MAKING A SPLASH

By Belinda Luscombe

ARCHITECTS GENERALLY ARE dour people. Since they're half professionals, half artists, neither side of them is ever entirely content. But Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch-born architect-prophet whom today's young architects most want to grow up to be, is smiling. He's thinking about the deep, vision-supporting pockets of his first American client, MCA-Universal, which has appointed him to oversee plans for most of a $3 billion expansion of Universal City in California. Why choose Koolhaas? "I think it's because of his grandfather," says Koolhaas of Edgar Bronfman Jr., grandson of the man who asked Mies van der Rohe to build New York City's first modernist tower, the Seagram Building.

In many ways Bronfman's selection of Koolhaas is indeed as bold as his grandfather's choice of a modernist in 1954. After all, architects who refuse to condemn suburban mall sprawl and who favor cheap industrial materials aren't usually the beneficiaries of high-corporate patronage. Which isn't to imply that there are many--or even any--architects quite like Koolhaas. Some would label his disorienting, asymmetric buildings deconstructivist; he likes to consider himself an architect without style. For him, form not only doesn't follow function; the two are barely on speaking terms.

Perhaps because of this, it has taken a long time for Koolhaas to hit America's consciousness, but the MCA commission, which is likely to include new offices and a redesign of the company's headquarters, caps an amazing 18 months for the beakish 51-year-old. In November 1994 his exhibition at New York City's Museum of Modern Art drew big crowds and critical plaudits. He was photographed, celebrity-style, in his midnight blue Maserati by Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. His first book, Delirious New York, was rereleased and sold 28,000 copies (not bad for a theoretical treatise on the American city written in the '70s). "I would say he's the most comprehensive thinker in the profession today," says American deconstructivist Frank Gehry. "He's the hope for the cities."

In February, around the time negotiations for the MCA deal were winding up, Koolhaas released his second book, a stubby, curious tome called S,M,L,XL, after the four sizes that Koolhaas projects come in. A dense, not always coherent conglomeration of photos, plans, essays, fiction, cartoons and alphabetized ephemera, it's the ultimate coffee-table book for a generation raised on both MTV and Derrida.

For Koolhaas, the most important factor affecting contemporary architecture is globalization. "For the first time," he says, "an architect can build all over the world." He lives in London (though he spends much of the year in hotels), has an office in Rotterdam and runs an ongoing research project at Harvard that studies the Pearl River Delta, a rapidly emerging urban area in China. "It's clear," he maintains, "that you shouldn't just import; you should use the cultural potential of each country in such a way that it synthesizes with your interests. The MCA project is a beautiful project in that sense, because it's so American and ambitious and yet it interconnects with my own history."

He's alluding to his early career as a screenwriter. He had one script produced by Dutch director Rene Daalder, a work Koolhaas describes as a Fassbinder-ish allegory that used images of B movies to comment on contemporary Europe; he also wrote a screenplay for Russ Meyer, the American nudie-pic auteur, that was never produced. Before turning to architecture, he worked as a journalist, so it's not surprising that at 33, after training at the Architectural Association in London and teaching four years in the U.S., his first project was not a building but a book. Delirious New York, which made Koolhaas famous as a kind of architect without portfolio, explores the "culture of congestion," what happens to a city when so many different activities and conditions coexist. What others saw as regrettable, Koolhaas saw as dense with choice and potential.

It took almost 20 years for Koolhaas' career as a builder to catch up to his reputation as a visionary. He's still recognized less for individual structures than for huge urban-planning projects. His biggest, and the one that probably scored him the MCA commission, is in Lille. What excited Koolhaas about the city was that, strategically located at the mouth of the Chunnel linking France and England, Lille must be able theoretically to accommodate the 50 million who could pass through each year and yet retain a user-friendly scale for its 175,000 residents. As the city's designated master planner, Koolhaas commissioned a number of architects to build there: Christian Portzamparc built an office tower, Jean Nouvel a commercial center, and Koolhaas himself tackled the Grand Palais, a huge convention center. "I'm interested in how architecture channels or intensifies or relaxes or crystallizes the flow of events," says Koolhaas. Perhaps his most arresting gesture in the Grand Palais is in its lobby, where he created a meeting place by putting a few smart chairs on a square of expensive carpet and lowering a smallish square of wooden ceiling in the midst of a vast expanse of concrete and air-conditioning ducts, as if a room had been marked out but given no walls--function without any form at all.

The theory that architecture should do rather than be has made Koolhaas the hero of students but not necessarily of his elders. Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, says Koolhaas, like many theoreticians, doesn't really know how to build. "There's a phrase being coined in Europe, and I think it has been applied to American literature but has been picked up by Europeans in relation to architecture--'Dirty Realism,'" says Frampton. "There's a touch of that about the game of doing buildings that are slightly slapped together as a sort of manifestation of the epoch in which we can't afford things anymore." Koolhaas has also been criticized for his apparent embrace of the rapid, mall-filled expansion that has scarred many American cities. "Get away from Paris and Amsterdam and go see Atlanta," says Koolhaas in S,M,L,XL. "Go straightaway without any preconceived ideas. That's all I can say." In his defense, Koolhaas says he is critical of untrammeled urban growth but it should be understood before being judged.

Perhaps it's because Koolhaas is not wedded to any one style that he finds McArchitecture easy to digest. Unlike the work of Peter Eisenman or Gehry, a Koolhaas building isn't easily identifiable. "In some ways I consider that a compliment," says Koolhaas. "You work in so many conditions that it would be artificial and unreal if your work did not become very different too." One consistent element in Koolhaas' buildings, however, is a relaxed attitude toward detailing and a willingness to use extremely cheap materials. In Kunsthal, an art gallery in Rotterdam, he used unfinished concrete and corrugated plastic for walls, metal grids for flooring, naked fluorescent tubes for lighting and tree trunks for pillars and a balustrade. "Architecture is always the encounter of vision and circumstance," he says. The Dutch, Koolhaas explains, don't believe in spending a lot of money on buildings. "So there's no choice but to build with really cheap materials."

But even when his clients have money, Koolhaas doesn't spend it on materials. The Villa Dall'Ava, outside Paris, cost $485,000, yet the architect still used orange plastic webbing, familiar from construction sites, for a balustrade on the roof. One room on the ground floor is surrounded on three sides by glass, which can be opened to the outside or enclosed by a curtain--almost like a hospital bed--for more intimacy. The clients asked for a "masterpiece," and they got an adventure. Neighbors, on the other hand, so opposed the plan that the house had to be fought for all the way to the French supreme court.

While XL projects continue to be Koolhaas' specialty, one of the commissions he's most excited about at the moment is another house in France, this one for a client who uses a wheelchair. An orgy of open-endedness, the house is designed around a huge hydraulic platform that interlocks with and completes the different floors as the client moves up and down the house. "And of course," says Koolhaas, salivating at the thought, "the movement changes the architecture." At last, the machine is a house for living.

--With reporting by Daniel S. Levy and David E. Thigpen/New York

With reporting by DANIEL S. LEVY AND DAVID E. THIGPEN/NEW YORK