Bringing XL Back Home: Having completed huge projects in Asia, Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture apply their strategies for building extra-large to the small city in which they are based.
When I went to Rotterdam to see the largest single building in The Netherlands, the eponymous De Rotterdam by OMA, it reminded me of something. But I couldn't put my finger on it.
Too Big To Fail?: Long awaited and much debated, the enormous headquarters for CCTV finally opens, already a symbol of the new Beijing. But what does it actually say about architecture and China today?
Promising to “kill the skyscraper,” Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues at Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) grabbed international attention in 2002 when they won the competition to design a huge headquarters in Beijing for China Central Television (CCTV).
In an exhibition he organized at the New Museum in New York City last year, Rem Koolhaas took the preservation movement to task, arguing that it had become an “empire” all too successful at tying the hands of architects and suffocating daring thinking.