Before he designed a single building, Rem Koolhaas wrote for a living. In the late 1960s he was a reporter for the Haagse Post, a Dutch weekly, sent out to cover the ordinary business of a small country working through its own quiet convulsions of modernity. He wrote film scripts on the side: a Dutch feature called The White Slave, co-written with a school friend, and later a screenplay for the American soft-core director Russ Meyer that never reached the screen, the kind of credit that architecture schools tend to leave off the syllabus. None of this is incidental. Most architects arrive at buildings by way of drawing: a boy with a set square, a girl who likes making models, an adolescence spent admiring bridges. Koolhaas arrived by way of sentences. He had spent his twenties learning to notice things, to compress an afternoon of observation into a paragraph a reader would actually finish, to find the story inside a situation that had not yet organised itself into a story. When he turned to architecture, he did not stop being a journalist. He changed his beat. The city became his subject, and he went on treating it the way a good reporter treats any subject: by watching closely, refusing the easy moral, and writing it up with rather more relish than the material strictly deserved.
Koolhaas is the most serious case study the last century offers of optimism in built form. He loved the metropolis, and loved it precisely for its delirium, the reckless confidence with which Manhattan stacked incompatible worlds on top of one another and called the result a city. He documented that optimism in Delirious New York, built for it across three decades of increasingly large commissions, and then, in the essay Junkspace, wrote its obituary, a catalogue of what the same commercial logic produced once it escaped the island that had made it thrilling. His most gifted student, Bjarke Ingels, inherited the method whole, kept the yes, and discarded the doubt, and the question that hangs over both careers is which of those two stances is the more serious: the master's diagnosis, which changed nothing about his own practice, or the student's confidence, which never asked.
His first and most important book does not read like an architecture book at all. Delirious New York, published in 1978, opens not with a discussion of form or structure but with a scene: a young European, unaffiliated and unknown, arrives in Manhattan in the early 1970s and falls for a city that almost everyone with professional opinions about cities has by then agreed to despise. This was the New York of white flight and fiscal crisis, of Jane Jacobs's warnings against Robert Moses's superblocks, a city that appeared in the newspapers mostly in connection with muggings, bankruptcy, and the famous tabloid headline instructing it to drop dead. Respectable architectural opinion held that Manhattan was a cautionary tale, a demonstration of what happens when density and commerce are allowed to run without the correcting hand of planning. The dominant strand of postwar thought, descending from Le Corbusier's manifestos of the 1920s and administered ever since by two generations of earnest municipal technocrats, held that tall buildings were acceptable only when they stood apart from one another in open parkland, well spaced, well ventilated, each tower an island of order in a green sea, the whole arrangement calculated to prevent exactly the crowding, noise, and functional confusion that Manhattan supplied in such abundance. Le Corbusier himself had visited New York in 1935 and come away disappointed, on grounds that read as faintly comic now: the skyscrapers were too small, he announced, and stood far too close together, cluttering the ground with shadow and noise when they should have soared, serene and widely spaced, above a liberated public park.
Koolhaas examined the same evidence and reached the opposite verdict. Where Corbusier saw a good idea badly executed, crowding that a more disciplined masterplan would have corrected, Koolhaas saw the crowding itself as the discovery, the thing a masterplan would have destroyed by trying to fix it. He looked at the skyline everyone else had filed under failure and saw something closer to a work of accidental genius: a utopia built not by theorists but by developers, engineers, and showmen, none of whom would have recognised the word. That gap, between what everyone else saw and what he saw, is where his entire career begins. A quarter of a century later, Koolhaas would look at the direct descendants of the very forces he admired in 1978, the shopping malls and airports and convention centres that grew out of the same commercial logic, and feel something close to the horror his contemporaries had once felt about New York. The distance between those two responses is, properly understood, a story about the limits of optimism itself: about how a way of seeing that illuminates at one moment and one scale can become its own opposite at another moment and another scale, without ever being wrong, exactly, at any single point along the way.
Rotterdam, Jakarta, Cornell
Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944, in the last winter of the German occupation, into a family for whom writing and cultural life were the family trade rather than an eccentric detour. His father, Anton Koolhaas, was a novelist and screenwriter who also held a position in Dutch cultural administration, and in the early 1950s the family moved to Indonesia, where Anton worked in a cultural capacity for the newly independent republic. Rem was about eight when they arrived and in his early teens when they returned to the Netherlands. It is tempting, and probably too neat, to draw a straight line from a Dutch boy's years in tropical, chaotic, newly postcolonial Jakarta to an adult fascination with congestion and disorder as generative forces rather than problems to be solved. Biographies rarely work in such straight lines. But it is fair to say that Koolhaas grew up without the assumption, so deeply built into postwar European planning culture, that order is simply what a well-run city looks like. He had seen a great, teeming, improvised city function, after its own fashion, without very much order at all, and the sight seems to have left a permanent mark on how he read urban chaos ever afterward: not automatically as failure, but as a phenomenon that might, on closer inspection, be doing something intelligent.
Back in the Netherlands he became a journalist, and it was as a journalist that he first encountered architecture seriously, covering the profession rather than practising it. He was, by his own later account, unimpressed by architecture as it was then taught and discussed in Europe: earnest, technical, weighed down by the moral hangover of postwar reconstruction, in which the correct performance of humility and social responsibility had become a kind of house style. He had, in short, listened to the profession talk about itself at length before deciding to join it, an experience that deters most people. In 1968 he enrolled at the Architectural Association in London, at the time one of the few schools in Europe willing to treat architecture as an intellectual and even a literary problem rather than a purely technical one. There he studied under Elia Zenghelis, a Greek architect whose thinking ran toward large, provocative urban propositions rather than tasteful detailing, and who would shortly become his partner. Koolhaas later spent time at Cornell University in upstate New York, drawn there by Oswald Mathias Ungers, a German architect and theorist preoccupied with the city as a field of large, legible, almost archetypal forms. And it was during his American years, above all during long stretches in New York itself, that the material for Delirious New York was gathered: Koolhaas walking Manhattan, digging through the archives of old architectural journals and property records, treating the city's built fabric the way he might once have treated a stack of interview transcripts, as evidence to be assembled into an argument nobody else had quite made.
The two teachers pulled in different directions, and the tension between them runs through everything he later did. Zenghelis treated the studio less as a place to learn how buildings stand up than as a place to learn how an idea about a city might be made to seem inevitable on paper; his drawings argued for a city by sheer force of image rather than by technical demonstration. Ungers worked from the opposite temperament, austere and rigorous, reading the city as a composition of clear, almost Platonic forms, squares and circles and grids repeated at different scales, an architecture of legible order rather than of provocation. Koolhaas took something from each without becoming a disciple of either: Zenghelis's appetite for the bold, declarative image, and Ungers's insistence that a city could be read as a coherent system of forms if one looked at it patiently enough, even a city, like Manhattan, that had never been designed as a system at all. The combination explains a great deal about the finished character of Delirious New York, a book that reads Manhattan's messy commercial history as though it were as deliberately composed as one of Ungers's diagrams, and argues for that reading with all of Zenghelis's polemical confidence.
Few architects work this way round, and the oddity explains a great deal of what follows: why Koolhaas's writing has the tone of cultural criticism rather than professional advocacy, why he is as comfortable analysing a Chinese television network or a Prada handbag as a building, and why, when his own argument eventually curdled, he was equipped, as almost none of his peers were, to write the curdling down.
