TABLE OF CONTENTS
6
SOURCE BOOKS IN ARCHITECTURE
7
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
8
INTRODUCTION
ASHLEY SCHAFER
14
THE COLLABORATION WITH PRADA
REM KOOLHAAS, ASHLEY SCHAFER, STUDENTS
28 PRADA RUNWAYS & SHOWS 196 MIU MIU RUNWAYS & SHOWS 262
SPECIAL EVENTS
286
PRADA TRANSFORMER
302
Q & A WITH STUDENTS
REM KOOLHAAS, ASHLEY SCHAFER, STUDENTS
314
DELIRIOUS AFTER ALL or WHY REM KOOLHAAS WRITES SUCH GOOD BOOKS
GALO CANIZARES
322
IMAGE CREDITS
323 BIOGRAPHIES
SOURCE BOOKS IN ARCHITECTURE
The Source Books in Architecture series focuses on the work of a particular architect and is meant to expose the foundations and implications of the work in question. The work is documented through conversations, interviews, early studies, models, renderings, working drawings, writings, and/or photographs at a level of detail that allows for a nuanced understanding of a disciplinary agenda from conception to completion. This content is often accompanied by commentary or conversations with the architect or critics that further explores the cultural significance of the work. Source Books in Architecture was conceived by Jeffrey Kipnis and Robert Livesey and is a product of the Herbert Baumer seminars, a series of interactions between students and seminal practitioners at the Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University. After a significant amount of research on the distinguished visitor, students lead a discussion that encourages those individuals to reveal their motives and techniques. The meetings are recorded and transcribed and become part of the content of the book series. The seminars are made possible by a generous bequest from Herbert Herndon Baumer. Educated at the École des BeauxArts, Baumer was a professor in the Department of Architecture at The Ohio State University from 1922 to 1956. He had a dual career as a distinguished design professor who inspired many students and as a noted architect who designed several buildings at The Ohio State University and other Ohio colleges.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A very sincere thank you to all of those who helped make this publication possible. I am especially grateful to Rem Koolhaas for providing his time and feedback in the midst of an extremely busy schedule. Thanks to everyone at OMA and AMO for their kindness and hospitality during my visit to Rotterdam. Rita Varjabedian, Giulio Margheri, Talitha van Dijk, Sophia Klinkenberg, and Isabella Rossen have been critical to the development and refinement of this book. Thank you to everyone at Prada, Miu Miu, and Fondazione Prada that provided their assistance during my visit to Milan and to my correspondence that has followed. I’d like to extend a particular thank you to Mario Mainetti and Simona Chiappa. Thank you to Galo Canizares and Ashley Schafer, who contributed their time and effort to the content included here. At the Knowlton School of Architecture, Dorothee Imbert, Todd Gannon, and Mike Cadwell have been and continue to be generous in their support of the Source Books in Architecture series. Thank you to Jaimie Mollison, Carla Sharon, and the whole of the Knowlton School administrative team for their assistance with this and every publication. As always, a continued thanks to Gordon Goff and Jake Anderson at ORO/AR+D for their guidance, expertise, and patience. Finally, this book would simply not have been possible without the assistance of Kristina Bertocchi, Erin Miller, Sanghyun Suh, and Brittney Wilson. Their assistance with the research, organization, and production of content was absolutely essential.
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INTRODUCTION ASHLEY SCHAFER
The last time that a discussion between Rem Koolhaas and students was committed to print was 1996. Conversations with Students, a slim volume documenting a 1991 seminar and lecture at Rice University, served as a taut foil to the magnum opus SMLXL, released a few months prior. Conversations is physically XS but intellectually weighty, accompanied by Sanford Kwinter’s essay “Flying the Bullet.” Kwinter compares Koolhaas’s counterintuitive flight toward disciplinary danger and his tackling of issues like congestion and troubled cities (i.e., New York in the ’70s) to fighter pilot Chuck Yeager’s flying tactics. Kwinter projected that “the future of architecture [might] begin with Koolhaas.” It would be a facile exercise to retroactively verify the accuracy of Koolhaas’s various speculations. Yet, a look at his conversations with Knowlton students in relation to the Rice visit (and their respective publications) sheds light on the radical transformation of politics, society, and the discipline over the last three decades. They serve as bookends to Koolhaas’s career, tracing OMA’s trajectory as the office entered its most productive period, negotiating and responding to those transformations while consistently embracing the counterintuitive. At the moment of the Rice visit, OMA had completed one major public building (the Netherlands Dance Theater), along with a handful of houses and housing projects. With the exception of the Checkpoint Charlie Housing in Berlin, all were within the Netherlands.1 Villa dall’Ava was under construction, but the projects included in the book (and illustrations for that lecture), though unbuilt, held aspirations to “investigate what a metropolitan architecture might be.” Koolhaas presented projects we now think of as canonical OMA projects, the Tres Grande Bibliotheque, Zeebrugge, and ZKM, not as isolated buildings but as projects with potential to form their own urbanism. He situated this ambition as “reflecting a new condition in Europe.” This condition—a seismic political, economic, and cultural
