"The word 'architecture' embodies the lingering hopeor the vague memory of a hope that shape, form, coherence

could be imposed on the violent surf of information that washes over us daily."

REM KOOLHA

Remment Lucas Koolhaas (English pronunciation: /rm klhs/; born 17 November 1944) 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. Koolhaas studied at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam, at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Koolhaas is the founding partner of OMA, and of its researchoriented counterpart AMO, currently based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In 2005 he co-founded Volume Magazine together with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman. In 2000 Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize. In 2008 Time put him in their top 100 of The World's Most Influential People

BIOGRAPHY

With his prodigious gift for invention, shrewd understanding of communication techniques, and contagiously optimistic conviction that modern architecture and urban design still possess enormous untapped potential for the transformation of modern life, no master builder since Le Corbusier has offered a more impressive vision for a brighter future than the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. To be sure, there are other present-day architects also at the very apex of the profession who do certain things better than he does. Robert Venturi is a finer draftsman and a more elegant writer; Denise Scott Brown has a more empathetic feel for the social interactions that inform good planning; and Frank Gehry displays a sharper eye for sculptural assemblage and a keener instinct for popular taste. But when it comes to sheer conceptual audacity and original thinking about the latent possibilities of the building art, Koolhaas today stands unrivaled.

HATS WITH KOOLHAS

 His work emphatically embraces the contradictions of two disciplines (architecture and urban design) that have struggled to maintain their humanist ideals of material honesty, the human scale and carefully crafted meaning in a rapidly globalising world that espouses material economy, machine scale and random meaning. Instead, he celebrates the chancelike nature of city life. Another key aspect of architecture, he interrogates is the Program. With the rise of modernism in the 20th century the Program became the key theme of architectural design. The notion of the Program involves an act to edit function and human activities as the pretext of architectural design: epitomised in the maxim form follows function. An early design method derived from such thinking was cross-programming, introducing unexpected functions in room programmes, such as running tracks in skyscrapers.

HIS INSPIRATIONS

PROGRAM

 Mr. Koolhaas believes in the idea of social progress. The pace of global change leaves him unfazed and optimistic. His work eagerly reforges the broken link between technology and progress. He revels in the unexpected, rather than passively anticipating agony. Perhaps as a Dutchman, imprinted with his country's role as an international trading centre, he has fewer problems with global change than might someone of another nationality.

HIS PHILOSOPHY

 The Dutch, a nation of traders, have not surprisingly spawned an architect whose work responds to the silent, nanosecond trans-national flows of money and ideas. Mr. Koolhaas also notes the Dutch pride in the national trait of economy and thrift. He actually likes the integration of the notion of cheapness to create sublime conditions and is philosophical about the client as chaos. "Chaos simply happens. You cannot aspire to chaos; you can only be an instrument of it."

HIS PHILOSOPHY

 The Netherlands Dance Theatre, completed in 1987, was originally conceived in 1980 as an extension to a circus theatre in Scheveningen, a seaside resort in The Hague. In 1984, the design was adapted for a new site - the Spui Complex - in the centre of The Hague. This new context - an area undergoing substantial change - was dominated by two slabs, the slope of an abandoned project for an innercity motorway, the axis towards the houses of parliament, the site for the future town hall, and a 17th century church - a lonely testimony to the once historical centre

ANCE THEATRE, HAGU

 Although there was minimal collaboration between OMA and the architects of the concert hall, the buildings' physical proximity generated a shared foyer - a 7-metre wide alley between the two buildings - in which an exterior wall of the concert hall becomes part of the NDT interior. The foyer consists of three levels: the lowest slotted beneath the auditorium tiers, above it a half-moon balcony, the highest - a 'floating' skybar. The plan, which was partially determined by the grid of the parking garage below, divides the building into three parallel programmatic zones. The large zone contains the stage (35 x 18m2) and 1,001 seat auditorium; the middle accommodates rehearsal studios; and the smallest includes offices, dressing rooms, the dancers' common rooms. An restaurant and an espresso bar are contained in the gold cone, which also serves as a cafeteria for dancers and staff.

ANCE THEATRE,HAGU

 The theatre has a structure of steel beams and girders, using metal cladding with sheet rock covered with stucco, marble and gold foil. The roof has a self-supporting structure of a double layer of trapezoid folded sheet steel.

ANCE THEATRE, HAGU

ANCE THEATRE, HAGU

EATTLE PUBLIC LIBRAR

 At a moment when libraries are perceived to be under threat from a shrinking public realm on one side and digitization on the other, the Seattle Central Library creates a civic space for the circulation of knowledge in all media, and an innovative organizing system for an ever-growing physical collection the Books Spiral. The library's various programs are intuitively arranged across five platforms and four flowing "in between" planes, which together dictate the buildings distinctive faceted shape, offering the city an inspiring building that is robust in both its elegance and its logic.

EATTLE PUBLIC LIBRAR

 OMA's ambition is to redefine the library as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, but rather as an information store where all potent forms of media new and old are presented equally and legibly. In an age in which information can be accessed anywhere, it is the simultaneity of media and (more importantly) the curatorship of its contents that will make the library vital.

EATTLE PUBLIC LIBRAR

 Our first operation was to "comb" and consolidate the library's apparently ungovernable proliferation of programs and media. We identified five "stable" programmatic clusters (parking, staff, meeting, Book Spiral, HQ) and arranged them on overlapping platforms, and four "unstable" clusters (kids, living room, Mixing Chamber, reading room) to occupy interstitial zones. Each area is architecturally defined and equipped for dedicated performance, with varying size, flexibility, circulation, palette, and structure.

EATTLE PUBLIC LIBRAR

 The Mixing Chamber, centrally located on the third floor, is an area of maximum librarian-patron interaction a trading floor for information orchestrated to fulfill an essential (though often neglected) need for expert interdisciplinary help. Librarians guide readers up into the Books Spiral, a continuous ramp of shelving forming a co-existence between categories that approaches the organic: each evolves relative to the others, occupying more or less space on the Spiral, but never forcing the ruptures within sections that bedevil traditional library plans. Upon the opening of the Seattle Central Library, the Spiral's 6,233 bookcases housed 780,000 books, and can accommodate growth up to 1,450,000 books in the future without adding more bookcases.

EATTLE PUBLIC LIBRAR

Sustainable Site Erosion and sedimentation control during construction; re-building on same site; located on major bus routes; bicycle parking spaces; landscaping and exterior design to reduce "heat island effect;" automatic lighting controls to reduce light pollution. Energy & Atmosphere Building designed to outperform Seattle energy code by 10 percent; about half the glass used in the curtain wall is triple-glazed with an aluminum expanded metal mesh sandwiched between two panes to reduce heat buildup from sunlight; computer-controlled air movement motor controls maximize energy efficiencies; no chlorofluorocarbon-based refrigerants in air conditioning and no halon gases in fire suppression system; control systems, meter HVAC systems, water usage and energy performance of the building.

EATTLE PUBLIC LIBRAR

Materials & Resources Space designed into loading dock area to collect and store recyclables; more than 75 percent of demolition and construction waste was recycled; a significant amount of recycled material was used in construction; a minimum of 20 percent of the building products used in the Central Library were manufactured within 500 miles of Seattle, thus helping the local economy and reducing impacts of transporting materials long distances. Water Efficiency Plants selected to require little water; all irrigation provided by rainwater collected from building exterior and stored in a 40,000-gallon tank; interior water use reduced by metered faucets, no-flush urinals and efficient mechanical equipment.

EATTLE PUBLIC LIBRAR

 "People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable. Architecture can't do anything that the culture doesn't. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, and singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living."