An Interview with Rem Koolhaas
This interview was done by Tom Fecht for the art magazine Kunstforum
International and happened at the opening phase of Hybrid Workspace at the
Documenta X in Kassel
in June 1997.
There is also a Real Audio version available of this interview (only
with Real Audio/Video player).
Tom Fecht for Kunstforum International: I would like to continue
a little bit the discussion we had last night with Edward Said. There was
a very important statement, as far as I understood it, in the context of
the division of labor in the field of aesthetic production. He made a very
important point about the role of intellectuals being confronted with expertise.
And he made a very strong statement, which made a point very clear in the
political context of Palestine, which I think, we can take the risk to generalize
a bit. He said that "every time there is a cry for identity we should
be careful because scandals and lies are around"
Rem Koolhaas: Because what?
Fecht: "Because scandals and lies are around". And he
had a pladoyer to offer instead several identities to allow transformation
for future partnership. This was one of his essentials. So when I look to
your manifesto which has been published in 95 about the generic city, the
city without character, identity is one of these important obstacles to
think freely about the future. So I would like to get to the geographic
elements in your terminology of identity. When you talk about the centers,
this becomes a very important point. Maybe you like to give some points
to that question.
Koolhaas: Yes, maybe we should not assume that those texts are
known. But anyway, as an architect I became aware at a certain point, that
there was a strange obligation of our profession to call the dominant condition
of the contemporary urban environment, and when I say dominant I don't mean
the centers but relatively recent urban substance, that most of us live
in, to always call it identity-less and to always refer to the identities
of the well-known centers, the identity of Paris, the identity of Berlin,
the identity of ... So I noticed a kind paradox: On the one the vast majority
of people was living in so called identity-less conditions and there was
still the discourse was mostly about preserving identities, establishing
identities and exploiting identities. So basically I reversed the questions
and decided to make an inventory which I called the "generic city",
the general city, the city without qualities, the city without identity,
which is simply an inventory of a new urban condition that is very pervasive
in Asia but which is equally pervasive in America and in Europe, and try
to explain or basically try to explain to myself maybe in the first place
what the virtues of this identity-less space could be and obviously one
of the enormous virtues is that once there is no identity you are also liberated
from a whole series of obligations, a whole series of assumptions and a
whole series models.
Fecht: When one looks at your installation in the Ottonaeum which
is one of the two important key installations in the whole Documenta if
one compares it to the one in the Friedericianum of Van Eick, the room right
next you has the installation of Reinhardt Mucha, which shows sort of shrines
of pieces of architecture, an archeology of architecture. In your manifesto
you raise the point that architecture is one of the most important media
to register history on the horizontal level, when it comes down to archeology
and you are scheming up with next century to have rather an archeology of
the horizontal where you stop digging and instead you need an endless supply
of airport tickets to move around the world.
Koolhaas: Of course the whole article on the generic cities has
a level of irony. What I am fascinated in is that kind of compared to earlier
civilizations that actually left traces. It seems as if our civilization
is doomed partly because larger and larger parts of it are taking place
in cyberspace but also because our style of building is less and less permanent
and more frivolous and flimsy. It seems that this literally age old tradition
of leaving a kind of imprint of civilization in the form of an architectural
layer, that we will be the first generation not to do that any more. But
what you are saying is on the other hand between Mucha and ourselves: It
is very interesting for me that at the moment that architecture has lost
an enormous amount of its original credibility that many artists are becoming
seemingly obsessed with architecture. And I don't know whether this is whether
that is simply because they don't know how completely eroded on the inside
the credibility of architecture feels or whether they actually may have
something to contribute.
Fecht: I can see that architecture becomes a field of vision for
a lot of artists and in your manifesto you raise the point that exactly
at that moment in history when the city started to die out, you can observe
the discussion of art in public space. And you make the equation that if
you add two dead things you can't get the thing alive again. So this is
not a dracula, the performance doesn't work. So I would be curious if we
come back to the beginning question of the division of labor, not to say
'industrial' division of labor in aesthetic production what kind of potential
you see in the artistic production to maybe come to this point of changing
identities, transforming for future partnership between the art, artists
and maybe even the question of authorship. Maybe you can even give some
details of the organization of your office.
