Rem Koolhaas

Before I met him for this article, I had my own story. Back in 2006 I went to a talk by Italian designer Enzo Mari in the Serpentine Pavilion, which had been designed that year by Rem’s firm OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture). Mari deserves a heap of respect, but in later life he has become a bit of a windbag. There we were, perched on the painfully uncomfortable foam cubes with which OMA had chosen to furnish the pavilion, with a chill wind whistling through its flimsy structure (to be fair, the budget for the project is close to zilch), listening to Mari extemporise at length. Rem was sitting immediately behind me and chose to rest his glass of red wine on the edge of my foam block, so that the smallest fidget from me would send it flying. Then, apparently as bored as I, he started to bitch loudly about the temperature of the pavilion. Sat upright and rigid, I did think, “Well, if there’s one person in here who might be considered responsible…!”

Sander describes his book – working title: ‘The Rem Koolhaas-method’ – as an “antibiography,” an account that eschews the normal biographical pegs such as childhood experience and early adult life and instead prefers biological evidence, for example DNA tests and MRI scans. Sadly, I didn’t get to share these insights, but Sander did lend me a theory that he is “playing around with,” which contends that among Rem’s defining qualities is his awkwardness. Sander had watched Rem being photographed before the start of the talk and described a scenario in which Rem had been unable to negotiate a relationship with the Dutch-orange cushions that were casually strewn over the onstage sofa. The sharp angles that Rem’s legs assume as he descends towards a soft seat are remarkable. He is not a natural lounger, and I imagine that cushions play little part in his life. Paying no heed to the fact that these accessories were likely carefully considered, brand-appropriate props, Sander reported that Rem shuffled them out of shot one by one. Rem’s physical awkwardness is matched with a measure of discomfort in his social interactions. His conversation is not stilted, but there is a grain to it. Sander argues this instinctive and inescapable awkwardness allows Rem to pursue paths that are not smooth. Lacking a natural sense of ease, Rem is not tempted to go easy.

When I first met Rem, he had, by coincidence, just had his brain scanned for Sander’s book. Convening in an anonymous hotel in Amsterdam, along with his driver, Greg Vyner, we paused for a coffee before setting off to the OMA office in Rotterdam. Rem was wearing the same slim-cut, dark-toned Prada separates topped with his signature three-quarter-length coat that he seems to be in whenever he’s interviewed or photographed. Scissored onto a small wooden chair in the lobby, his pleasingly anachronistic Blackberry on the marble coffee table nearby, he downed his cappuccino at double speed before making for the car. Rem has complained about journalists forever writing about how fast he walks, but he does walk very fast. His pace is a major feature of ‘Rem’, a documentary made by his son, Tomas Koolhaas, released in 2016. For a large part of the film’s 75 minutes, Rem strides in front of the camera, his coat flapping as he goes.

Rem also processes information extremely fast. At the top of our first conversation he launched into an analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s designation of NATO as braindead, a story that had blown up in the press only hours before we met. I was yet to engage with any kind of news that day, but Rem had already decided that the French president’s statement was “the first step to the liberation of Europe” from the “decadent” domain of the Atlantic. Rem absorbs his information traditionally, his assistants collating a stack of international papers each morning. For all his mental velocity, he is still happy to accommodate the lag before a story makes it into print.

The thrust of the Architectural Review piece is that Rem’s career is a case study in the systematic and ruthless ascent to power, but the takeaway is that some of Rem’s fellow architects are provoked by the longevity and breadth of his influence. Architecture is a highly competitive profession, with formal competitions ramping up personal rivalries, but Rem, more than any other architect, does seem to inspire wariness. That might simply be because OMA enters an enormous number of said competitions, so the chance a big-name architect has been shortlisted against the firm at some point is very high. It might also have something to do with his talent for ambiguity. Oftentimes Rem seems to be having his theoretical cake while eating his practical one too, which must be galling if you are operating at the same table.

Attempting to map how Rem became Rem, Jack Self describes the tendency of others “to focus on inconsequential details” like “why he swims every morning” as “futile, as well as supremely naive.” I took this as licence to attempt to get a swim in with Rem, but although I turned up to every meeting with my suit in my bag, no dice. Rem has said you can tell a lot about a person by the way they move in water, but I wasn’t going to get that opportunity. I did meet someone who had, however. Carol Patterson, an OMA architect from the US who lives in London, used to coincide with Rem in the lanes at the YMCA in Bloomsbury. She described his style as slow and steady, which, though not the way you would characterise him in any other field, perhaps offers some underlying truth. For all the dazzle of its output, the OMA project is underpinned by dogged persistence.

