Architecture 2.0: Koolhaas v. Napoleon III

In today’s Seattle Times, Mark Rahner talks to architect Rem Koolhaas about ego, empathy and architecture. What I find particularly insightful is Mr. Koolhaas’ vision of his role, both then and now, as a facilitator, teammate, and bureaucrat.

Bureaucrat?

Not his words, but the idea has some currency in that many of Mr.
Koolhaas contemporaries, and even some up-and-coming architects seem to
want to deploy similar rhetoric to keep form appearing to cultivate a
cult of personality.

Here’s Mr. Koolhaas responding to the idea that the OMA’s Seattle
Central Library design was widely attacked as an egotistical affront to
the city and its citizens:

“Yes, but of course we
were not alone. And I think that is kind of actually one of the
difficult and distorting things at the current moment, is that
basically some architects are seen as kind of almost bullfighters who
somehow have to kill an animal, but you’re part of a much larger
enterprise.”

The crux of the sentiment is that public architecture is about ‘the
public’ and no single personality should be able to force a vision upon
the masses. From this point of view the architect’s role is reduced to
one of a kind of machine. This idealized architect/machine should take
his or her artistic, theoretical and practical experience and
synthesize it with ‘the will of the people”. The outcome of this
process is assumed to be a kind of Super-architecture, not achievable
without the process of discovery central to the idea—a kind of
“Architecture 2.0″.

But this ‘process of discovery’ amounts in reality to a series of
bureaucratic hurdles; meeting after meeting, public input forums and
city, state and/or corporate approval processes. It is
design-by-committee, and that is never good. Never.

Mr. Koolhaas would argue that this point of view is a-historical,
naive and unrealistic; it doesn’t consider the realities of major
public projects, it doesn’t understand the pressure of paying clients,
the media, the organization.

But consider this; architecture has been called many things—life,
death, war, peace, thought, idea, being, becoming, science,
engineering, art, philosophy, literal, metaphorical and so on. It is
all these and more. But the best architecture—that which moves us and
makes the world a better place for its very existence—is the result of
a singular vision, a passionate voice, an individual artist’s unique
solution to the problem at hand. This is not “Fountainhead”
romanticism. It is instead, the very definition of art.

There are many examples to support this idea—Corbu, Gaudi, Wright,
Eames—but my favorite is Napoleon III’s transformation of Paris between
1853 and 1870; Second Empire Paris. Yes, Napoleon Bonaparte III—the
famed nephew of Napoleon I, and leader of the February Revolution of
1848—was in my opinion one of the greatest ‘architects’ in modern
history. It was Napoleon’s vision [not his minion Haussman's, the
bureaurocrat who executed the ideas; see "Transforming Paris" by David P. Jordan, and "Designing Paris" by David Van Zantan]
that transformed Paris from Medieval nightmare to the Modern marvel it
is today. And while it is a fascinating and complicated transformation,
it is essentially the story of one man’s will to transform a city and
it’s architecture.

Architecture at its best, is art. And art at its best is a singular
vision of the world told with sometimes brutal honesty. It can console,
enrage, question, enlighten. Without it, life would be sterile, lonely,
banal—much like the products produced by design-by-committee, be they
buildings, houses, movies, television or music.

Returning to Mr. Koolhaas, I believe his is an exceptional vision
which needs no tempering by committee, corporation or bureaucracy.
Re-read Delirious New York or S,M,L,XL
if you need to be reminded. Imagine some of those raw ideas taking form
in the real world, without concessions, compromises and petty
narrow-minded dumbing-down so common in today’s Architecture 2.0.

Give the power, and the responsibility, back to the artists. Then
stand back in amazement at the new world we will all be lucky enough to
live in.

I can’t wait.

[Read the entire Seattle Times interview here...]