Normally I am a big fan of the writing in the New Yorker. It’s elegant, sometimes witty and often precise and descriptive. Even the piece on the British foxhunting debate, which portrayed Britain in a modern version of the old sweeping stereotypes, was just about within my tolerance. I just read it as a fun story rather than a serious piece about the real world. And let’s face it, for many, many Americans – even the educated liberal middle-classes who form the New Yorker’s core audience, Europe is just a fun story, a place to go on holiday. So, despite the occasional wrongheaded opinion piece and the articles about other cultures which fail to pick up on the cultural nuances, I’m always glad to see the latest issue sitting in the mail box. It’s a good read and I can accept the bad apple in the barrel.
Daniel Zalewski’s article about Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, head of the OMA agency, which appeared in the March 14th issue, is more than a bad apple. It’s so rotten it deserves to be reproduced in Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner. Zalewski lapses into hyperbole so frequently during his chase to capture his subject on paper that I wondered briefly if I was reading a complex parody. I wasn’t. Koolhaas isn’t some invention of the author. He lives, he breathes, he wears self-consciously trendy spectacles, he heads a firm called the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. He is also, according to Zalewski, worthy of comparison to the greatest of renaissance men.
In the same way that you can envision the block of marble from which Michelangelo sculpted his “Moses,” you can practically see the block of foam from which an OMA building was carved.
If this in itself is not enough to elicit a guffaw, it gets better (or worse). Zalewski soon undermines his own praise of Koolhaas’ genius by revealing that Koolhaas came to architecture after his movie De Blanke Slavin (White Slave), (1969) bombed. It was made in collaboration with Rene Daalder, who has directed four exploitation movies since. I tracked down the trailer of one of Daalder’s more recent efforts, Habitat, (1997). I had problems playing the video, but a few seconds were more than enough. A cut-price James Earl Jones breathily intones “In the future even breathing will be deadly. We must mutate to survive.”
Surprisingly the Dutchman is not the master of the arts the Italian was.
Clearly enchanted by his subject, Zalewski meticulously records the period he was privileged to spend in the great man’s company and in the process unwittingly exposes him to ridicule. Failing to notice the absurdity of maxims like “the cosmetic is the new cosmic,” he pops them all into the article. As it progresses Koolhaas sounds more and more like a caricature of a genius performed by an intellectual conman.
On Sunday afternoon, as Koolhaas inspected ongoing projects on the second floor, he walked to a balcony overlooking the first floor and nodded with satisfaction at the grid of beige workspaces below, which could have been lifted from an Atlanta office park. All you could see outside the long row of windows was a four-lane road with the occasional car zipping by. “This is one of my favorite views,” he said. “It is a testament to globalization. It is banal, it affords no pleasure, it could be anywhere.” He smiled.
Later Zalewski records an incidence of manipulative bullying as if it’s astute negotiation.
During my visit to Rotterdam, he sometimes directed orders at his Dutch project managers by spittle-screaming into his cell phone in his native tongue, which, in its more splenetic forms, is relatively transparent to an English speaker: “Idioot!”; “Dom!” Upon hanging up, he would glide back into polite conversation, suggesting that what I had witnessed was not uncontrolled rage but, rather, calculated manipulation – the rhetorical companion to his tactical use of wit.
Best of all, though, is when Zalewski draws attention to Koolhaas’ shortcomings as an architect and tries to present them as his greatest strength.
Koolhaas has no particular interest in drawing. […] Designers such as Gehry and Libeskind are gifted with a pencil, and often establish a building’s form on paper. […] They have a deft, idiosyncratic “master’s hand” that informs all their office’s work; the undulating facade of a Gehry building is instantly recognizable. Koolhaas’s unpolished draftmanship could be seen as a handicap, but it actually opens him up creatively. Whereas Gehry’s buildings tend to be circumscribed by his tendency to draw with sensual curves, Koolhaas has no fixed repertoire of artistic flourishes.
Firstly, why are artistic flourishes a bad thing in high-concept architecture? Secondly, why does Koolhaas have no fixed repertoire, no signature? Zalewski explains:
Ole Scheeren, one of Koolhaas’s four senior partners, told me, “People think Rem creates everything, but he doesn’t. He often reacts to the creations of his staff.” Joshua Ramus, the partner in charge of the Seattle library project, said, “The remarkable thing of which Rem is the author, explicitly, is the office’s process. A thousand years from now, that’s what people will say was truly new about Rem. What the OMA process focusses on isn’t the creator but the critic. In our way of working, the important person is the one who is shown various options and then makes a critical decision. The result is better architecture.”
Is it? Is it really? At this point, halfway through the article, I had to give up. I hope that later on Mr. Zalewski recognises the human side of the great architect and tones down the metaphors and the starry-eyed arslikhan. Sadly, I don’t expect him to have done so. I imagine the interview was permitted on the grounds that Koolhaas’ press department could veto it. As such it’s a fascinating example of how the rich and powerful generate their own hype.
In my opinion a far better and more typical New Yorker article was Burkhard Bilger’s piece of 14th February about a Czech professor of shoe technology’s research into the merits of sandals owned by Otzi the iceman, who was found preserved in an Austrian glacier in 1991. But then, I do love a good pair of shoes.