My conversation with Rem had just reached Soviet-era Russian architecture when we arrived at OMA’s building in Rotterdam. Greg pulled into an internal car park and we climbed a small staircase to the office itself. Immediately after we arrived, Rem was drawn into meetings, so I was put in the charge of Sander Manse, one of the six-person in-house PR department. The firm’s relatively new premises are spread sparsely over one very spacious floor of a late 1960s brutalist building designed by Huig Maaskant, the architect responsible for reconstructing much of the city after the bombs of the Second World War.

The finishes in the office are minimal – raw ceilings, strip lights, grey vinyl floor, white tables – and the general demeanour of its seemingly very young staff is equally understated – black tops and trousers predominate, a white shirt acts as a flourish (a notable exception here is Rita, who has a predilection for bright colours that is particularly effective against the muted tones of her colleagues). The average age of the 250 OMA employees in Rotterdam is apparently 34, but when I joined them for lunch in the dining room on a mezzanine level above the office it appeared a decade younger. Assembling a salad for myself, with the addition of a hard-boiled egg (Sander told me that protein sources are varied through the week), I felt like I was in the canteen of an extremely international university. Rem usually has take-out sandwiches over meetings, only eating communally if, say, his grandson is in the house.

After lunch I was invited to join a meeting between Rem and the team working on the exhibition ‘Countryside, The Future’. Launched at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in February and running until August, the exhibition takes up the entirety of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building’s spiralled rotunda, and its scale of focus – the “radical changes,” both architectural and anthropological, taking place in the 98 per cent of planet earth that is not occupied by cities – could potentially set the agenda for much of Rem’s work in the years to come.

In an origin story for the project that Rem has told in various lectures, it all began with trips to the house in the Swiss Alps that belongs to the parents of Koolhaas’s partner, Petra Blaisse, a landscape and interiors designer, which he has visited regularly for the past 20 years. One day he realised he could no longer smell cows in the village and decided something must be up. Then he met a man he assumed was an indigenous farmer, but discovered was in fact a disillusioned nuclear scientist retired from Frankfurt. Next, he realised that the people taking care of the local meadows and cleaning the weekend houses of city dwellers were, typically, from Southeast Asia. “Visiting the same place two or three times a year allowed me to observe the changes very slowly, even without knowing I was observing,” Rem told me. “Once I was alert to it, it became almost like a laboratory. That was really the beginning in terms of my own conversion-slash-discovery.”

Those working on the exhibition are deemed to be part of AMO, OMA’s in-house research arm. In the meeting, the office felt as much like a school as it had in the dining room, albeit one with an unusually high pressure to deliver. You could criticise it as a research sweatshop, but the long hours and high pressure are common to most architectural offices. The discussion followed Rem’s rhythm and, when he felt something had been talked about enough, the room moved on in an instant. There was a sense of everyone being on their toes – literally in some cases: while Rem sat, quite a few of the participants stayed on their feet – but I saw no confrontation or anxiety. Journalists sitting in on Rem’s meetings with younger colleagues often report nerves, colour creeping up necks and the like, and mentions of Rem’s anger are common, with even his son’s film showing him snapping at a journalist. I felt warranted in asking what had changed. Without a hint of denial, he dismissed anger as a “style.” “There was a moment that big displays of emotion and temperament were considered acceptable,” he said, “and I think that it’s very clear that they are no longer.”

A kindly AMO-er spared a couple of minutes to show me some of the films that will be included in the exhibition, and I settled in to watch a seductive sequence on pixel farming, a possible industry-changing agricultural practice being pioneered in the Netherlands whereby farmland is carefully divided into small squares – one square per plant – much like screens are divided into pixels. The crops are monitored by self-driving robots that use sensors and an awful lot of data to give each plant the precise amount of water and fertiliser it needs to maximise crop yields. Another film showed endless aerial shots of Midwestern cornfields that form part of a vast corridor of near-continuous farmland that stretches north to south across the entire length of the United States. It was 5.55pm and I had heard we were getting back in the car to Amsterdam at 6pm, but Rem showed no signs of disengaging, so, unlike everyone around me, I was relaxed. Then, at 5.59pm, all of a sudden we were off. Greg was sprinting to the car park carrying various bags and a pile of newspapers, Rem was a couple of metres behind, and it was all I could do to grab my coat and dash after them.