Koolhaas: OK, I think one thing which is really liberating about
the Documenta as a whole is that all the professional kind of identities
have been leveled and taken away and that there has been a much more even
condition where somehow the theme is the urban condition and how we inhabit
the urban condition, it's illuminated by people called artists and people
called architects, and also be people called photographers or scientists.
For me it really represents an enormous relief and a sense of freshness
that we are no longer forced to pretend to have certain competencies and
abilities, but it seems what the main theme of the exhibition is that there
is a collective and that each of us makes part of this collective and that
therefore the old play of vaguely different roles that still the collective
responsibilities are asserted above the individuals and professionalised
identities. I think that is a very liberating theme of this exhibition.
I am very curious whether in reviews that eventually will come out.
Fecht: When I spoke several days ago with Katherine David, one
of the key points for her conception was that she sees the urban area as
one most essential and important aesthetic and social experiences of the
90s...
Koolhaas: I don't think so. Ironically it has nothing to do with
the 90s, their interest here... what is happening now, and I think the 90s
are just marking the condition that whether we want it or not or admit it
or not, for the first time almost every one on the world lives in an urbanized
condition, or is about to live in an urbanized condition.
Fecht: So the whole terminology of architecture, the city, doesn't
work any more the way we used to handle these terms.
Koolhaas: No, I think that for instance in China and about what
I will talk about also tonight. [see links] There are conditions where a
village, or a person in this village, owns a fishpond, sells the fishpond
to a developer, the developer builds a skyscraper in the fishpond, the entire
village moves into the skyscraper, so some farmers live with chickens and
goats on the 42 floor, and around the skyscraper there are rice fields.
I think that things that we, in our minds keep separate and place very far
apart, with a kind of suddenly telescoped, as if according to a computer
program like Photoshop where you can simply combine everything in a single
image that you want to combine. So it seems as if certain inhibitions that
have traditionally organized architectural and everyone's space have disappeared
and we are suddenly in a situation which is much more absurd and potentially
much more dangerous but where anything can be combined to coexist with almost
anything else. And I think that in that context, public art and public space
as they have traditionally been interpreted are both extremely dubious,
because public space is an organized form of space which implies a certain
behavior and insists on a correct use. And I think that is already too authoritarian
to really function in these conditions. And in the same way art which is
supposed to represent this kind of publicness, also in my eyes at least
is no longer believable. I think that in the last ten years it just has
become bigger and bigger and more and more desperate.
Fecht: When you wrote about your generic city you said the generic
city is what's left when important parts of urban life takes place in cyberspace.
Which explains why we lose places and streets as public locations. To what
extent are these medias in their aesthetic potentials useful to reorganize
the tools and the skills of architects and in terms of education and practice.
Koolhaas: That is a very interesting question because architecture,
in my view, is a profession that consists of concrete entities that are
built and that have a real existence. Or even though, of course, you can
also create a kind of virtual architecture in cyberspace or can have a kind
of architectural experiences in cyberspace. But I think the more interesting
aspect of architecture is still the more concrete architecture. But nevertheless
I think there is an enormous influence of virtuality on architecture and
you could say and it is only a partly a caricature that probably out of
a sense of insecurity some of the best architects these days are trying
to make their buildings immaterial, as if they don't exist. And trying to
endow them with that kind of glamour that computer aided images have, the
perfection and the sterility maybe also. So there is in a way a kind of
strange simulation of virtuality in real architecture. But what is for me
more interesting is the kind of shamelessness and amorality that basically
the computer implies in terms of the ability to combine everything with
everything else in single frames, that kind of lack of resistance, and the
absence of necessity for discipline, that all these are in effect deeply
effecting architecture, but the built form of architecture.
Fecht: In the portraits given in the guide of the Documenta, there
is a strong emphasis on the importance of theory in your architectural practice.
