Posts Tagged ‘Koolhaas’

Koolhaas: It’s the end of an era

Friday, April 24th, 2009
"Library Side East" by Stephen L. Rosen
Rem Koolhaas, who designed the Seattle Central Public Library, and more recently the CCTV Building in Beijing, told the Wall Street Journal that money is scarce for megaprojects, even for him.

“I don’t even know about the word ‘downturn,’ ” Koolhaas told the WSJ in his office in Rotterdam. “It seems simply the end to a period.”

Though his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, hasn’t had any projects canceled yet, Koolhaas said they have several projects on hold.

And they’ve had to make layoffs. WSJ reported that the firm, which had 270 employees last summer, is now down to 220. OMA is working on a theater complex in Taipei, a library in Qatar and new buildings in Holland, WSJ reports.

Has your firm had layoffs too? Respond to the poll on the right (scroll down just a tad) on area layoffs at A/E/C firms.

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“The bigger a building is, the harder it is to make wonderful”

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

In addition to a bubble-gum story about hot new twenty-somethings and an almost-too-thorough play-by-play of the fall

the-national-center-for-the-performing-art-designed-by-paul-andreu.jpg
The National Center for Performing Arts, by Paul Andrieu
of Bear Stearns, this month’s Vanity Fair has an exploration of the feats of architectural genius and engineering prowess on display at Olympic sites in Beijing.

Accompanied by some really breathtaking shots by Stephen Wilkes and Todd Eberle, the article fawns over Beijing’s “daring commissions” and “creatively humanistic design.”

An interesting point made by Kurt Andersen in the piece: The Olympics often bring a flood of outstanding architecture to its host city, but in the case of Beijing, that effort has bled into buildings that could otherwise be mundane.

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Rem Koolhaas' China Central Television office building
These type of additions are usually hastily erected, while the gloss is turned elsewhere.

Like Foster + Partners’ new $3.8 billion terminal at the Beijing airport and Rem Koolhaas’ China Central Television office building (shown at left), building types that Andersen says “very seldom turn out better than mediocre.”

Andersen embarks on an exploration of the architecture and the phenomenon, complete with comparisons to turn-of-the century New York, Koolhaas “snarling” and the author finding himself an “apologist” for the authoritarian regime and its role in the transformation. A fun read.

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Posted in Architecture, Engineering | 3 Comments »