I had hoped that Rem would be driving, as he often does when he is interviewed – indeed, in Fantastic Man’s previous profile of him written in 2007, Susie Rushton tells of a “hair-raising spin in (Rem’s) black 1998 BMW 840.” Greg drove this time, but happily, the opportunity did arise later: after another day of interviewing, when Rem was driving himself and Rita to Rotterdam, he offered to take me to Schiphol Airport on the way. We got into that same two-door BMW, but the roads were quiet and we proceeded at a pace that left my locks smooth against my scalp. Rem remarked on the beauty of the lowering indigo-clouded sky – much superior, he said, to a conventionally nice day. Hardly boy-racer material, but I was glad, nonetheless, to have experienced Rem at the wheel.

A chatty hour or so later, still in rush hour, we arrived in Amsterdam. Rem called on Greg to second-guess the satnav and we made a few traffic-defying U-turns before reaching Rem’s door among a beautiful row of houses designed by “Amsterdam School” architect Hijman Louis de Jong. It was dark and drizzling and, very sweetly, Greg offered to drive me on to my hotel.

In this meeting there was time for circumstantial chat and storytelling. Niklas, whose slightly unkempt appearance seems to be the product of his whirring brain, talked of a recent trip to Osaka where he had given a talk to robotic engineers. Apparently, robot therapists are becoming a thing there, as some Japanese prefer to confide in machines. Niklas is the primary author of a chapter in the ‘Countryside’ book and the part of the exhibition concerning the buffer zone between Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and its human settlements. Intended to minimise the contact between the gorillas that inhabit the park and people, the buffer zone gives rise to a culture all its own. I was shown a film of gorilla interaction that felt more like something produced by David Attenborough than OMA. “Some of the films have an inherent beauty; some of them are really touching, or really dramatic. I’m moved by them,” said Rem. “Everyone is bored by statistics and classic infographics material, so we’ve been very careful to exploit the fact that the countryside is relatively unknown, and to harvest, so to speak, visual material that is not about information pure and simple, but also has its own power and impact.”

Meanwhile, Stephan told us that in China schemes are afoot to dole out benefits to the best-performing members of society. Apparently, this is measured, in part, by the purchase of equipment such as work boots, hence people have realised they can game the system by purchasing superfluous tools merely to bump up their scores. Arguing that this kind of engagement with the state has the side effect of sharpening the mind, he demonstrated a Rem-like propensity to insist that everything that is ostensibly bad, might, in fact, be good.

James Westcott, a lightly bearded Brit with an Extinction Rebellion sticker covering the Apple logo on his laptop, questioned Rem as to whether something he had written about his own interactions with the countryside sounded a little “Marie-Antoinettish.” Rem acknowledged the criticism, but went with the risk of appearing the naively entitled urbanite.

I get the sense that Rem is revealing more of himself in ‘Countryside’ than he has in past projects, not that he’s prepared to admit it. When I asked whether the research has roots in his own biography, his own desire to be outside cities as he gets older, his reply was typically unequivocal but open-ended: “Maybe that is true, but there is no point in reading it that way. I’ve always been good in projecting my own biography in terms of larger issues, or hiding my biography under different issues.”

Sat side by side on the longer side of the table, we began by negotiating the subject matter.

Coming away from my various encounters with him, both in person and in print, all I can say is: you can say that again. Contrarianism in tandem with a congruent determination to put architecture – and architects – in their place are the themes that have run through all of Koolhaas’s writing and exhibitions over the past 50 years. Both urges are evident in his first publication, ‘Delirious New York’ (1978), and both are equally apparent in his most recent project, ‘Countryside, The Future’. It’s arguable that Koolhaas’s impulse to oppose the consensus is characteristic of his generation, an early postmodern attitude as dated as his Blackberry. And just like said Blackberry, it’s still working for him.

I suspect Koolhaas’s contrariness has the deepest of roots – I can’t imagine him a conformist kid – but its origins vis-à-vis architecture lie in a study of the Berlin Wall that he undertook as a student at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. Produced in collaboration with his OMA co-founders Madelon Vriesendorp (his then wife), Elia Zenghelis (his tutor) and Zoe Zenghelis (Elia’s artist wife), it became his final project at the school. In an account of his initial Berlin field trip, written 20 years after the fact, he admitted that his greatest surprise was that the wall, which had been up for about a decade by then, “was heartbreakingly beautiful.” Acknowledging that it was “deadly,” he nevertheless admired the culture that had grown up around it over its relatively short existence, a perverse liveliness that owed nothing to the input of architects. “It was as if I had come eye to eye with architecture’s true nature,” wrote Koolhaas. “In comparison, the ’60s dream of architecture’s liberating potential – in which I had been marinating for years as a student – seemed feeble rhetorical play. It evaporated on the spot. (…) I would never again believe in form as the primary vessel of meaning.” Apparently such iconoclasm did not go down well at the AA. After Koolhaas’s presentation of the project, the school’s director, Alvin Boyarsky, asked ominously, “Where do you go from here?”