Delirious New York and the culture of congestion
Delirious New York carries the subtitle A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, and the joke buried in that subtitle is in earnest, because it tells you exactly how to read the book. A manifesto is normally written in advance of the thing it calls for: a plan, a set of demands, an argument for a future that does not yet exist. Koolhaas's manifesto works backwards. Manhattan already existed, in more or less finished form, by the time he wrote about it. What he proposed was not to call the island into being but to write down, as though it had been a single coherent ideology all along, the theory that he believed its builders, developers, and engineers had been unconsciously enacting for the better part of a century, without ever quite admitting to themselves what they were doing. Nobody who put up a Manhattan skyscraper in 1910 thought of himself as executing a philosophical programme. Koolhaas's conceit was to read the buildings as though they had been executing one anyway, to give the doctrine a name, Manhattanism, and to write, on the builders' behalf and after the fact, the manifesto their instincts had never bothered to produce. A manifesto written after the buildings are finished does, it should be conceded, enjoy an unusually high rate of fulfilled predictions.
The theory he extracts goes by the name he gives it in the book: the culture of congestion. The argument runs roughly as follows. Manhattan possessed, by historical accident rather than design, three technologies that together made something new possible. The first was the grid, imposed on the island by the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, a piece of real-estate administration rather than urban vision, drawn up by commissioners who would have been alarmed to learn they were visionaries, which divided Manhattan into a repeating pattern of rectangular blocks with almost no variation: no monumental avenues, no grand civic set pieces, nothing but an indifferent, endlessly extensible mesh. Where a European city plan encodes a hierarchy, a cathedral square at the centre, boulevards radiating outward, ordinary streets diminishing toward the edges, the Manhattan grid encodes no hierarchy at all. Every block is, on paper, as important as every other block. The second technology was the elevator, which did to the vertical dimension of a city block what the grid had already done to its horizontal dimension: it made height available on the same undifferentiated, repeatable basis, so that the fortieth floor could be reached with exactly the same ease as the fourth. The third was the steel frame, which relieved a building's exterior wall of the job of holding the building up, so that height was no longer limited by the thickness of masonry a lower floor could bear.
Put those three things together, Koolhaas argues, and you get a piece of real estate, the standard Manhattan block, that can be built up almost indefinitely, floor stacked on floor, with no architectural or structural reason for what happens on any one floor to bear the slightest relationship to what happens above or below it. A grid indifferent to what happens within each block, combined with a vertical structure indifferent to what happens on each floor, produces a building type that is not really a single building in the old sense at all. It is a vertical accumulation of unrelated and often incompatible worlds, each a self-contained universe, stacked like a pile of unrelated books, connected only by the elevator shaft and the address on the front door. Koolhaas even coined terms for the two ruptures involved, and the coinages have the surgeon's bluntness he favoured: the lobotomy, for the severing of a building's exterior from its interior life, so that the façade no longer tells the truth about what goes on behind it, and the schism, for the mutual independence of the stacked floors. His larger name for the whole phenomenon, the culture of congestion, is meant literally. Not merely a lot of people packed into a small space, though it is that too, but an entire way of organising urban life around the deliberate, almost gleeful collision of activities and fantasies that have no business being anywhere near each other, and the discovery, made and remade by generation after generation of New York builders without any of them writing it down, that this collision was not a problem to be managed but the whole point.
His paradigmatic example, the one later readers remember best, is the Downtown Athletic Club, a modest, unglamorous tower completed in 1930 in lower Manhattan, which Koolhaas reads as the culture of congestion's purest built expression. The building stacked a men's club vertically: a boxing gymnasium on one floor, an oyster bar close by, and, several storeys up, an interior golf course, laid out inside a Manhattan tower as though acreage were no object, which, in a building organised on this principle, it was not. Koolhaas fixes the whole absurdity in a single image, describing, in words to this effect, men eating oysters in boxing gloves, naked, on an upper floor of a skyscraper. It is not recorded that the members considered themselves an avant-garde. Members rarely do. None of these programmes had the slightest logical relationship to the others. A man could box on one floor, eat oysters on another, and play a round of golf on a third, all inside a single street address, all served by the same elevator bank, and the exterior gave almost no hint of any of it, presenting to the street the calm, more or less uniform masonry face of a perfectly ordinary office building. This is not simply an amusing bit of programming trivia. The façade and the interior life have parted company entirely, the lobotomy performed to perfection; the tower functions as a vertical Manhattan in miniature, a single address containing multiple unrelated worlds just as the island contains multiple unrelated neighbourhoods; and this separation of interior fantasy from exterior decorum is exactly what makes Manhattan's skyscrapers interesting rather than merely large.
Koolhaas finds versions of the same principle across a wide range of Manhattan's landmark buildings, and part of the book's pleasure lies in watching him apply one interpretive key to structures that seem to have nothing in common. The Waldorf-Astoria, rebuilt on Park Avenue in the early 1930s after its original site was cleared for the Empire State Building, becomes a hotel that had swallowed an entire miniature city: ballrooms, private clubs, and a railway siding running beneath the building so that a president could arrive by train without ever surfacing onto a public street, an amenity whose usefulness was admittedly concentrated among presidents, congestion pursued to the point where the building no longer needed the city outside it at all. Even the Empire State Building, so often treated in popular history as a simple triumph of height for its own sake, is read by Koolhaas as a monument to faith outrunning function: its upper floors, built on pure speculative confidence during a race whose economic logic collapsed with the 1929 crash, stood largely empty for years, the culture of congestion caught in the act of building first and daring a use to catch up.
The book's earlier chapters look for the origin of this instinct somewhere other than Manhattan's office towers, in a place few architectural historians before Koolhaas had thought to look: Coney Island, the amusement resort at the southern tip of Brooklyn, which by the turn of the twentieth century had become an entire artificial landscape of manufactured sensation, built expressly for the pleasure of an urban working public that had never before been offered anything of the kind. Coney Island had electric light on a scale nobody had seen, mechanical rides that simulated disaster and rescue for entertainment, whole fabricated environments, even a ward of premature babies in incubators presented, with a straight face, as popular amusement. Koolhaas reads Coney Island as Manhattan's unconscious laboratory, the place where the culture of congestion was first rehearsed in cruder, more literal form, before the island itself, a few miles north, worked out how to build the same principle into permanent architecture rather than seasonal spectacle. What Coney Island did with cheap, disposable structures and crowds arriving by ferry for an afternoon, Manhattan would go on to do with steel frames and elevators and permanent occupancy: manufacture artificial worlds, stacked without any organic relationship to their surroundings, engineered purely to produce sensation and revenue.
The tone in which all of this is delivered matters as much as the argument, and wants describing precisely, because later readers sometimes flatten Koolhaas's early enthusiasm into something more naive than it was. Delirious New York is an exuberant book, written with evident delight, sentence after sentence turning some piece of grubby commercial history, a corrupt zoning negotiation, a developer's scheme to squeeze one more floor out of a lot, into an unwitting avant-garde gesture. Its method is itself a borrowed provocation: Koolhaas openly adapted what Salvador Dali had called the paranoid-critical method, the surrealist's technique of imposing an obsessive interpretation onto found material until the evidence appears to organise itself around the obsession, and the book devotes a memorable late chapter to Dali and Le Corbusier circling New York, each projecting his own fantasy onto the same skyline. Koolhaas treats the men who actually built Manhattan, the developers and engineers rather than the credentialed architects, as unconscious visionaries, artists who never knew they were making art, and who would have been baffled, probably irritated, to hear themselves described that way. Here the book's quarrel with mid-century planning orthodoxy becomes explicit. The prevailing wisdom of the postwar decades held that a healthy city needed light, air, and separation: distinct zones for living, working, and recreation, buildings set well apart, density treated as a symptom of urban sickness to be cured by clearance and dispersal. Koolhaas's Manhattan is the flat contradiction of all of it. Density, in his telling, is not the disease. It is not a medical category at all. It is simply what a great city is, the collision and superimposition of unrelated lives and enterprises in the smallest possible space, and Manhattan's grid, elevator, and steel frame had, without any planner's permission, built more of it, more successfully, than any deliberately planned city on earth.