shift in Europe—was the formation of the EU,2 which he (correctly) anticipated would radically shift the scale of architecture and the European city itself. Each of the projects he shared addressed his inchoate thoughts on the effects of this scalar leap, fully articulated three years later in the essay “Bigness or the Problem of the Large” wherein he argues for an architecture so large that it operates beyond the scale of urban fabric. Twenty-seven years later, at the Knowlton School, Koolhaas’s conversation with students centered around his collaboration with Prada. In this 20-some-year-long partnership, OMA designed everything from customer interfaces and semi-annual runways, to stores and to the Fondazione Prada venue in Milan, Largo Isarco 2. Published herein we find a compendium of projects that are among the smallest and most ephemeral projects of his career. Typically occupied for mere hours, the seasonal shows are the sine qua non of experimental opportunity, and OMA capitalizes on these fleeting experiences to upend our expectations, confirming Koolhaas’s own claim that, “you could characterize our work as never wanting to do the obvious.” Indeed, OMA reinvents the nature of the fashion show itself, at times drawing our attention to the unspoken but relentless hierarchy granted to the front row seat, as well as to the space of the catwalk itself. We find the 2010 Spring/Summer Menswear show concealing the catwalk in a long narrow space adjacent to the main hall. It can only be visually accessed through a long slot window; it can only be physically accessed if the attendee discovers a single small door—a secret passage. The 2012 Spring/ Summer Menswear No-Stop-City-inspired field of cubes preempted the coveted front row position of VIP guests by reimagining the catwalk as a meander through a grid of seats, allowing every attendee a front or second row seat. These are among my personal favorites, but more than the strength of any one show, the collection is remarkable in 9
that it evidences a sustained and seemingly inexhaustible creativity. The program remains the same (a model path and seating for spectators) and the site largely remains the same: the vast majority of the Prada shows have been held in the Via Fogazzaro space. The spare, dry, single lineweight plans include only the barest information: an exterior wall, an interior wall, the existing row of columns bisecting the space, seats indicated by squares. Sometimes lines indicate a change in level and sometimes a dashed line indicates the runway—but only when it isn’t obvious. The contrast of these almost mechanical plan drawings with the kaleidoscopic range in the shows themselves recall his observation from Delirious New York that the plan’s “two-dimensional discipline … creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy.” This symbiotic relation of constraint and freedom emerged again when he discussed the countryside research. The countryside, now populated with exurban infrastructures (agricultural farming, data centers, fulfillment centers), is the new grid that supports the “frivolity” of the contemporary city. As at Rice, the day at Knowlton ended with an evening lecture, where Koolhaas perhaps implicitly acknowledged the connection with his earlier student visit—or at least chose momentarily and uncharacteristically to look backwards at that time. He began with a quote on screen, dated 1994, from “Singapore Songlines”: The next round of East-West Tension will be fought over this question: whether democracy promotes or erodes social stability, whether free speech is worth the cultural trash it also produces: whether the health of a collective matters more than the unfettered freedom of the individual.3 Like the Rice lecture, he referenced politics, albeit now more explicitly and with less optimism for its impact on architecture. He wove a discussion of nationalist, populist politics4 through a series of projects following a thread of the possibilities of socio-political connection through architecture.5 In a near-structuralist inversion, his optimism now was for architecture’s potential for challenging and perhaps changing politics. He ended with a lengthy teaser of the exhibition-to-be at the Guggenheim: Countryside. Again, ever inverting expectations, Koolhaas and OMA/AMO focused not on the office’s raison d’etre—the metropolitan—but its architecturally neglected counterpart: the countryside. 10
-----------That was 2018. I began writing this essay on February 20, 2020, having returned the previous night from the opening of the Guggenheim exhibition that Koolhaas had previewed at Knowlton. Those were the days when traveling to attend a large cultural event, catching up with friends and colleagues, and attending a crowded lecture in a basement was perhaps frivolous, but not life-threatening. Within three weeks (on March 13, 2020) the show, the museum, and the city were closed due to COVID-19.6 As I finish this essay, the lines from “Singapore Songlines” resonate: the health of our collective is threatened by individuals who see the wearing of masks to prevent a deadly disease as a form of political oppression, while the removal of statues representing the oppression of African Americans is contested. Our democratically-elected officials use free speech-via-Twitter to sow social division while Black Lives Matter protests are filling public spaces across the US. Perhaps the most architecturally and socially loaded demonstration is taking place in the iconic Barclays Center plaza by SHoP.7 I have witnessed many students reference and imitate this project for its vaguely mobius-strip-like sculptural forms, its heroic cantilever, and its swooshing lattice-like Corten skin. But do they understand the use and impact of eminent domain and street closures on the neighborhood? Do their Pinterest sources include the fact that the developer hired SHoP as a political and economic decision to ease the multinational Ellerbe-Becket’s (now AECOM’s) project through the planning approvals process? The protesters choice of the Barclays plaza site starkly reminds us that that no matter how strong the form, how sexy the skin, or how daring the cantilever, architecture engages our economic, political, and social conditions. It can represent power structures and provide spaces for protest and social change. In the 27 years since Koolhaas’s first conversations with students, many US universities, responding simultaneously to economic pressure and student demand for more “real world” education and have welcomed corporations and private interests into the academy. The adoption of corporate-sponsored research by the academy serves as more as a sleight of hand substitution of economic “real world” for social, political, and cultural considerations.