Koolhaas: Basically I don't think that architectural theory exists,
that's a side I am very modest about, of course there is thinking in architecture,
and what I have noticed in my architectural practice is that it is incredibly
difficult to combine the production of buildings and some kind of intellectual
reflection because the production of buildings is really a very brutal and
exhausting process. What I have always been concerned about is that how
in the typical architect's career there is an initial beginning with ideas,
then an enormous effort to make the ideas real and then at the end of this
effort a kind of exhausted, empty condition where there are no ideas any
more. That is why in our work we try to alternate between research and reflection
and that is also why I am teaching at Harvard University because this is
the only way in which, against the consumption of ideas, of the practice,
we are able to find domain of renewal.
Fecht: Do you see any emotional or moral qualities in architecture
that might survive the processes of profound changes in the next century.
When I look at your book S,
M, L, XL it appears to me like the manifesto which some of your critics
put in the context of the manifestoes by Duchamp or Manetti and the futurists,
so when I think about Marshall McLuhan's book "the medium is the message"
which was a book that had an element of this free-folded typography, where
the message was not that clear, this was one of the points we had in the
discussions last night, that it is important to see that the borderlines
got out of focus. You describe architecture or activities in the aesthetic
field as the possibility to give an urban fashion to the planet. What is
this free fold? Is it a movement of search which you could also find at
the Documenta?
Koolhaas: No. To the extent that the book was called "free
fold", we were only talking about the format of the book, because the
problem of the book is to create a container or an envelope for work and
ideas that in themselves don't make any claim to consistency. Because I
think that Said didn't speak about consistency, for me the need for consistency
and the way only consistency earns respect, is one of these other dangers
of the intellectual, because I think inconsistency is at least as important
so therefore in the book we had a lot of different projects, a lot of different
essays, a lot of different insights, and I wanted exactly to avoid the impression
that it is one theory, one line, one argument. The issue was how can you
develop a container that still allows the diversity, the conflicts and the
contradictions to remain evident.
Fecht: When you take this container: What do you think are the
most urgent tasks in the education of architects during the next decade
speaking of Europe. In your installation in the Ottonaeum you make a strong
point which is basically statistics: How many living unions are constructed
in one night, two architects, three computers. So it is a quality which
changes by quantity in a dimension which is hard to imagine for European
traditional architectural education.
Koolhaas: I am always very bad in saying what people should do
or I am already bad on the level of the individual, I am certainly bad on
the level of a continent, but I think that, just as an example, I negotiated
a situation with Harvard University where I said I would teach there under
the condition that I would not be involved in design, or design education.
I guess that basically suggests that I don't believe in design education
at this moment. And that I think that the discrepancy between issues that
could inspire architecture and the education has become so big so that it
would be probably much better to suspend design education for 10 years,
and to introduce 10 years of solid research. I am sure that there is vast
research to do in the urban condition in East Europe, in Kazachstan, where
ever. The pretension that you can still tell people how to operate is becoming
for me personally more and more unthinkable.
Fecht: To what extent you could imagine a cross- cooperation between
artists, no matter what field. Do you see any chances in your economic and
developing structures to include artists in this process or is this rather
a position of analysis and observation.
Koolhaas: It is hard to say, and you yourself started with it
already, that the basic idea of specialization is one of the things that
inhibits forms of thinking. For me it is more interesting to think about
brains, and to assume that artists also have brains, and the artists have
a very particular reflection of intellectual processes. In that sense we
work with friends which happen to be artists or sometimes we actually formally
invite somebody because he has specific reasons to do it. It is not the
need for architecture to encounter artists, but it is more to combine different
kinds of brain power.
Fecht: One specific question in the context of identity. Last
night we had this interesting position of Mr. Said, where he basically said:
Many identities are much better then one. But we can't understand history
without memory. Since architecture is a very important element of storing
memory and history, what function could memory have in the context of architecture
from your point of view looking at the next century.
Koolhaas: Well I am very bad to tell people what to do and I am
also incredibly bad in looking forward, I don't know why that is exactly
but I think I have an obsession with the present and I am extremely reluctant
to make any claims or dictates for what is going to happen. We have already
talked about the way architecture leaves less and less traces. What I guess
is that some other domains have to take over the role of memory from architecture.
