Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas

Book excerpt: Rem Koolhaas (born in 1944) has been part of the international architecture avant-garde since the nineteen-seventies. His numerous worldwide awards include the Pritzker Prize in 2000 for his lifetime achievement.This book interprets his many buildings and projects for the first time through his own comprehensive theoretical oeuvre, comprising polemics manifestos, books about cultural studies such as Delirious New York, and so-called “design patents”. Rem Koolhaas developed an evolutionary design method that linked theory and practice, whereby an idea is applied to several projects and combined with others in different ways, so that it is continuously evolving. The book not only combines this architectural knowledge with the intellectual history of the concepts, but also reinterprets the function of the authors or the architects and their originality.