Rem Koolhaas's latest book, S,M,L,XL, seems almost as large as some people's buildings (3kg, The Monacelli Press). His buildings can be as big as towns, huge urban dreams such as the Euralille development in Lille. The 52-year-old Dutch architect has made a reputation as an iconoclastic visionary, seeing urban life as a fluid, largely chaotic "culture of congestion" over which architects can assert virtually no lasting control. And who would want to ? Not Koolhaas. His love of the urban condition is surpassed only by his mania for the unknown, the untenable, the unmanageable and the untried.
Wired: Is architecture behind the times ?
Koolhaas: Architecture has been defined in terms of one activity, and that activity is adding to the world. The same intelligence for adding ought to also deal with its debris. It's a very depressing phenomenon that we can deal with decaying conditions in the city only by weak attempts to restore them or to declare them historical. It would be much more powerful and creative to use other tactics, such as taking away something and then building something entirely new. One of the ambitions of S,M,L,XL is to extend the repertoire, which also includes, for instance, not doing anything, or asking somebody else to do something - both of which are, curiously, things that an architect never does.
Where do you see the future of architecture going ?
With globalisation, we all have more or less the same future, but Asia and Africa feel much more new. I've been doing research in China recently, investigating cities that emerge suddenly, in eight years or so, seemingly out of nothing. These places are much more vigorous and representative of the future. There, building something new is a daily pleasure and a daily occurrence.
You're doing a big project in China now, aren't you ?
Yes. Its working title is City of Exacerbated Differences. It is in the Pearl River Delta. It's not a single city but a region inhabited by a cluster of very diverse cities such as Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Guangdong, Zhuhai and Macau. Together they may represent a new model of the megalopolis, in the sense that their coexistence, their functioning, their legitimacy is determined by their extreme mutual difference.
What are you learning there ?
In the area we were in designing a building typically takes ten days - and it's three people and three Apple computers. And it's a 40-story building. Others are done in two days. The work definitely becomes more diagrammatic, but maybe more pure at the same time.
It sounds likely to produce a less hospitable environment.
I disagree. People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. That's both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs must mean that it's habitable.
You make it sound like no one's in charge.
Architecture can't do anything that the culture doesn't. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.
Singapore has succeeded, over the last 40 years, in removing any trace of authenticity. And many Asian cities are like this now, seeming to exist of nothing but copies - in many instances bad copies - of Western architecture.
You've said, "I like thinking big. I always have. To me it's very simple: if you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big."Does that explain 1,344 pages of S,M,L,XL?
S, M, L, XL - I am passionate about every scale. But in the '70s and '80s, while the world was in the process of enlarging, architecture was subdividing; there was a self-marginalisation, a fanatical attention to detail, even a language that was splintering. Bigness already existed, as the outcome of inventions such as steel and air-conditioning, but engineering was still being considered a mere afterthought and not a necessary complement to architecture. So the reason to consider Bigness was to find a way to align architecture with the bigness of the new climate.
For a long time, you didn't believe that building was the necessary outcome of designing, and in fact you've built only about 20 projects so far.
S,M,L,XL is deliberately seamless about this, trying to present an absolute equivalence between unbuilt and built, because in a way I think it's a moot point. Of course, it can be very inspiring to build things. But part of the goal of the book was to explore architecture that didn't come to fruition. I was also interested in showing the implications of failure - showing both the calculations and the miscalculations of projects.
The most romantic example of this is the story you tell about a house that the young Mies van der Rohe was commissioned to build by a wealthy woman. After having him design and construct a 1:1 scale model in canvas, she abandoned the project. The story seemed to make a deep impression on you: "I suddenly saw him inside the colossal volume, a cubic tent vastly lighter and more suggestive than the sombre and classical architecture it attempted to embody. I guessed - almost with envy - that this strange 'enactment' of a future house had drastically changed him ... was this canvas cathedral an acute flash-forward to another architecture ?"
Yes! The impact on me was in the fact that the "cancellation" of the house was more dramatic, more important almost, than its realisation. It's a sensation that later, as an architect, I became intimately familiar with.
If "the culture of the 20th century is the culture of congestion," what will the culture of the 21st be ?
The culture of dissemination, dispersal.
Katrina Heron (kheron@wired.com) is Wired US's editor at large.