Exactly this traditional doesn't work any more, for instance you can look
at Berlin now to see very clearly what is happening because to the extent
that architecture embodies memory the present reconstruction of Berlin is
a kind of blatant attempt to extinguish and to eliminate certain kinds of
memories, the memories of communism, the memories of the fifties, the memories
of a kind of sober, optimistic moment of modernity. So already see that
this kind of responsibility to embody memory is no longer part of the inner
self-image of the profession. So, there is such a kind of ruthless judgment
in terms of what is good and what is bad that the most intelligent part
of the profession which for the sake of argument we should assume, is involved
in redoing Berlin is actually basically a single empty memory operation.
Fecht: I don't know if you had the chance to look at the most
part of the exhibition. Let's take for example the installation of Syberberg,
called "Memory Cave", the cave is explicitly not architecture,
it is an element going beneath. In this context Syberberg starts with Plato's
metaphor of the cave, and he gives some images of the Potsdamer Platz in
the context of the Reichskanzlei, and some images out of the car, a few
days later, all these images interfere with memory which looses its location,
which obviously no longer has a consistent place. Is this an aesthetic approach
which you could feel to get into closer communication with advice for a
solution. Or if you look at the national library which has been recently
opened in Paris, where you have this metaphorical element and you have practical
implements of the building in the same time. In this context, could you
reflect on memory maybe.
Koolhaas: I think this building is a kind of desperate attempt
to impose a memory on an entity which, as you say, in terms of its pragmatic
needs has nothing to do with a memory. Therefore the only consistency, if
I can make a confession, that our thinking in our work have had in the past,
is that we refuse ever to be bitter about anything that happened in the
past and we try to, without being foolish, try to interpret the inevitable,
which allows a forward movement. To the extent that we no longer have the
responsibility to symbolize memory or to represent memory or no longer have
the responsibility to represent anything, I think it is extremely exiting
for us, then it means that we can be completely new, completely dumb, completely
inarticulate, completely inert, completely meaningless. It simply reintroduces
a vast amount of possibilities.
Fecht: thank you very much.
Eike Becker: Just a very quick question. A lot people came here
to this exhibition and they expected something similar like the gestamapet
kunstwerk or so on. They identify where they identity of one single artist
or so on. The question of Gestampt kunstwerk.Then the question of collage,
what is your position towards collage, what is your position to these two
area.
Koolhaas: Are you talking about Documenta as a whole?
Becker: Yes, Documenta as a whole, and of course, the relationship
of gestamptwerk and collage to your work and the works of others.
Koolhaas: I don't whether I can answer the question, but for me
in spite of the criticism we have heard and read I think what is extremely
exciting there is a very thematic and ambitious and uncompromising situation
in this Documenta. Greater Urban and all its aspects has been represented
as the dominant and continuos setting. Whether its gezamptkunstwerk or not,
I think gesamptkunsterk is a kind of romantic notion and I think that there
is a kind of, very insistence on a romantic view in whole ex and an insistence
on cooling the temperature kind of rather than creating an overheated expectation
an almost clinical quality which I think is extremely stimulating because
it allows you for the first time to really look clinically at a number of
things and relate make your own connections, between them instead of being
guided by hand of the gestampgtkunsterk.in terms of forcing you tom make
those decisions so the clinical quality also has a certain freedom for
creating your own raptor. IN terms of collage, I've always been uncomfortable
with the notion of collage, because I've always been much more interested
in the notion of montage, I think because the montage is basically the planning
of a series of events or the planning of a series of visual or other episodes.
Whether its stories or in a movie, or episodes in a painting. I think that
collage is something that anybody can do but montage introduces an abstract
strategic value which I sense here in the hand of this exhibition. It is
much more a montage than a collage.
OK, thank you.
more info:
Rem
Koolhaas lecture within the 100 days / 100 guests program at Documenta (only with Real
Video player)
Documenta X, Kassel, Germany
Rem Koolhaas / OMA
Internet source page at ArchiNed
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