Rem Koolhaas Can’t Put Down His Pen

By Duncan Mavin

Koolhaas Cool

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Rem Koolhaas is among the elite group known as “starchitects”: well-known architects such as Frank Gehry and Richard Rogers, whose iconic buildings define the skylines of the world’s top cities. A look at some of his designs, including plans for the West Kowloon Cultural District.

Rem Koolhaas sketches constantly as he talks me through his proposal for Hong Kong’s planned US$2.8 billion cultural development.

Mostly he draws grids, in various sizes, but from time to time his pen draws something else: an outline of his plan for the 40-hectare West Kowloon Cultural District, with its signature arched bridge; a giant cuboid letter “M” that seems apropos of nothing in particular; a rough map of Hong Kong’s coastline.

At 66 years old, Mr. Koolhaas is among the elite group known as “starchitects”: well-known architects such as Frank Gehry and Richard Rogers, whose iconic buildings define the skylines of the world’s top cities.

He already has made his mark in Asia, with the Prada Transformer, a shape-changing building that opened in Seoul in 2009, and the mammoth CCTV heaquarters in Beijing that will be completed later this year.

His firm, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture), has also designed the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, which features a three-story floating podium suspended partway up a 246-meter tower that is scheduled for completion this summer. Earlier this week, OMA also was commissioned to produce a new design strategy for Hong Kong’s transit authority that includes building two prototype subway stations, the first of which is expected to open before 2014.

Still, the biggest prize on the table right now is the West Kowloon Cultural District. At an interview in Hong Kong this week, Mr. Koolhaas and David Gianotten—who runs OMA’s Hong Kong office–were keen to stress their commitment to the region.

“What we want to avoid at any cost is that we would be acting or seen as foreign to this whole thing,” says Mr. Koolhaas, referring to the bidding process for the Hong Kong arts and culture project. The OMA office on trendy Wyndham Street, for example, employs 45 people, 60% of whom are from Hong Kong or China. Mr. Koolhaas himself is in the city once a month for a week; Mr. Gianotten has been living in Hong Kong for the past two years.

Though he first visited the Pearl River Delta region around Hong Kong in 1994, he says the development of architecture and planning in Asia has accelerated in the past year or so. In particular, “the education is moving forward in leaps and bounds,” he says. “It’s difficult to say whether we will see the emergence of an Asian school of design. I would say we already see that Asia equals the Western ability. It’s almost more ingenious, more versatile.”

The West Kowloon Cultural District, first touted in 1998 by the city’s then-Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, has been beset by controversy — about its budget and scope, and the initial involvement, now withdrawn, of the city’s powerful private land developers — and dogged by personnel problems. Most recently, the project’s chief executive, Graham Sheffield, quit this month after only five months on the job, citing health reasons.

OMA’s design for the West Kowloon Cultural District features three “urban villages” – an experimental new museum; a marketplace that mimics Kowloon’s street markets with small shops, studios and galleries; and a performance area.

If Mr. Koolhaas’s firm is to win the project, it will have to overcome competing challenges from two other firms with strong local connections. Local architect Rocco Yim Sen-kee’s Rocco Design Architects has put forward a proposal that highlights elements of traditional Chinese entertainment. Foster + Partners—the firm of Britain’s Sir Norman Foster that was behind both HSBC’s Hong Kong headquarters and the city’s Chek Lap Kok airport—won an initial competition for the West Kowloon hub in 2002 before the rules were rewritten in the face of opposition to the involvement of private funding.

All the firms will have had 12 months – a longer period than usual with such bids — to make their case before a final decision is made in March. All three bids have been criticized in some quarters, with opponents of OMA’s plan focused particularly on the curved bridge that links one end of the peninsula-like expanse back to the mainland. (Mr. Koolhaas says this bridge is necessary to promote the best flow of traffic throughout the expanse.)

For Mr. Koolhaas, a former journalist and author, the project appeals to his philosophical nature and his ideas about architecture and design. As he twists the frame on a pair of collapsible spectacles, he says Hong Kong’s government took “a monumental decision” with West Kowloon, an endeavour that on the surface seems to be at odds with the city’s commercial spirit.

“If you see the typical Cantonese incredible ingenuity, and how it applies to culture, [the project] is not so much about changing the nature of Hong Kong as about changing the emphasis,” he says. “We like the rough and tumble [of Hong Kong’s rapid development], but at the same time here and there, we say, ‘This is a public building and let’s give it space to breathe.’”

A successful project could provide a blueprint for other rapidly developing Asian cities where urban planning is sometimes “brutal,” he says. Projecting forward 10 years or so after the West Kowloon project, Mr. Koolhaas says he hopes “Hong Kong has a cultural machine that both directs the local situation and the Asian resurgence, and is also a useful entity for South Korea, the Philippines, for China, Singapore.”

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