The reaction against modernism, associated in the United States with Jane Jacobs, had by then argued, in a book that shaped a generation of urban thought, that healthy cities depended on fine-grained mixed use, short blocks, old buildings kept standing alongside new ones, and above all a dense, informal street life that large-scale redevelopment tended to destroy. Koolhaas's Manhattan sits comfortably in neither camp. It is far too dense and commercially ruthless to satisfy Jacobs's affection for the small-scale and the incremental, built as it largely was by developers with no interest whatever in preserving anything, and far too indifferent to light, air, and formal order to satisfy the modernists. Delirious New York invents a third position, one that shares Jacobs's love of density and mixture but locates it not in low, old, fine-grained streets but in the single skyscraper, reimagined as an entire miniature city compressed into one address. It is a deliberately awkward position, sympathetic to both camps and aligned with neither, and the awkwardness is part of what keeps the book alive rather than letting it settle into a period document of its own decade's arguments.
And yet the subtitle keeps insisting on itself. A manifesto written after the fact, retroactively, for a phenomenon its supposed advocates never knew they were advocating, is not quite the same thing as a simple celebration. There is a joke inside the book's entire structure, and the joke is at the expense of manifestos as a genre, of the whole architectural habit of writing confident position papers about what buildings ought to do. Even in his most enthusiastic book, Koolhaas keeps one hand slightly behind his back, retaining the journalist's habit of noticing the absurdity of a situation while reporting on it with real relish. Which is why the disgust that surfaces in Junkspace a quarter century later is not, on close inspection, the arrival of a wholly new and contradictory sensibility in a man who had previously felt none of it. It is the escalation of a doubt that had been present, faint but detectable, from the very first page.
OMA, built at scale
Delirious New York would have remained a brilliant, essayistic provocation, the kind of book architecture students photocopy and pass around without ever quite knowing what to do with it, had Koolhaas not gone on to build. In 1975, three years before the book's publication, he had already founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, OMA, in London, together with Elia Zenghelis and two artists: Madelon Vriesendorp, who was also Koolhaas's wife, and Zoe Zenghelis, Elia's wife, whose paintings gave the practice's early competition entries a visual imagination that pure architectural drafting rarely achieves on its own. The office later moved its main base to Rotterdam, Koolhaas's home city, where it remains headquartered. For its first decade and a half OMA built comparatively little of consequence; it was an idea before it was an office, sustained by teaching, the growing reputation of the book, and competition entries, the profession's standing arrangement whereby a dozen offices work for months so that one of them can be paid. The lag matters. It means the culture of congestion spent roughly fifteen years as pure argument before it had to answer to a client, a budget, a planning department, and a building code, the four disciplines that reliably separate an architectural idea from an architectural reality, which is a lower bar than it sounds, and one a great many brilliant architectural manifestos never clear at all.
The Kunsthal in Rotterdam, completed in 1992, put the theory properly to the test, and it remains one of the clearest demonstrations of what the culture of congestion looks like when compressed into a single, modestly sized art centre rather than spread across an entire island. The building sits low in a park beside a motorway and a river, and its defining trick is a public route that runs straight through it, a ramp that visitors, and indeed anyone simply cutting across the park, can walk along without ever formally entering an exhibition. Along the way this route deliberately crosses paths with the galleries, so that a person walking through on the way to somewhere else finds themselves momentarily inside an art exhibition, and a visitor to the exhibition finds their route interrupted by people who have no interest in the art at all. Different circulation paths, for different purposes and different publics, are made to collide rather than being kept politely separate: exactly the operating principle Koolhaas had extracted from the Downtown Athletic Club, scaled down from a vertical Manhattan tower to a single low building beside a Dutch motorway, and no less deliberate for the change of scale.
The most moving of OMA's buildings from this period, and the one that shows what the method could do when pointed at a single human life rather than a public, is the house the office completed outside Bordeaux in 1998. The client was a French publisher who had been left paralysed by a car accident and used a wheelchair; his brief, as Koolhaas has recounted it, was the opposite of what one might expect. He did not want a simple house adapted to his condition. He wanted a complex house, because the house would define his world. OMA's answer was three houses stacked on top of one another: a cave-like lower level half buried in the hillside, a glass-walled middle level open to the valley, and a heavy concrete upper level, punched with porthole windows, that appears to float weightlessly above the transparency below it, the heaviest part of the house resting on the lightest. At the centre of the section, and of the client's life, sits the house's real invention: a hydraulic platform the size of a room, roughly three metres by three and a half, which serves as the man's office and moves between all three floors, sliding past a bookshelf wall three storeys tall so that the entire library remains within his reach. When the platform is on one floor it completes that floor; when it moves, it leaves a hole. The house is never finished, never whole, always reconfigured around the movement of one man. In Manhattan the elevator had been congestion's enabling device, the neutral machine that made the stacking of worlds possible; in Bordeaux the elevator becomes the inhabitant's own room, almost the inhabitant himself, and the culture of congestion turns inward, compressed into a single family's daily life. The client lived in the house only a few years before his death, and a later documentary about the building, following the housekeeper who must actually clean its cantilevers and mop around its machinery, is affectionately merciless about the gap between an architectural masterpiece and a practical home. Both things are true of it, which is somehow fitting.
In 2000 Koolhaas received the Pritzker Prize, the profession's highest honour, at a point when his catalogue of major completed buildings was still comparatively thin. The award recognised, as much as anything, a way of thinking: the books, the diagrams, the reorientation of an entire discipline's conversation. The buildings that would justify it in steel and concrete were mostly still to come.
The Seattle Central Library, completed in 2004, is generally reckoned OMA's most successful realised building, and the reasons for its success are instructive. Koolhaas and his partner on the project, Joshua Prince-Ramus, began not with an image of what a library ought to look like but with an unusually literal diagram of what a library actually does: a careful accounting of all the activities a contemporary library needs to house, book stacks, reading rooms, meeting spaces, a computer lab, an auditorium, staff offices, parking, each with its own space requirements, its own relationship to daylight, its own need for quiet or its own tolerance of noise. Rather than fitting this list into a predetermined box, the architects let the requirements generate the building's shape, consolidating the stable functions into five compact platforms, stacking the platforms with looser public space flowing between them, and wrapping the whole assembly in a faceted skin of glass and diagonal steel bracing that reads, from the street, as a single crystalline, faintly unstable form. The building's most celebrated interior gesture, a continuous spiral of book stacks that climbs through several floors without a single break, came directly out of the same diagrammatic thinking: the practical problem of a collection that needs room to expand indefinitely, solved by turning the solution into the building's spine, so that the Dewey decimal system itself becomes a continuous ramp rather than a set of disconnected floors. The librarians, members of a profession not celebrated for gambling, took some persuading, and to their credit consented to be persuaded. Seattle's public response was, by the standards of contemporary civic architecture, remarkable, and critics across the stylistic spectrum credited the building with reviving interest in what a library could be, at a moment when many American cities had all but given up on the public library as a building type worth taking seriously. It stands as OMA's clearest demonstration that the culture of congestion, disciplined by a rigorous functional diagram, could still produce something a broad public would embrace without reservation.
The CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, completed around 2012 for China Central Television, tells a considerably more complicated story, one best told without evasion in either direction. The building is an engineering feat of the first order: a continuous loop of a tower, two leaning shafts rising from a shared base and joined near the top by a vast right-angled cantilever, an irregular, almost gravity-defying silhouette that Beijing residents nicknamed, with the city's characteristic bluntness, big pants, on account of its resemblance to a pair of trousers straddling the skyline. As a piece of architectural sculpture it is extraordinary, and as a diagram it extends the culture of congestion once more, this time to the scale of an entire television network: production, broadcasting, administration, and public-facing space folded into a single looping circuit rather than the conventional arrangement of a tower for offices and a separate low block for studios. But CCTV is also, inescapably, the headquarters of the propaganda and censorship apparatus of an authoritarian one-party state, an organisation whose daily function includes the suppression of exactly the kind of open, unregulated collision of ideas and publics that Koolhaas's own writing had spent decades celebrating as the mark of a healthy urban culture. The criticism this drew, at the time and since, from architects, journalists, and Chinese dissidents, was serious and fair, and in its sharpest form it runs like this: not merely that Koolhaas took the commission, which any large practice might have done, but that his sophistication made the taking worse rather than better, that a man who writes brilliantly about complicity and then proceeds to be complicit has used his irony as a laundering mechanism, the knowingness performing the absolution. On this reading, the critic who says I know exactly how compromised this is, and builds anyway, is more culpable than the naif who never asked. Koolhaas has, to his credit, engaged with the charge directly rather than pretending it does not apply, arguing at various points that architects who refuse all compromised commissions end up building nothing at all, that abstention is itself a position with consequences, and that engagement, even with unattractive power, can be more useful than the clean hands of distance. Whether that argument persuades is a question each reader must settle alone; that it is an argument, made in the open, rather than a dodge, nobody need dispute. A tragedy attaches to the project, and to slide past it would be a cheat. In February 2009, during Chinese New Year celebrations, an illegal fireworks display set ablaze the adjacent Television Cultural Centre, the hotel and cultural building OMA had designed as CCTV's companion structure. The fire killed one firefighter, injured others, and gutted the building, which stood as a burnt shell for years before eventual renovation. It was not a failure of OMA's design in any direct sense; the fireworks violated the city's own regulations. But it belongs to the same story, a reminder that buildings of this scale sit inside a world of real risk, real regulatory failure, and real human cost, and an honest account of Koolhaas's career has to let the fact stand rather than tidy it away.
Between Seattle and Beijing, OMA completed Casa da Musica in Porto, opened in 2005, a concert hall that arrived at its faceted white exterior by an unusually candid route: by the office's own account, the design began life as a scheme for a private house, which Koolhaas, facing a deadline, scaled up to the size of a concert hall, a procedure no school recommends, an origin story he has told with more amusement than embarrassment and one that says a great deal about his faith in the diagram over the site. The building reads from the surrounding square almost as an alien object dropped into the middle of a conventional Portuguese city block, an angular white solid, tilted and cut, resting on a travertine plaza that skateboarders adopted almost immediately. Inside, the main auditorium is a simple shoebox, the acoustically proven shape, but its two end walls are of corrugated glass, so that daylight and the city pour into a room that convention insists should be sealed, and a rehearsal in progress becomes, almost incidentally, a spectacle for anyone walking past. It is a smaller and in some ways a more purely architectural achievement than either Seattle or Beijing, unencumbered by the political weight the CCTV commission would soon carry, and it confirmed, if confirmation were still needed by 2005, that Koolhaas's diagrammatic method could produce buildings of real formal beauty and not only buildings of intellectual interest.
Whatever one thinks of any individual building, the arc of the writing, from Delirious New York's delight to Junkspace's horror, is real, documented in Koolhaas's own words across a quarter century, and it maps with unusual precision onto the question of optimism and its limits.
None of this is a scandal peculiar to Koolhaas; it is the ordinary condition of ambitious architecture everywhere, from Renaissance Florence to contemporary Doha, and it would be both unfair and unilluminating to single him out for a compromise his entire profession shares. The fact will not stay quiet, though, and it is better set down without excuses on one side or sermons on the other, because it forms the backdrop against which Junkspace's later disgust must be read. Koolhaas did not arrive at his horror as an outside observer of development's excesses. He arrived at it as a man who had spent three decades building the things he was describing, for the clients willing to pay for buildings of that scale and ambition, which is a very particular vantage point from which to write a diagnosis: closer to a surgeon's memoir than a public health pamphlet.
S,M,L,XL and the theory of Bigness
By the mid-1990s Koolhaas had accumulated enough built and unbuilt work, and enough writing, to attempt something no architect of his stature had quite tried before: a single book that would hold the whole of it. S,M,L,XL, published in 1995 in collaboration with the graphic designer Bruce Mau, runs to something like thirteen hundred pages and weighs enough to serve as a doorstop for a fairly serious door; the bulk is not padding but part of the argument, though the book is best read at a table, since it punishes the lap. Rather than organising the material by chronology, the order in which projects were designed and built, or by building type, the usual museum-monograph categories of houses, offices, and civic buildings, Mau and Koolhaas organised the book by physical scale: Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, the categories that give the book its title. A private house sits in the Small section regardless of when it was designed; a city-scale masterplan sits in Extra-Large regardless of whether it was ever built. Built and unbuilt projects are mixed without apology, since for Koolhaas an unbuilt scheme is not a failure to be hidden but a piece of thinking every bit as legitimate as a completed building. Essays, diary entries, and long sequences of images without captions interrupt the project descriptions throughout, while a dictionary runs continuously down the margins, an alphabetical procession of quotations and definitions that has nothing directly to do with the pages it accompanies, so that reading the book straight through, which almost nobody does, feels less like reading a monograph than being handed an encyclopaedia crossed with a scrapbook crossed with a novel. This was itself a claim about how architecture ought to be discussed: that the tidy monograph, one project after another in respectful chronological order, flatters architecture by pretending it is a form of steady, cumulative professional progress, when in fact ideas recur, contradict each other, get abandoned and revived, and refuse to sit still in neat categories, and a book about architecture should have the courage to look as disordered as the thinking actually was.
The book's most durable intellectual contribution is a short essay inside the Large section titled Bigness, or the problem of Large, and the jargon that has accreted around it in architecture schools conceals an idea of great simplicity. Koolhaas's claim is this: once a building passes a certain threshold of sheer size, something changes that has nothing to do with style or intention. A modest building, a house or a small office block, can still be understood by a person standing in front of it or walking through it; its parts add up, more or less, to a whole a human mind can hold, and that whole can still be made to relate sensibly to its street, its neighbours, its city. Past a certain scale, this stops being possible. A building large enough, a vast corporate headquarters, an airport terminal, a hospital complex, simply contains too much, and its interior organisation becomes too complex, for any of it to be grasped as a single coherent composition, either by the person inside it or by the city around it. The building's relationship to its own parts breaks down, and so does its relationship to its context. A building of sufficient size no longer belongs to its street in any meaningful sense, because it has become, in effect, its own weather system, a self-contained world whose logic is generated from within rather than negotiated with what surrounds it.
The conventional architectural response to this condition, going back at least to the urban design debates of the 1960s, was to treat it as a failure to be corrected: break the big building up, mask its bulk, force it back into some pretence of relating politely to the smaller buildings nearby, dress it in a contextual skin so that it does not look quite as enormous as it is. Koolhaas's argument in Bigness is that this wastes the very quality that makes a big building interesting. Rather than apologising for its scale, an architect should treat Bigness as a new condition with its own freedoms, since a building large enough to have become its own context is thereby released from an obligation smaller buildings can never escape, the obligation to make polite formal conversation with the neighbours. A big enough building can simply be itself, pursue its own internal logic on its own terms, and the resulting incoherence between building and surroundings, rather than being covered up, can be treated as a legitimate, even exciting feature of the contemporary city. The essay's most notorious moment is a two-word sentence in which the whole duty of contextualism is dismissed with an obscenity, a line usually quoted with more glee than understanding; in context it is less a vandal's boast than a diagnosis, a statement that at a certain scale the courtesy of fitting in has already become impossible, whether the architect performs it or not.
