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This interview was written by Alejandro Zaera Polo in 1996. It was originally published on El Croquis 79 OMA / Rem Koolhaas.
When El Croquis proposed a second interview with Rem Koolhaas, there were serious doubts about its potential interest in any sense. Thinking about it, I remembered the context of the first interview: in the midst of the euphoria surrounding the ZKM and the Lille projects, when 'modernised Europe' was being produced at OMA. I remembered an event that / had witnessed at OMA very directly, which made us very aware of the fact that the climate in Europe was changing drastically: the death of the ZKM project. I had heard that OMA had recently undergone important structural changes, and I thought that perhaps it was the necessary effect of the changes in the environment. I remembered that, after the first interview 'Finding Freedoms', Rem was supposed to write an afterword titled 'Freedom from Freedoms', which he never did. And I thought that this second interview might be an opportunity to explain that perhaps it is not so easy to find freedoms. After all, Rem's career is a demonstration that maybe the only possible 'freedom' is to migrate between 'structures', to develop a mutant practice that operates on an 'eventual' rather than 'essential' basis. The second interview was an opportunity to depict precisely a kind of 'nomadic radical structuralism', -a very solid alternative to the collapse of post-structuralism-, which / think is Rem's most important discovery on a theoretical level. And this seemed a very good reason to do this second interview, in spite of the scary thought that it may be a/so the reason for a who/e set of them, a kind of permanent diagnosis ... Rem a/so found reasons for this second interview, which we never discussed. By pure chance, it was final/y recorded the day after the public presentation of his second book, S,M,L,XL, at the Architectural Association in London. The title is an attempt to name these ideas after an event, rather than as a category.
Your work during the eighties was deeply involved in a reformulation of a modern Europe in the light of the new economic and política/ developments of the post co/d-war period. This period of development and political hopes vanishes suddenly at the beginning of the nineties, resulting in the abandonment of the most ambitious projects and the return to conservative attitudes. The decline of the European economic conditions and the erosion of the ambitions of a modernised Europe seemed to have direct effects on the structure that OMA had developed during the eighties. After three years of uncertainty, you have recently made substantial changes in the organization of your office. What is the nature of these recent mutations in the structure of OMA?
The erosion of the 'fabrication' of Europe and the impact of economic decline was very important in these changes. To begin with, it had a negative effect on our income. And, since we were committed to this invention of Europe, it made our conceptual basis fragile. lt coincided with a need to reconsider the nature of the office. The office existed for just over ten years and this political and financial turbulence made me especially aware of its permanent fragility. That was a shocking awareness...
I expected that after an initial 'struggle', when a skeptical reception was inevitable, after 10 years of producing projects and making certain discoveries, there would be a moment when you are treated differently, both in terms of financial rewards and in terms of working conditions. It became very clear that that theoretical plateau of stability did not exist, that you were just as much at the mercy of political whim, bad temper or futile and childish disagreement after 10 years as you were in the very beginning. It made the prospect of another 20 years of that condition not very attractive. I began to write S,M,L,XL, which was a kind of cleansing, to some extent a kamikaze effort. It was a critique on certain aspects of the work but also inevitably an analysis of the position of the office. We had reached a point where 70-80% of our work was outside Holland, in an incredible multiplicity of countries and cultures. Money is harder to get the further the client is from the office, contracts mean completely different things in different cultures, clients and contractors are working in different time zones and control and communication becomes confusing ... logistics expanded to an astronomical degree. There was a wrenching effect: on the one hand, the incredible complexity of the operations, on the other, a persistent sense of fragility and weakness that cast doubts on the position of the independent architect under these circumstances. It was not only our own condition, it seemed to be a general condition: major European offices were in exactly the same position.
In Asia, there is a model of architects associated with engineering firms that create larger wholes, and that seemed an interesting alternative. Already three years ago, Cecil Balmond and I had discussed the idea of starting an office together, a co-production of OMA and Arup. Although it seemed plausible, it was finally rejected to avoid a confusion of mutual identities. During our project for the IJ-Oevers in Amsterdam, we collaborated with the Dutch engineering firm De Weger. They were impressed with our ability to disentangle infrastructure problems; we were impressed with their willingness to consider what we proposed. We started talking to them a year and a half ago and finally, we reached an agreement this fall, where they would buy part of our shares, participate in the management of the company, form a technical support unit for us and collaborate in several projects, although we remain a completely autonomous entity. We will, for example, continue to work with Arup. We would agree on the kind of association we would want to embark on for a specific project, case by case. De Weger has 700 people in the Netherlands, offices in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, and OMA now has an office in Hong Kong. They are interested now in developing their building department, although they are best known for infrastructure works. As you know, this is an area that we have always been incredibly interested in. Our attraction in their eyes was our experience with infrastructure, the idea that somehow an architect could play a role in the definition of territorial conditions. What is interesting about this new situation is that there are clear advantages for both sides. Our association allows us to cover the entire field from architecture to infrastructure, which seems especially attractive in the perspective of certain operations that now occur in Asia. Usually, as an architect, it is difficult to deal with planners and infrastructure engineers; there is always an opposition. The way in which our collaboration might become a kind of seamless condition is incredibly seductive.
What is interesting in these changes is that your practice as an architect seems to act as a thermometer of the political and economic climate. What is your impression of the current situation in Europe?
I think that the European condition is simply different, tougher than what it seemed in the euphoria of the late B0's. Maybe it was a self-induced euphoria around an idea that was never truly popular. But it has left a number of interesting challenges that are still in the air. And I think that if we can draw any conclusion from the last 5 or 6 years, it is that if conditions deteriorate very quickly, they can also return very precipitously. lt could be more a symptom of instability than a real decline. Part of that is the incredible irresponsibility, almost frivolity of the economic world, which is at the same time, the measure of all things. The incredible lack of patience of what are called, -with less and less justification-, developers. That is one of the greatest ironies of the present moment: developers, who are supposedly the caste that leaves traces in the form of buildings, are now too impatient or 'feverish' to ever maintain a single speculation long enough to actually start a building, let alone to finish it. The 'moods' of developers are now like the fluctuations of the Stock Market, signs of interest. There is no guarantee that those signs will produce concrete realizations. Over the past 5 years, we have seen excitement about Berlin that then shifted to Prague, from there to Shanghai, then to the Philippines, that is now shifting to Indonesia and that may shift to India and then come back to Europe via Africa and Yugoslavia... In that sense, I do not think any 'strength' is permanent right now, and therefore 'weakness' is not definitive either.
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