Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, urbanist, and writer who co-founded OMA and shaped debates about contemporary architecture and urban life.
Office for Metropolitan Architecture: Office for Metropolitan Architecture is the architecture practice co-founded by Rem Koolhaas in 1975. OMA is the studio through which Koolhaas developed many of his best-known projects.
Seattle Central Library: Seattle Central Library is a public library designed by OMA and opened in 2004. Its stacked programmatic platforms turn the library brief into an explicit architectural diagram.
Zaha Hadid: Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect known for dynamic forms and experimental drawings. She worked at OMA early in her career before establishing an independent practice.
S,M,L,XL: S,M,L,XL is a 1995 book by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau documenting OMA’s work and architectural ideas. Its experimental format made an architecture monograph into a vehicle for Koolhaas’s arguments.
New Urbanism: New Urbanism is an urban-design movement advocating walkable neighborhoods and traditional patterns of development. Its preference for coherent, human-scaled neighborhoods contrasts with Koolhaas’s attention to fragmented metropolitan reality.
Delirious New York: Delirious New York is Koolhaas’s 1978 book interpreting Manhattan as a laboratory of modern urban culture. This early book established his distinctive way of reading cities through buildings and cultural forces.
CCTV Headquarters: CCTV Headquarters is a Beijing office building designed by OMA as a continuous loop of interconnected towers. Its looped structure makes an unusually direct built expression of Koolhaas’s interest in organizational form.
Elia Zenghelis: Elia Zenghelis is a Greek architect and educator who co-founded OMA with Koolhaas and others. His partnership helped establish the office and its early architectural direction.
The Harvard Project on the City: The Harvard Project on the City was a research initiative led by Koolhaas at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Its studies of Lagos, shopping, and other urban phenomena extended his practice into research and teaching.
Critical regionalism: Critical regionalism is an architectural approach that resists universal design by engaging local climate, culture, and landscape. Its emphasis on rootedness differs from Koolhaas’s investigations of globalized and interchangeable urban forms.