S,M,L,XL contains a second essay, quieter than Bigness but arguably just as consequential, called The Generic City, and it belongs in this account because it extends the same logic in a direction that anticipates Junkspace even more directly than Bigness does. In it Koolhaas considers the contemporary city not in its famous, historically encrusted examples, not Paris or Rome or even Manhattan, but in its ordinary, rapidly multiplying contemporary form: the airport-adjacent business district, the tower cluster beside a ring road, the kind of urban fabric being thrown up at astonishing speed across Asia and the Gulf states in the 1990s, indifferent to history, indifferent to local identity, built to a schedule and a budget rather than to any inherited civic tradition. His argument, delivered in a deliberately flat, almost bureaucratic tone he would soon push much further, is that the Generic City should not be mourned for its lack of identity. The effort to give every new development a distinct local character is, in his account, mostly wasted, a thin decorative exercise papering over a deeper and more interesting truth: most of what a city now needs to do, house people, move them, employ them, entertain them, can be done identically almost anywhere, and this interchangeable quality, rather than being a loss, might simply be the honest face of a globalised urban condition. It is a colder, more clinical essay than Bigness, written with less evident delight, and reading the two side by side inside the same enormous book, one can watch Koolhaas's tone shifting in real time: the exuberance of Delirious New York still present in Bigness, noticeably thinner by the time The Generic City arrives a few hundred pages later, as though the book itself were quietly rehearsing the turn that Junkspace would complete a few years afterward.
AMO and the restlessness beyond building
Around 1998 Koolhaas founded a second organisation alongside OMA, called AMO, a mirror of the parent office's initials, conceived as a research and media practice operating in parallel with the building practice rather than subordinate to it. The distinction matters. AMO does not exist to produce marketing materials or renderings in support of OMA's architectural commissions, although it has occasionally done work that resembles that; it exists to let Koolhaas and his collaborators pursue questions that architecture, strictly defined as the design of buildings, has no obvious way of answering, questions about branding, politics, media, and the countryside, pursued with the same seriousness as a building commission but without the obligation to end in a structure anyone has to build and pay for.
AMO's work has ranged widely enough that summarising it risks sounding like a list of unrelated hobbies, which is more or less the point. It undertook a long collaboration with the fashion house Prada, extending well beyond store design into questions of how a luxury brand constructs meaning, research that fed into flagship stores in New York and Los Angeles built to function less like shops than like stage sets for the performance of shopping itself, an idea with an obvious kinship to the concerns that would shortly surface in Junkspace. It carried out research into the visual identity of the European Union, at a moment when the Union was groping toward some coherent public image of itself, and produced, among other things, a proposal to replace the EU's circle of stars with a flag of vertical stripes compressing all the member states' colours into a single dense band, instantly nicknamed the barcode: an odd and telling commission for an architecture office, and evidence of how far Koolhaas had come to see branding, political identity, and spatial design as versions of the same underlying problem. He directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, the event at which the profession gathers every two years to exhibit itself to itself, under the theme Fundamentals, turning away from the customary showcase of star architects' latest projects and asking instead for an examination of the basic elements of architecture itself, floors, walls, windows, corridors, stripped of authorship and treated as a shared, almost anonymous vocabulary, a curatorial choice that reads, in retrospect, as another expression of the same suspicion of the individual heroic gesture that Junkspace had already voiced. And in early 2020 he mounted an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York called Countryside, The Future, which turned his attention, after nearly five decades spent almost entirely on the dense urban condition that had made his name, toward the rural world: the vast, sparsely populated territories that most contemporary discourse about architecture simply ignores, and which Koolhaas argued had been undergoing a technological and economic transformation, automated farming, data centres, climate engineering, at least as radical as anything happening in cities, while almost nobody with a public platform was paying attention. Koolhaas has never renounced Delirious New York, and continues to describe it, when asked, as a book he stands behind; he had simply, by his seventies, grown restless with his own most famous subject.
Junkspace
Around 2001 Koolhaas published an essay that reads, on first encounter, as though it had been written by someone else entirely. It appeared first in the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, part of a larger, characteristically exhaustive Harvard research project into the architecture of consumption that Koolhaas had directed, and it was republished in 2002 in the journal October under the title Junkspace. Where Delirious New York and S,M,L,XL, for all their length and eccentricity, remain recognisably works of argument, building a case with evidence and, in their own way, structure, Junkspace abandons argument's usual courtesies altogether. It reads less like an essay than a fever: a long, breathless cascade of observation and denunciation, sentence tumbling after sentence with barely a paragraph break to catch hold of, aphorism piled on aphorism the way the spaces it describes pile escalator on atrium on food court. There is no introduction to speak of, no development, no conclusion; the essay could stop almost anywhere, and for long stretches seems to be trying to. Reading it is meant to be slightly exhausting, and this is plainly deliberate. The sentences work the way the travelators in its subject matter do, each one delivering the reader onto the next with no obvious point of exit. The form enacts the condition it describes: a space with no clear beginning, middle, or end, which simply goes on until the reader, like the shopper inside it, loses track of how long they have been there. Fredric Jameson, reviewing the essay at length, treated it as a major piece of writing about late capitalism rather than a professional document about buildings, and he was right to; it may be the only essay by a working architect that literary critics quote more often than architects do.
There is a pun buried in the title, of the kind Koolhaas has always been fond of, and it repays drawing out because it is not merely decorative. Junkspace echoes junk space in the literal engineering sense, the wasted, unusable gaps left behind inside a large mechanical or structural system, and it echoes, too, the increasingly familiar phrase space junk, the debris of dead satellites and spent rocket stages now orbiting the earth indefinitely, useless, unrecoverable, slowly accumulating; the essay's opening lines make the second echo explicit. Both are doing real work. Junkspace, in Koolhaas's account, is exactly this kind of debris: the residue of a century of architectural ambition, still occupying space, still costing money to heat and light and renovate, but emptied of the purpose and idealism that first justified its construction, drifting on in a permanent, directionless orbit around the cities it no longer really belongs to. It is not what was built when modernisation succeeded; it is what coagulates while modernisation is running its course, the fallout of progress rather than its monument.
What Junkspace catalogues, in this breathless mode, is a type of space that by the turn of the millennium had become so common across the developed and developing world as to be almost invisible, precisely because nobody had bothered to describe it as a coherent category before. Koolhaas's list, expanded and varied throughout the essay, includes shopping malls, airport terminals, hotel atria, casino floors, cruise ships, convention centres, the renovated lobbies of once-distinguished older buildings: the endless, seamless, climate-controlled interior environments that late-twentieth-century commercial development had been producing everywhere at once, with a consistency of feeling that transcended almost every difference of country, climate, and culture. His central claim, made at deliberately overwhelming length rather than argued in the tidy, linear fashion of an academic paper, is that Junkspace is what remains once modernism's architectural ambitions have been stripped of their idealism and reduced to pure commercial expedience: the descendant, several generations removed, of the modern movement's own dream of a continuous, flexible, technologically enabled interior world, but pursued now purely for revenue rather than for any of the social or aesthetic ideals the modernists once professed. Where a modernist architect of the 1920s hoped that an open, flowing, technologically sophisticated interior might liberate its occupants, Junkspace's version of the same interior exists to disorient them just long enough to extract another purchase. Air conditioning, in Koolhaas's telling, is the quiet villain of the piece: the technology that removed the last natural limit on how far an interior could extend, and thereby made possible a building with no reason ever to stop.
Everything hinges on the essay's central move, which is easy to state too quickly, so take it slowly and in plain words. Delirious New York had found, in Manhattan's densely stacked, commercially driven towers, something to admire: an accidental civic vitality, unrelated activities piled on top of each other inside a single address, treated as evidence of a great city's health rather than its sickness. Junkspace looks at spaces built by exactly the same underlying commercial logic, the maximisation of activity and revenue per square foot, extended forward a further quarter century, and freed from the one condition that had made Manhattan's version of the logic bearable, even joyful: the specific, accidental, historically inherited fact of a real street grid underneath the towers. However strange a skyscraper's interior life became, the building still had to answer to a public realm of sidewalks and avenues, an address, a door, a relationship to a street that anyone could walk down without paying for the privilege. Strip that away. Let the same congestion-seeking commercial logic operate in a placeless, artificially lit, climate-controlled interior with no grid beneath it and no public street anywhere in sight, an airport terminal that could be almost anywhere, a mall identical whether it sits in Dubai or Ohio, and what you get is no longer a thrilling accident of urban vitality. It is something closer to a nightmare: endless, self-similar, disorienting by design, a space engineered to erase a visitor's sense of scale, of direction, and above all of time, precisely because a disoriented visitor stays longer and buys more before finding the way out.
