Koolhaas, Rem
Koolhaas, Rem
(Remmet Lucas Koolhaas), 1944–, Dutch architect, b. Rotterdam. He began his career as a journalist and screenwriter, moving to London in the late 1960s to study architecture. Koolhaas is widely viewed as the most intellectually challenging, audacious, and influential architectural thinker of his generation; until the 1990s he was primarily known as a theorist. He founded (1975) and heads the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). His cutting-edge work defies categorization; it is innovatively functional and often uses inexpensive everyday materials. Among his completed commissions are the Netherlands Dance Theater, The Hague (1987); the vast Euralille urban complex, Lille, France (1994); the Dutch Embassy, Berlin (2003); the McCormick Tribune Campus Center, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago (2003); and the arklike Casa de Música, Oporto, Portugal (2005). His most acclaimed projects include the Central Library in Seattle (2004), featuring an irregularly angled and cantilevered glass-and-steel exterior and, in the interior, a soaring reading room and spiral of bookshelves; the CCTV Headquarters, Beijing (2011), whose two tapering, inward sloping 50-story steel-and-glass towers are joined at the top by an angled 13-story bridge, creating a large five-sided empty space in the center; and the Prada Foundation's arts campus in Milan (2015–18), which includes 120,000 sq ft (1,115 sq m) of exhibition space, a cinema, and a gallery tower having one face concrete with loggias, another glass cantilevered over the street, and the last huge cables within a gigantic beam. Koolhaas is the author of Delirious New York (1978, repr. 1994), about the city's architecture and density; S, M, L, XL (1994), about OMA's projects; and several other books. He received the Pritzker PrizePritzker Prize,officially The Pritzker Architecture Prize
, award for excellence in architecture, given annually since 1979. Largely modeled on the Nobel Prize, it is the premier architectural award in the United States and is named for the family that founded the
..... Click the link for more information. in 2000.