what he could do to make their lives easier. Look at the devastating simplicity of what he finally created – ramps at different angles for easier access. In one lifetime he achieved the global adoption of that idea. Parent was the total opposite. After the war, France was in a kind of euphoric situation with what’s now called the Trente Glorieuses. And so he felt it was totally boring to live horizontally, and that everyone ought to live on some kind of incline to put their lives literally on a different plane and make things more challenging. Here’s a fantastic diagram he made: up here you see an incline where human beings cannot remain unaided. Here he says that a 50% incline is the “limite d’adhérence humaine sans intervention d’accrochage” [“limit of human adherence without some kind of grip mechanism”]. [ Laughs.] And here’s a wonderful photograph of him in his house. Hidden in the inclined plane, which was covered in carpet, there were soft places where you could sit, but you couldn’t see them, so you’d stumble over hard and soft. For me
these are two extremes of architectural interpretation – one as a challenge and the other as comfort and security.
All the elements in this book are physical – you can touch them.
Yes, but many of them are now on the verge of taking on a cer tain non- physicality. As we went along we became more and more aware that the digital age has already profoundly infiltrated and modified every element. For example, there’s a floor that records your position on it – it’s sold as a kind of security device for old people, it can be directly connected to an ambulance, etc. But of course it’s also a way to control whether you stand, lie or do whatever on the floor. The toilet now has a digital dimension in the sense that every episode is analysed and transferred to a doctor. And there’s a thermostat that learns and can anticipate your heating preferences. But the data are also shifted to energy and insurance companies. In 2014, Sam Lessin, at the time in charge of product management at Facebook, said: “The more you tell the world about yourself, the more the world can give you what you want.” I think this is totally deceitful and dishonest, but entirely representative of digital companies. So it was very exciting to be there at the moment that this was going to be the direction or the deal for architecture. I’m under no illusion that we can stop the deal, but I think we can be slightly more alert about it.
Architecture as a Big Brother data- collecting enterprise basically. Yes. A house that used to offer you total security can now betray you.
I guess an abstract element of architecture is the idea of safety.
Yes. It all fits into a larger context where the ideals of the French Revolution – freedom, equality and fraternity – have been replaced by comfort, security and sustainability. And I’m 100% convinced that simply by delaying so much and being so lazy about thinking and acting on climate change we will face an incredibly authoritarian wave at some point, where, because we didn’t do it voluntarily, we’ll be forced to do it. Soon there’ll be a thermostat telling you, “Your time’s up, you must go to bed,” and off you go to sleep in a cold room. Seriously, I’m 100% sure. China’s already making those moves, and it will happen here too.
Rem Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture ( Taschen, 2018).