The Koolhaas Effect

Architect Rem Koolhaas is involved in aa series of unconventional projects across the globe: "His unorthodox choice of project reflects an impatience with the rules of a profession that he entered only late in life... While Frank Gehry's buildings - like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao - marvel visitors with the boldness of their design, the beauty of their geometrical shapes and the luminescence of their materials, it is the ideas underlying the physical form that make Liebeskind and Koolhaas buildings a lived experience. And if Liebeskind has made a name for himself painstakingly recording the trauma of the 20th century, Koolhaas's ambition is to become the chief architect of political power of the 21st. Three recent projects - the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the CCTV tower in Beijing, and the EU headquarters in Brussels - act as case studies for his granulated understanding of power, and show how he can interpret its subtleties with the same clinical precision that Liebeskind brings to pain."