The essay's most quoted observations, recounted here in their sense rather than claimed as exact transcription, concern the peculiar amnesia these spaces induce: a shopper or a traveller who cannot, minutes after arriving, recall which entrance they came in through, because every entrance has been made identical to every other by the same escalators, the same recessed lighting, the same conditioned air, so that the space offers no landmark by which memory could fix a point of arrival. It is a small, almost comic image, and Koolhaas plainly means it to raise a laugh even as it describes something troubling: a space engineered to defeat the most basic form of spatial memory a human being possesses. The circumstances of the essay's composition sharpen its point rather than undercutting it. Junkspace grew directly out of the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, a vast research project Koolhaas directed in the late 1990s in which teams of his students at Harvard's Graduate School of Design spent years compiling statistics, interviews, and historical research on the architecture and economics of shopping, an undertaking that dispatched some of the most expensively educated young designers alive into food courts with clipboards, tracing how the department store, the shopping mall, the airport retail concourse, and eventually the museum gift shop had each in turn absorbed more of the total built environment, and how commercial floor space had become, over the course of the twentieth century, one of the dominant organising forces in how cities actually get built, whatever a city's official plans might claim about its priorities. Junkspace is not, in other words, a young man's impressionistic complaint about shopping malls, dashed off after an unhappy afternoon at an airport. It is the essayistic residue of a large, well-funded, empirically serious research project, distilled from thousands of pages of data and interview transcripts into a single, deliberately overheated piece of prose, and that is precisely why it carries the authority it does. Koolhaas had spent years studying the thing he was denouncing, in exactly the patient, evidence-gathering mode his journalist's training had first taught him, before allowing himself the essay's cathartic release of feeling.
The essay goes on in this vein at length, denouncing the endless, unfinished, permanently renovating character of these environments, always under partial reconstruction, a wall going up here while a ceiling comes down there, so that the space is never, at any single moment, in a finished state a visitor could fully take in; and denouncing, too, the peculiar placelessness of Junkspace's aesthetic borrowings, its habit of quoting historical styles and regional motifs, a bit of colonial revival here, a hint of local vernacular there, entirely detached from any of the specific meanings those styles once carried, deployed purely as atmosphere, a kind of architectural white noise meant to reassure rather than to signify anything in particular. Even the materials come in for indictment: the sealant, the drywall, the mirror and the stretch ceiling, surfaces chosen because they can be endlessly joined, patched, and replaced, an architecture of caulk where there was once an architecture of stone.
This is not a repudiation of Delirious New York. The ambivalence was present from the beginning. Junkspace is simply the moment at which the appalled half of that original ambivalence, always there, always faintly audible beneath the earlier book's delight, finally takes the microphone and refuses to give it back.
What the arc actually shows
It would flatter this story to present it as a simple conversion, an idealistic young man giving way, across three decades, to a disillusioned older one, but that narrative is too tidy for what actually happened, and the places where it will not fit are the instructive ones. Koolhaas did not retire from commercial architecture after writing Junkspace, chastened, to build modest civic buildings in quiet penance. He went on, in the years immediately following and ever since, to complete the CCTV tower for the Chinese state, to run a large international practice serving exactly the kind of corporate and governmental clients whose commissions had produced the spaces Junkspace denounced, to sustain AMO's commercial branding work for a global luxury house. And Junkspace itself, read as prose rather than only as argument, is not a document of despair. It is a document of evident relish, written with the same stylistic bravado, the same pleasure in language and observation, that animates Delirious New York; a writer in true despair does not produce sentences this alive, this eager to find one more grotesque detail for the catalogue. An unresolved tension sits in the middle of all this, and smoothing it over would help nobody: a man capable of writing one of the most damning architectural essays of his generation, and then going back to work the following Monday building more of exactly the thing the essay had damned. That is not hypocrisy, quite. It is closer to what happens when a diagnostic intelligence and a professional practice occupy the same body and refuse to reconcile.
The more interesting claim is not about Koolhaas's personal consistency or the lack of it. It is about what his career, read as a single long experiment conducted in real time and at real scale, actually demonstrates about the nature of optimism. Koolhaas took one idea, that density, scale, and commercial vitality are, properly understood, urban virtues rather than urban pathologies, and traced it all the way through: from its early, unbuilt, purely intellectual form in a young journalist's retroactive manifesto, through three decades of increasingly large built commissions, to its full, planetary-scale maturity in the placeless interiors Junkspace catalogues. What he discovered, by pursuing a single logic further and more literally than almost anyone else was willing to, is that an idea can be true, productive, and gloriously optimistic at one scale and one historical moment, and can become something close to its own opposite at another scale and moment, without there being any single point along the way at which the idea itself was simply wrong. The congestion that made 1920s Manhattan thrilling and the congestion that makes a contemporary airport transfer hall dehumanising are, in Koolhaas's own account, not two different phenomena that happen to share a name. They are the same logic, extended further, and stripped of the specific conditions, a real street grid beneath the towers, a public realm open to the whole public rather than merely to paying customers, a real diversity of activities rather than an endless repetition of the same retail formula, that had made the earlier version of the idea bearable, even joyful, rather than merely efficient. An idea about density is not the same thing as a grid, an elevator shaft, and a street full of pedestrians in 1920s Manhattan.
One further wrinkle complicates the tidy version of this argument in a useful way. Koolhaas did not simply watch his idea travel and curdle from a safe distance, the way a critic might watch a policy he once championed produce unintended consequences decades after leaving office. He was, at every stage, one of the people doing the exporting. It was OMA's own commissions, and OMA's own theoretical output, that helped carry the culture of congestion out of Manhattan and into the vocabulary of a global architecture profession increasingly building airports, malls, and mixed-use towers on every continent, often for clients with far less interest in civic vitality than the accidental, unplanned nineteenth-century property speculators of Koolhaas's own first book. Junkspace is, in this light, not only an outside diagnosis. It is closer to a confession: an author noticing his own fingerprints on the crime scene and choosing to write the report anyway, rather than pretending he had arrived after the fact. That is a harder and more admirable thing to do than it might first appear, and it is one of the reasons Junkspace still reads as more than a clever man's complaint about the modern shopping mall. It is an old hand's reckoning with his own contribution to the problem, written by a man with every professional incentive to look away and an evident personal compulsion, the journalist's compulsion, not to.
The pupil who kept the diagram and left out the doubt
Bjarke Ingels worked at OMA in the years around the turn of the millennium, during the period when Koolhaas's practice, having built the Kunsthal and begun the Seattle library and expanded into the vast, restless research operation that would become AMO, stood at something close to the height of its intellectual authority over the profession. Ingels had trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, with a period at the architecture school in Barcelona, and by his own account the years at OMA left a permanent mark on how he thinks about the discipline: not the specific forms Koolhaas's office produced, but the underlying method, the habit of treating a building's design as the visible outcome of a diagram, a piece of reasoning about site, programme, and constraint that could be drawn, in a few boxes and arrows, before a single wall was ever put on paper, and then presented to a client, or to the public, as though the building had simply followed logically and almost inevitably from the diagram, rather than being the product of taste, aesthetic preference, or purely formal ambition dressed up afterward in the language of necessity. This was, in effect, exactly the rhetorical move S,M,L,XL had made at book length: strip the design decision down to a functional argument, however selectively construed, and let the resulting form appear to be simply what reason demanded rather than what an architect happened to want.
