Koolhaas curated - View

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Christian Brensing

KOOLHAAS CELEBRATIONS IN BERLIN AND LONDON; SCHLAICH BERGERMANN SHOW POWERS OF GERMAN PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING AT DEUTSCHES ARCHITEKTUR MUSEUM IN FRANKFURT; PRIZES AWARDED FOR AR D; AR'S EUROPEAN INTERVENTION CONFERENCE; BLOBBERY IN BIRMINGHAM AND GRAZ; VIEW FROM KIZHI ISLAND.

Rem Koolhaas' ever expanding oeuvre has been celebrated with a grand exhibition in Mies' Neue National Galerie in Berlin.

The completion of Rem Koolhaas' New Dutch Embassy in Berlin (officially due to open this spring) forms the catalyst for the biggest and most energetic celebration of OMA/AMO work to date. It is a deliriously furious return to a Berlin that so deeply frustrated and upset Koolhaas at the beginning of the '90s when, in horror, he turned his back on the city's petit-bourgeois plans to rebuild Potsdamer Platz. Now he is back with a vengeance and the stately Museums of the Prussian Cultural Collections have gamely surrendered the entire New National Gallery's upper deck to Rem's furor architectonicus.

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With the help of his curator Kayoko Ota and Andres Lepik with Cristina Steingraber from the National Gallery. Koolhaas has turned Mies' venerable masterpiece into a junkyard of architecture. At best, the exhibition could be described as a chaotic assemblage of Rem's architectural projects and theoretical leitmotifs. OMA nowadays is synonymous with Fluxus, the Situationists, Pop and Dada all at once. Yet it is a cultivated, carefully staged anarchy with only the best and truest intentions of building big, bigger and biggest architecture. Just as Koolhaas superimposed fashionable sizes on architectural design in his book SMLXL (1995), here he presents a myriad of models in different scales.

The conventional display hierarchy of architecture (sketch, plan and model) has been completely overturned. The open plan National Gallery is criss-crossed with chest-high walls off which visitors bounce and weave like pinballs. In fact, when observed from the scaffolding viewing platform, the whole show resembles a giant pinball machine. Zones are created and dedicated to influences rather than just architectural projects: the Forbidden City, the YES Regime, Pavilion in Pyjama, the EU etc. Hence the exhibition is as much about current beliefs, fashion, fears and phobias as the big projects which Rem is now famous for winning: the twisted CCTV towers in Shanghai, California's Universal Studios, the H-Project in South Korea or Porto's Casa da Musica.

It has taken Rem eight years since the publication of SMLXL to reassemble and refocus energies for this show. In Koolhaas' world of architecture on fast forward, this is astonishingly slow. Nonetheless during this time he and OMA have achieved international breakthrough, restructured the office from a studio into what is now a big business, and churned out theoretical wisdom by the yard. The simple inversion of the acronym OMA has created the Harvard think-tank AMO, Rem's theoretical masterclass for his own visions.

But all this would not have been achieved without the many prominent and not so prominent collaborators to whom Rem has allocated ample individual space in the show. Given Koolhaas' fame and standing, he is still amazingly frank, open and generous in sharing OMA's reputation. Space and walls are handed over to Candida Hofer, the Dutch Embassy's photographer, artists Tony Oursler and Jeff Preiss, as well as Koolhaas' engineering partners Arup and in particular Cecil Balmond.

All this and more is on display in Berlin; the exhibition will then travel to the NAi in Rotterdam and on to yet undisclosed international venues. No catalogue, but at the end of last year, Taschen published Koolhaas' latest book entitled Contents.

Content -- Rem Koolhaas OMA/AMO Buildings, Projects and Concepts, Neue National Galerie, Berlin, Germany, until 18 January, Koolhaas was awarded the RIBA's Royal Gold Medal at the end of last year.