by Simona PlungaitÄ—
Remment Lucas Koolhaas born in 1944. He is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and “Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design� at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA.
Koolhas first studied scriptwriting at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. He cowrote “The White Slave�, a 1969 Dutch film noir, and later wrote an unproduced script for American soft-porn king Russ Meyer.
He then was a journalist for the Haagse Post before starting studies, in 1968, in architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, followed, in 1972, by further studies at Cornell University in New York.
Koolhaas first came to public and critical attention with OMA (The Office for Metropolitan Architecture), the office he founded in 1975 together with architects Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis and (Koolfaas’s wife) Madelon Vriesendorp in London. They were later joined by one of Koolhaas’s students, Zaha Hadid – who would soon go on to achieve success in her own right.
An early work which mark their difference from the then dominant postmodern classicism of the late 1970s, was their contribution to the Venice Biennale of 1980, curated by Italian architect Paolo Portoghesti, titles “Presence of the Past�.
Each architect had to design a stage-like "frontage" to a Potemkin-type internal street; and the OMA scheme was the only modernist scheme among them. The first large project by OMA to be built was the Kunsthal in Rotterdam.
Each architect had to design a stage-like "frontage" to a Potemkin-type internal street; and the OMA scheme was the only modernist scheme among them. The first large project by OMA to be built was the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. These schemes would attempt to put into practice many of the findings Koolhaas made in his book Delirious New York (1978), which was written while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, directed by Peter Eisenman.
Koolhaas with his Prada projects ventured into providing architecture for the fleeting world of fashion and with celebrity-studded cachet: not unlike Garnier's Opera, the central space of Koolhaas' Beverly Hills Prada store is occupied by a massive central staircase, ostensibly displaying select wares, but mainly the shoppers themselves. At the moment Koolhaas' constructions sites are in China: the massive Central China Television Headquarters Building in Beijing, China, and the new building for the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the equivalent of the NASDAQ in China.