In 2001 Ingels left OMA and founded PLOT in Copenhagen together with a fellow OMA veteran, Julien De Smedt, and when that partnership dissolved in 2005 he founded BIG, the Bjarke Ingels Group, on his own, in the same city. What followed was one of the fastest expansions in the recent history of the architecture profession: from a small Copenhagen office to a firm with, by most published counts, several hundred staff, at times approaching seven hundred, and outposts in New York, London, Barcelona, Shenzhen, and Los Angeles, all within not much more than a decade. It was a growth curve almost without precedent for a practice not attached to a global engineering conglomerate, and it testifies to how effectively Ingels's version of Koolhaas's method translated into commissions.
Ingels laid out his own theory of architecture in 2009, in a book called Yes Is More, a title that corrects Mies van der Rohe's less is more by one word and means the correction, and the form of the book is as revealing as its content. It is presented not as a conventional monograph or a written manifesto in the tradition Koolhaas had gently mocked in his own subtitle, but as a graphic novel: panels, speech bubbles, a cartoon version of Ingels himself walking the reader through each project as though guiding a tour. This is, quite obviously, an heir's gesture toward S,M,L,XL's insistence that architecture be argued through images and diagrams rather than through conventional written prose, but it is the gesture stripped of everything that had made Koolhaas's version of it difficult. Where S,M,L,XL runs to more than a thousand deliberately disordered pages, mixing essays, unbuilt schemes, and image sequences without captions in a way that resists easy consumption, Yes Is More is a brisk, cheerful, entirely legible pitch, closer in its actual reading experience to an illustrated sales deck than to an encyclopaedia. The coinage Ingels attaches to his own approach, pragmatic utopianism, states the difference from his old employer as plainly as a coinage can. A building, in Ingels's account, does not have to choose between serving hard practical demands, density targets, construction budgets, energy performance, and being formally exuberant, playful, optimistic in spirit. It can be both at once, and the choice architecture had supposedly always faced, between doing good and looking good, between the responsible and the delightful, is, in Ingels's telling, simply a false choice that a sufficiently clever diagram can dissolve.
The projects that built this reputation repay attention, because they show, with real clarity, both what Ingels kept from Koolhaas's method and what he left behind. The early Copenhagen housing projects, built while Ingels was still working with De Smedt and in the first years of BIG on its own, the VM Houses of 2005, the Mountain Dwellings of 2008, and the 8 House of 2010, all apply the same underlying trick: take an ordinary, unglamorous building programme, in this case mass housing, and let a functional diagram, rather than a conventionally pleasing facade, generate the building's dramatic form. The Mountain Dwellings stack a car park and a block of flats together so that each apartment gets a sloped roof terrace sitting directly above the parking structure below, an arrangement presented, with a large printed image on the building's parking facade, as a mountain of homes rising above a foothill of cars, a piece of showmanship Koolhaas himself would likely have appreciated even while raising an eyebrow at its total sincerity. The 8 House weaves two connected slabs of housing into a figure-eight plan, with a continuous sloped pathway that allows residents to cycle from the ground floor all the way to the building's upper apartments without ever using a lift, an inventive solution to the problem of maintaining street-level sociability in a large housing block, borrowed in spirit directly from the same instinct that had produced the Kunsthal's crossing circulation routes fifteen years earlier: ordinary movement made to collide productively with other kinds of movement rather than kept in separate, polite channels. What these buildings share, and what distinguishes them from Koolhaas's own late work, is their register. They are warm, legible, and immediately likeable in a way that OMA's buildings, even at their most successful, rarely bother to be, since OMA's buildings are generally more interested in making an argument than in making friends. Ingels himself is relentlessly cheerful in photographs, which in a profession historically committed to black clothing and difficult spectacles amounts to a theoretical position, and the buildings take after him.
BIG's international breakthrough beyond Scandinavia came by way of an unusually literal piece of showmanship: the Danish pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, for which Ingels's office shipped an actual working harbour swimming pool, of the kind Copenhagen had built on its own redeveloped waterfront, halfway around the world and installed it inside the pavilion, along with the original bronze cast of Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue, temporarily relocated from its own harbour for the occasion, so that Chinese visitors could swim in Danish harbour water a few feet from the actual statue that ordinarily presides over it. The gesture tells you almost everything about the difference in temperament between master and student. Koolhaas's OMA had, a few years earlier, built an entire state broadcaster's headquarters in the same country and produced, in doing so, a serious and unresolved argument about complicity with state power. Ingels arrived in China with a swimming pool and a beloved bronze mermaid and produced an unambiguous crowd favourite, one of the most visited pavilions at the entire Expo, with no controversy attached to it at all.
The projects that followed confirmed the pattern at ever larger scale. VIA 57 West, completed in New York in 2016, took the courtyard housing block, a European type, and folded it into something closer to a tetrahedron, a single sloped, faceted tower that opens a private courtyard toward the Hudson River while presenting a dramatic angular profile to the street, applying the same let-the-diagram-generate-the-form method that had produced the Mountain Dwellings a decade earlier, now at the scale of a Manhattan high-rise. BIG's involvement with the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, in the long-disputed design for what would become Two World Trade Center, put Ingels's practice, for a time, directly into the heart of the same New York skyline Koolhaas had made his name writing about, a commission repeatedly redesigned and delayed as tenants and site politics shifted, and one that stands, whatever its final built form turns out to be, as a reminder that BIG's ambitions had by the 2010s scaled up to match the largest and most symbolically freighted commissions in America. The Lego House, completed in the small Danish town of Billund in 2017, stacks a set of interlocking, oversized building-block volumes into a public square and exhibition space for the toy company that made the town famous, a building that is, quite unapologetically, a literal architectural pun on its client's product, built to be photographed by children before it is admired by architects. BIG's headquarters work for Google, in Mountain View and in London, the latter designed jointly with the British designer Thomas Heatherwick, applies the firm's diagrammatic warmth to the single most commercially powerful client type of the early twenty-first century, the technology campus, in buildings whose sweeping, tented, plant-covered forms are engineered, as much as anything, to communicate a benevolent, informal, unthreatening version of corporate power to a wary public. Even Ingels's speculative work follows the pattern outward: BIG's master plan for Telosa, a proposed new city for the American Southwest backed by private investment and organised around ideals of shared land value, is pure S,M,L,XL in its ambition, a whole city imagined from a single diagram, but pursued with none of the historical grounding that had made Koolhaas's own city-scale thinking, whatever its faults, an argument rather than a pitch.
The clearest single image of what Ingels's inheritance actually amounts to is CopenHill, the waste-to-energy plant at Amager, on the edge of Copenhagen, completed in 2019 and known locally as Amager Bakke. The building's function is about as unglamorous and purely infrastructural as architecture gets: it burns household waste to generate electricity and district heating for the city, a piece of civic plumbing that in most cities sits, by design, out of sight and out of mind, walled off behind chain-link fencing on some unlovely industrial edge of town. Ingels's office gave the building a sloped roof, engineered as a functioning ski slope with artificial turf standing in for snow through the warmer months, open to the public, along with a climbing wall on one of the building's flanks and hiking trails threading across the roof for anyone who simply wants a view over the city. The plant's function and the roof's recreational life operate simultaneously. A Copenhagener can, quite literally, ski down the side of the machine that is, at that moment, incinerating the city's rubbish for electricity. It is, as far as anyone has been able to establish, the only power station in the world with a ski season.
Read in Koolhaas's own terms, CopenHill is a small, cheerful reincarnation of exactly the material Junkspace catalogued with horror seventeen years earlier: industrial infrastructure, an endlessly repeatable programmatic type found identically in cities the world over, dressed up and layered with an unrelated recreational programme in precisely the collision-of-activities spirit that Koolhaas had first celebrated in the Downtown Athletic Club and then come to fear in the shopping mall. The method is Koolhaas's own, transmitted directly through Ingels's years at OMA: let the diagram, waste plant below, ski slope above, generate a form that looks inevitable once built and was in fact nothing of the kind. What is missing, entirely and by evident design, is the ambivalence. Where Junkspace finds in the endless layering of unrelated commercial programmes a disorienting, dehumanising placelessness, CopenHill presents an almost identical structural move, industrial function layered beneath recreational fantasy, as an unqualified civic gift: publicly beloved, photographed from every angle, cited constantly as proof that infrastructure need not be ugly and that a building can do its unglamorous job and still delight the public at the same time. It is Koolhaas's diagrammatic confidence rebuilt by his own former employee with none of Koolhaas's later doubt attached to it at all.
