Bling, blobs, burgeoning: problems of figure; Architecture has become more and more gestural in its searches for monumentality and the race for iconic status

Architectural Review, The, March, 2005

Such indifference to scale and civic propriety is common in the work of many would-be avant-garde architects. But it can be difficult to criticize them effectively because many of the buildings with which they have made their names are galleries or other buildings for cultural activities, so criticism of them can be presented as philistinism, and in the case of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin (AR April 1999), anti-Semitic to boot. Yet Libeskind's technique of deriving the slashed lines on the walls is derived from drawing lines on plan between places where famous Jews lived, then elevating the plans. Looking through the slit windows you can have no understanding of any of the connections envisioned by the architect. Only he has the key to the patterns, and by now, perhaps he has forgotten it.

Inside, the slit windows generate glare that has caused the galleries to be very difficult to hang. The celebrated voids in the plan, intended to denote the memory of those who were murdered in the Holocaust, are indeed strange and potentially moving, but they are mean and underwhelming. It is not a good building, but one that has been endlessly praised largely because of the astonishing amount of public relations effort poured out on it.

In the quest to achieve novelty at all costs, few expedients are ignored. Bigness, for Koolhaas, is the key phenomenon of our age. 'The humanist expectation of "honesty" is doomed: interior and exterior architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic and iconographic needs, the other--agent of disinformation--offering the city the apparent stability of an object.' (2)

For Koolhaas, the global market rules and its incessant demand for urban change makes the content of building and concerns about quality irrelevant. Coupled with his method of 'panic design' (last minute solutions to enormous programmes), Koolhaas's work is predictably almost always flashy, imposing, cold and image-obsessed, almost totally lacking in tenderness and understanding of the complexity and range of human experience. There are occasional exceptions, where humanity sometimes shines through, such as the Dutch Embassy in Berlin (AR May 2004) and to some extent the great Seattle Library (AR August 2004), but they are rare.

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Koolhaas has had direct influence on a generation of Harvard students, and his overblown book S,M,L,XL has proved to be a bestseller among students and young architects. His influence is particularly strong in the Netherlands, where the Super Dutch have been making living quarters for the poor (social housing) into architectural monuments for a decade. MVRDV's WoZoCo housing for old people in Amsterdam, is held by many to be a praiseworthy example of the new thinking. Here, site restrictions and planning requirements determined the envelope of the slab-block, which turned out to be too small to accommodate all the units required by the client. Therefore, five 11m long cantilevers were created to allow the total number of dwellings to reach 100 while keeping to the planners' preferred footprint. Anyone with the most vestigial knowledge of construction and structures knows how expensive such a strategy must be, and how scraped the main slab (complete with prison-like metal bars) has had to become as a result of the five gestures. Even given Dutch tolerance for living in highly organized groups, life here must be a bit grim for the majority.