Rem Koolhaas

His maternal grandfather, Dirk Roosenburg (1887–1962), was a modernist architect who worked for Hendrik Petrus Berlage, before opening his own practice.

Rem Koolhaas has a brother, Thomas, and a sister, Annabel.

His paternal cousin was the architect and urban planner Teun Koolhaas (1940–2007).

Remment Lucas Koolhaas (born 17 November 1944) is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

He is often cited as a representative of Deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.

He is seen by some as one of the significant architectural thinkers and urbanists of his generation, by others as a self-important iconoclast.

Remment Koolhaas was born on 17 November 1944 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to Anton Koolhaas (1912–1992) and Selinde Pietertje Roosenburg (born 1920).

His father was a novelist, critic, and screenwriter.

The family lived consecutively in Rotterdam (until 1946), Amsterdam (1946–1952), Jakarta (1952–1955), and Amsterdam (from 1955).

His father strongly supported the Indonesian cause for autonomy from the colonial Dutch in his writing.

When the war of independence was won, he was invited over to run a cultural programme for three years and the family moved to Jakarta in 1952.

"It was a very important age for me," Koolhaas recalls "and I really lived as an Asian."

As Koolhaas himself has acknowledged, this approach had already been evident in the Japanese Metabolist Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

A key aspect of architecture that Koolhaas interrogates is the "Program": with the rise of modernism in the 20th century the "Program" became the key theme of architectural design.

The notion of the Program involves "an act to edit function and human activities" as the pretext of architectural design: epitomised in the maxim form follows function, first popularised by architect Louis Sullivan at the beginning of the 20th century.

The notion was first questioned in Delirious New York, in his analysis of high-rise architecture in Manhattan.

An early design method derived from such thinking was "cross-programming", introducing unexpected functions in room programmes, such as running tracks in skyscrapers.

He was a journalist in 1963 at age 19 for the Haagse Post before starting studies in architecture in 1968 at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, followed, in 1972, by further studies with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, followed by studies at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City.

In 1969, Koolhaas co-wrote The White Slave, a Dutch film noir, and later wrote an unproduced script for American soft-porn king Russ Meyer.

An early work which would mark their difference from the then dominant postmodern classicism of the late 1970s, was their contribution to the Venice Biennale of 1980, curated by Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, titled "Presence of the Past".

Each architect had to design a stage-like "frontage" to a Potemkin-type internal street; the façades by, Frank Gehry and OMA were the only ones that did not employ Post-Modern architecture motifs or historical references.

Koolhaas first came to public and critical attention with OMA (The Office for Metropolitan Architecture), the office he founded in 1975 together with architects Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis and (Koolhaas's wife) Madelon Vriesendorp in London.

They were later joined by one of Koolhaas's students, Zaha Hadid – who would soon go on to achieve success in her own right.

These schemes would attempt to put into practice many of the findings Koolhaas made in his book Delirious New York (1978), which was written while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, directed by Peter Eisenman.

Koolhaas's book Delirious New York set the pace for his career.

Koolhaas analyzes the "chance-like" nature of city life: "The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape" "Rem Koolhaas...defined the city as a collection of 'red hot spots'."

(Anna Klingmann).

Other early critically received (yet unbuilt) projects included the Parc de la Villette, Paris (1982) and the residence for the Prime Minister of Ireland (1979), as well as the Kunsthal in Rotterdam (1992).

In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize.

Koolhaas' next publications were a by-product of his position as professor at Harvard University, in the Design school's "Project on the City"; firstly the 720-page Mutations, followed by The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2002) and The Great Leap Forward (2002).

All three books published student work analysing what others would regard as "non-cities", sprawling conglomerates such as Lagos in Nigeria, west Africa, which the authors argue are highly functional despite a lack of infrastructure.

The authors also examine the influence of shopping habits and the recent rapid growth of cities in China.

Critics of the books have criticised Koolhaas for being cynical, – as if Western capitalism and globalization demolish all cultural identity – highlighted in the notion expounded in the books that "In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop".

Perhaps such caustic cynicism can be read as a "realism" about the transformation of cultural life, where airports and even museums (due to finance problems) rely just as much on operating gift shops.

It does, however, demonstrate one of the architect's characteristic devices for deflecting criticism: attack the client or subject of study after completing the work.

When it comes to transforming these observations into practice, Koolhaas mobilizes what he regards as the omnipotent forces of urbanism into unique design forms and connections organised along the lines of present-day society.

Koolhaas continuously incorporates his observations of the contemporary city within his design activities: calling such a condition the ‘culture of congestion’.

More recently, Koolhaas unsuccessfully proposed the inclusion of hospital units for the homeless into the Seattle Public Library project (2003).

In 2008, Time put him in their top 100 of The World's Most Influential People.

He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014.