The critical case against Ingels is no footnote, and it goes straight to the question of which stance is the more serious. One line of argument, pressed over the years by senior critics on both sides of the Atlantic, holds that the firm's accessible, instantly graspable diagrams, the very quality that makes Ingels's presentations so persuasive to clients and so popular with the public, come at a real cost to architectural depth: a building explained fully by a single clever diagram risks having nothing more to offer once the diagram has been understood, no accumulating richness on repeated visits, no mystery left over once the initial trick has landed. A related and harder worry holds that BIG's fluency in producing warm, marketable, instantly communicable architectural images sits closer to the discipline of marketing than to architecture as a form of sustained cultural or spatial thought, that the firm has, in effect, perfected the art of the pitch at some cost to the art of the building. These are not frivolous objections, and they cannot be waved away simply because the buildings in question are popular and photogenic. There is an opposite temptation, and it is the cheaper of the two: the reflexive suspicion, common enough among architecture critics, that anything likeable and easily explained must for that very reason be shallow. Public affection for a building is not nothing. CopenHill did not become one of the most photographed buildings of its decade by accident, and the pleasure Copenhageners take in skiing down the side of their own rubbish incinerator is a real civic good, however modest, that a more austere and more intellectually defensible building might well have failed to produce. Koolhaas's own late-career ambivalence, hard-won as it is, is not obviously a more useful or a more honest stance for a working architect to hold than his student's confidence. It is simply a different stance, and a considerably more troubled one, arrived at only after decades of building the very things his student was, by the 2000s, building afresh with none of the same hesitation.
Yes is more, and what a discipline loses when it stops asking
End, then, with the two men's respective relationships to irony, because the difference is not a matter of temperament alone; it is where the real argument finally lands. Koolhaas's entire career, from the arch, self-undercutting subtitle of his first book onward, has been conducted at a certain ironic distance from its own enthusiasm. Even at his most exuberant, describing the Downtown Athletic Club's golf course and oyster bar with the evident glee of a man who has found exactly the anecdote he wanted, Koolhaas never quite lets the reader forget that a retroactive manifesto is a slightly absurd thing to have written, that he is imposing coherence on a history that had none, that the whole undertaking is, in some part of itself, a performance rather than a simple statement of belief. That ironic distance is precisely what gave him room, a quarter century later, to turn the same intelligence on the descendants of his own earlier enthusiasm and find something closer to horror there, because a mind that has never fully believed its own manifesto is a mind that retains the freedom to revise it.
Ingels's manifesto carries no such distance. Yes Is More is titled, and argued, without a flicker of Koolhaas's self-consciousness; it means exactly what it says, and its confidence is total rather than performed. This is not a small difference of style. It is the difference between an architecture built on a diagnosis that has learned to doubt itself and an architecture built on the same diagnosis's method, extracted cleanly from the doubt and put back into circulation as pure, marketable confidence. One further observation about the critical case rehearsed above belongs here, because it cuts in a direction that favours neither man entirely. The critics in question write from within a tradition, architectural criticism as practised in serious newspapers and journals across the second half of the twentieth century, that has itself always prized depth, difficulty, and slow-earned meaning over immediate popular appeal, and in whose working vocabulary difficult is a compliment and pleasant something closer to an accusation, a tradition with its own biases and its own blind spots, not a neutral instrument for weighing Koolhaas against Ingels. A critic trained to admire buildings that reward repeated, patient study will always be somewhat suspicious of a building that gives up its meaning at first glance, whatever the merits of that meaning turn out to be, and one should at least entertain the possibility that some of the coolness toward Ingels among senior critics reflects this inherited taste as much as it reflects any failure specific to BIG's actual buildings. None of which settles the underlying question. It simply means that the dispute between the two camps is not a dispute between disinterested judgment and mere popularity, but between two different and equally partial accounts of what architecture is for.
Whether the extraction of the method from the doubt represents an advance or a loss is a question better left open than settled by fiat, because a persuasive case exists on both sides. It might be a real advance: an architect who found a way to keep building at Koolhaas's scale and with Koolhaas's diagrammatic method, serving the same corporate and municipal clients, working within the same commercial pressures that eventually curdled Koolhaas's own enthusiasm, without being crushed under the weight of his teacher's later disgust at what that confidence tends to produce when let run unchecked. A profession entirely populated by Koolhaases, endlessly diagnosing the horror of what it is itself continuing to build, might simply be a profession that has talked itself into paralysis, and there is something to be said for a student who looked at the diagnosis, took the parts that were still useful, and got back to work with his doubts left at the door. On this reading it is the student, not the master, who holds the more serious position: the one who accepts that buildings must actually get built, and that a doubt which changes nothing about one's practice is less a moral achievement than a private indulgence.
Or it might be something closer to a kind of forgetting, a willed innocence purchased by the simple expedient of declining to ask the question that Junkspace forced its author to sit with for the length of an entire essay: what happens to a building's diagram once it has been extended far enough, repeated often enough, exported to enough cities with no real public street beneath it, that the very conditions which made the diagram delightful in its first instance have quietly been withdrawn. CopenHill is a wonderful building to ski down, today, in Copenhagen, a small northern European city with a strong public sector, a functioning waste-management system, and a citizenry that trusts its own institutions enough to take a ski trip up the side of an incinerator without a second thought. In the spirit Koolhaas's own later writing insists on, one has to ask what the same diagram becomes once it has been repeated a hundred times over, in a hundred different cities, under a hundred different sets of civic conditions, some of them a great deal less trustworthy than Denmark's. That is not a question anyone else can answer on Ingels's behalf, and it is not obviously a question that has occurred to him with anything like the force it once occurred to his teacher.
The real subject here, in the end, is not a competition between the two men, and it would be a mistake to read it as one, since Koolhaas remains, on any fair account, the deeper and more consequential figure, and Ingels the gifted student who took one part of an unusually rich inheritance and ran with it rather than the man who absorbed the whole of it. Resist, too, the temptation to imagine that Koolhaas's own late-career choices settle the matter in his favour. He has continued, into his eighties, to run a large international practice, to accept commissions from the same category of powerful client that Junkspace's own logic implicates, and to publish and exhibit at a rate most architects half his age would struggle to match. He has not retreated into a life of pure critique, writing essays about buildings other people build. This suggests that Koolhaas himself has never fully resolved this tension, has perhaps concluded that resolving it is not actually the job, and continues instead to hold the doubt and the ambition in the same hand, publishing the diagnosis on Monday and returning to the drafting table on Tuesday. That is not a comfortable place for a career to sit, but it may be the only honest place available to someone who has traced an idea as far as he has.
The real subject is what a discipline, or for that matter a person, loses and gains when a diagnostic, ambivalent way of seeing the world is passed on to an inheritor determined to build only its more optimistic half. Something is plainly gained: buildings that get built rather than merely diagnosed, infrastructure that becomes a civic pleasure rather than a suppressed embarrassment, a public that gets to enjoy architecture rather than merely read essays about its discontents. But something is very probably lost as well: the capacity to notice, in the moment of one's own greatest confidence, the exact point at which a good idea, pursued far enough and generalised widely enough, quietly turns into something one would no longer recognise, let alone endorse, if one still had the honesty left to look. Koolhaas earned that honesty the hard way, over three decades and at real cost to the tidiness of his own biography. Whether his most talented student will ever need to earn it in the same way, or whether he has simply found a way to keep building happily without it, is not a question either man's career has yet finished answering.