Rem Koolhaas Height

[Janne Evers]

News: ten years after declaring he wanted to "kill the skyscraper", architect Rem Koolhaas has accepted an award for the best tall building of the year and joked: "my campaign was completely unsuccessful".

Koolhaas, founding partner of OMA, received the award for Best Tall Building Worldwide from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Chicago today for CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, China.

Completed in 2012, the looping CCTV building was a deliberate assault on the cliched form of most skyscrapers. OMA won a competition to design the building in 2002 and the following year it featured on the cover of Koolhaas' book Content, which contained a chapter titled Kill the Skyscraper.

In Content, Koolhaas argued that skyscrapers as a genre had been reduced to a vacuous race for height. He wrote that "the skyscraper has become less interesting in inverse proportion to its success. It has not been refined, but corrupted."

Conflating expectations of what a skyscraper is, and can or should do, the CCTV Headquarters has now become embedded in the thought process of the making of tall buildings. It singlehandedly paved the way from the height-obsessed, set-back skyscraper of the past to the sculptural and spatial skyscraper of the present, at the scale of the urban skyline. Its stunning form, which appears both powerful and conflicted, as if pulled in several directions, symbolizes the multiple functions of the program and the dynamic positioning of its nation on the world stage. The unique architectural design contrasts significantly with historical building styles in Beijing, yet it could never be classified as a homogenizing force.

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The CCTV headquarters aims at an alternative to the exhausted typology of the skyscraper. Instead of competing in the race for ultimate height and style within a traditional two-dimensional tower 'soaring' skyward, CCTV's loop poses a truly three-dimensional experience, culminating in a 75-metre cantilever. The building is visible from most of Beijing; it sometimes comes across as big and sometimes small, from some angles strong and from others soft.

The seminar focused on city manifestos as precedents for analysis and design provocation in order to elicit alternate resonances between urban attributes and imagery. The course focused on representation, drawing of cities, abstraction of cities, and the development of short manifesto texts. The following is a city manifesto utilizing the theoretical underpinnings of Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York:

Once the culture of congestion and Manhattanism as we knew it ran its course, the city succumbed to capitalist pressures and so began the onslaught of the needle tower. With the rise of the needles came the fall of the public sphere.

The supertall skyscraper and needle towers represent the height of privatization and commercialization. Their verticality allows for little interaction amongst their inhabitants and minimal communal spaces. As buildings' footprints got smaller, fewer users were accommodated per floor and the more individualized life became. In a search for light and air, the needle towers raced higher and higher leaving the ground below covered in shadows.

As Manhattan gets consumed by the dollar, the needle towers become the bank vaults of foreign investors. Many floors become "a guarded bank vault of immobilized wealth." If the culture of congestion was the culture of the 20th century . . . the culture of vacancy has become the culture of the 21st century.

On each floor, the culture of vacancy has arranged identical human activities in standard combinations. With the rampant rise of the empty needle, Manhattan faced the complete loss of congestion and its public sphere. The needles became so tall and skinny no one was left living in them at all.

It is with this bleak reality that this proactive manifesto begins. A call to save the city from the privatization and reintroduce the collective nature of the globe. As with all manifestos, its fatal weakness is its inherent lack of evidence, that which will be created. What does exist is a problem and this manifesto explores proactive solutions as opposed to retroactive speculations.

One of the most prominent aspects of a design, if not the most important, is the consideration of the context and environment in which the proposed design will be found. In the case of the Dutch House by Rem Koolhaas, the unique and very challenging environmental conditions and topography of the site led to a design with interesting conditions that respond to these conditions.

Not only is the design limited to a four-meter height restriction, it was to be situated on a highly uneven topography yet maximize space for specific program in the private-residence. Given the difficult site, Koolaas took it upon himself to incorporate a house both above and below ground, accommodating four bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, study and two terraces.

Program is based on the permanent occupancy of the two parents and the temporary and visiting occupancy of their three grown-up daughters. For times without visitors or daughters, the house is kept at a manageable scale through a programmatic split and literal slab. The intentions remained to maximize the total program while minimizing the amount of formal gestures.

This dual relationship is further emphasized and expressed through the use of multiple different treatments of glass and uses of shadings according to program and orientation. Bridging the dichotomy (literally and figuratively) is a central ramp, which provides functional and visual connections between the two separate programmatic systems.

Koolhaas has worked as a professor at Harvard University since 1995. In 1998, he won the design competition for the new campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000.

As part of the circuit, there is a glass wall dividing the public-accessible outside area of the pedestrian ramp from the interior. A second ramp, which runs parallel and in reverse, is terraced to house an auditorium. Beneath it is the caf. A private single-story hall can be reached via a third ramp that winds along a roof garden.

The Dutch House was built amid a pine forest with fine sand. Because of the uneven site, the design was limited to a height of 4 meters in order to optimise the available space. Despite the difficult location, Koolhaas decided to build an above and below-ground home with four bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a study, and two terraces.

Despite its unique exterior shape, the library has a striking appearance, consisting of multiple distinct floating platforms that appear to be encased in a vast steel net surrounding a glass skin. Every platform is an architecturally defined programmatic cluster that is configured for optimal, focused performance. The areas between the platforms serve as informal marketplaces where librarians educate and entertain patrons. They also organize the interface between the various platforms and provide areas for work, socializing, and recreation.

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Since the dawn of the skyscraper, architects have been preoccupied with going higher. In the mid-to-late 19th century, advances in steel construction and elevator technology allowed buildings to soar into the air-usually going straight up, or sometimes tapering back a bit at the top. While some recently completed and still-under-construction buildings are currently vying for the title of "World's Tallest," these days-with less emphasis on achieving great heights-architects are exploring new directions.

One such architect, not surprisingly, is Rem Koolhaas. His Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has designed a striking-some might say audacious-residential tower for Manhattan's Flatiron district. When completed (current plans have the project moving forward), it will be OMA's first building in New York City, the setting for Koolhaas's 1978 classic book, Delirious New York. In it, Koolhaas celebrates the early-20th-century drawings of Hugh Ferriss, which illustrate the possibilities for skyscrapers following the landmark 1916 Zoning Law that created New York's pervasive setback buildings.

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