The intention of the Baumer visit is to provide students with an under-the-hood glance at the workings of a prominent practitioner. I would argue that Koolhaas offers students not insights into his design method, a formal approach, or professional expertise, but rather a reminder that we are part of larger structures and forces. What his work then and now reminds us is that the autonomy/culture dialectic is a false choice. For Koolhaas, culture, economics, and politics are disciplinary questions. Capital, codes, and citizenry are part of architecture, from the Prada shows, to CCTV, to a project to protect ancient Palmyra before it was destroyed.8 Each of these examples situates architecture as means to address and make visible those underlying (often oppressive) structures. We are inextricably part of a real, complex, messy, and still-dangerous world. How we choose to participate within the structures that exist matters. Perhaps the future of architecture did begin with Koolhaas, who reminds us—then and now—how to fly toward danger.
1 Euralille Masterplan and Congrexpo in Lille were started in 1989 and finished in 1994. The Nexus Housing Project in Fukuoka was completed in 1991. 2 For context, the Berlin Wall had fallen two years prior, Germany had recently unified, and the Maastricht Treaty was being penned. 3 Here I used the date of 1994 because Koolhaas used it in his lecture at the Knowlton School in March of 2018. As far as I can find, the first publication I can locate of the essay “Singapore Songlines” is in SMLXL from 1995. 4 A simple black and white slide with bullet-pointed text flashed on the lecture hall screen for about 10 seconds listing the office’s concerns for the last 15 years. The topics were: human rights, corruption, freedom of speech, free trade, nuclear arms proliferation, and copyright. 5 Although Koolhaas did not explicitly mention the parallels in his lecture, he referenced the challenges of a creeping populism and nationalism. In 1991, the EU was forming. By 2018, Britain was working on its structured exit. 6 As I finalize copy edits in September, the exhibition is scheduled to reopen from October 2020-February 2021. 7 In the legacy of many large-scale urban projects in Manhattan, construction of Barclays displaced a neighborhood of people of color. Average ticket prices at the arena are quoted from being $90 to $242, far beyond the economic means of most of the neighborhood residents. https://www.forbes.com/teams/brooklyn-nets/#f85f585f57eb https://money.yahoo.com/ average-ticket-prices-nba-team-100000563.html 8 Koolhaas shared his horror that, in 2015, three months after OMA’s visit to the site to discuss the potential for making the ancient city a protected, vibrant emblem for the city, it was systematically destroyed by ISIS, who used the amphitheater as a stage for the execution of 25 Syrians.
INTRODUCTION
11
PRADA RUNWAYS & SHOWS
49
2008 FALL/WINTER MENSWEAR
108
2014
PRADA RUNWAYS & SHOWS
109
IN THE HEART OF THE MULTITUDE As an inversion of the traditional catwalk configuration, AMO conceives a set built around the perimeter of the audience, which sits on an irregularly-shaped central island. Visitors experience a streetscape: models weave about in front of and under large blocks that loom over the public and radically redefine the boundary and size of the main room. The stage is entirely built in wood. Graffiti art of women cover the perimeter blocks, while the catwalk is covered in industrial rubber as a clear reference to urban environments.
PRADA RUNWAYS & SHOWS
111
For the 2016 Fall/Winter show, AMO takes inspiration from the traditional public stages and places of civic ceremony. Placed around the periphery of the room, a system of balconies and tribunes defines the central space. Similar yet different, they create an imbalanced symmetry. A raised viewing platform is inserted into the middle of the room, dominating the catwalk.
144
2016
This assemblage of structures breaks through the building, expanding into the surrounding streets and urban domain. A new entrance, marked by a ceremonial gateway, creates a passage from street to show. Guests gather on the balconies, tribunes, and central platform in crowds according to a series of spatial hierarchies. No longer bystanders, they become active participants in the ritual unfolding around them.
PRADA RUNWAYS & SHOWS
145
146
2016