For Koolhaas the answer was the US to escape from the European insistence on the social efficacy of architecture. In 1972 Koolhaas left London for Cornell University in New York, where he became first the student and later the colleague of architect Oswald Mathias Ungers. Koolhaas had come across Ungers’s work in Berlin, where the latter had been teaching until 1968 and from where he had left in part to escape the political activism of his German students. Ungers’s intials, OMU, prefigure OMA and likewise his concept of the “dialectic city” – an urban environment that resists planning according to a single strategy and instead takes the form of an archipelago of distinct environments – anticipates much of Koolhaas’s writing.

Alongside contrarianism and a scepticism of mainstream architectural agendas, Koolhaas has also maintained a life-long sympathy with what he dubs “the informal.” During my conversations with him, as in many previous interviews, he harked back to the four years he spent in Indonesia as a child, which he believes offset his native Dutch “affinity for order.” ‘Delirious New York’ is a hymn to such informality. It establishes the fairgrounds of Coney Island as the prototype for early 20th-century New York City. As a proponent of the unplanned, Koolhaas generally has little time for other architects, yet he does have a soft spot for Raymond Hood, the lead architect of the Rockefeller Center and a possible model for Ayn Rand’s fictional architect Peter Keating in her 1943 novel ‘The Fountainhead’. Hood was wont to seduce clients with statements such as “All this beauty stuff is bunk.”

The original cover of ‘Delirious New York’, featuring an illustration by Vriesendorp of a post-coital pairing of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, adds a frisson to its agenda. Koolhaas describes the Empire State Building as “a sensuous surrender by its collective makers – from the accountant to the plumber – to the process of building.” Boiled down, the book argues that the most important factors determining the form of early 20th-century Manhattan were 1) the 1916 zoning law, an edict that required buildings to step back from the full extent of their potential floor plan once they had reached a certain height (hence creating the distinctive shape of the early 20th-century Manhattan skyscraper), and 2) the invention of the elevator.

Significantly, this thesis anticipates the argument behind his ‘Elements of Architecture’ at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, which bypassed complete architectural works to instead focus on the components of the “architectural collage”: windows, façades, escalators, corridors and the like. Since the launch of the Architecture Biennale in 1980, it has been the convention to have the curator, usually an architect, showcase the work of his or (very rarely) her peers. Devoting a whole section of his exhibition to “the Toilet” but not a single room to a fellow living architect, Koolhaas adopted a characteristically controversial approach to the task.

Looking back on his move to America, and connecting it with his ongoing trajectory, Koolhaas told me, “I went to New York in the early 1970s, when everyone thought it was dead, the worst place in the world. (…) Then, as a Westerner, I became totally disappointed with it – and this is an underlying and long-term disappointment, that we can only see architecture through the dogmatic qualities of Western architecture: public space, blah, blah, blah. In Asia, in the meantime, there was a totally different urbanism, but, because we kept looking at it from our Western perspective, we could only be disappointed and contemptuous. So, there was a motivation to say ‘there’s more to it.’”

That’s Koolhaas’s long-term engagement with Asia, in particular his unapologetic involvement with China, explained in a single phrase. When I attempted to raise various ethical issues – China’s mistreatment of its Muslim minority was all over the papers when we met – he batted me away with ease. “For way too long the whole of Europe has been focused on the Anglo-Saxon world, the Atlantic world, even though we could tell, at least since 2008 (the year of the financial crash), that there was a lot of corruption, a lot of decadence and a lot of really deeply wrong directions. Yet still we didn’t have the courage to reconsider whether the Atlantic is forever our domain,” he said. “I see everything that I’ve done in the context of readjusting and looking east. I know that there are many things you can criticise – I’m basically critical of every side – but I think it’s been insane how we’ve been unable to define productive and creative relationships there, and that all we’ve been doing, on the demand of America, is rejecting Russia, rejecting China. If we want to avoid undermining our future, we need to find a way to co-exist.”

“Ostensibly a relief from constant sensorial onslaught, minimum is maximum in drag, a stealth laundering of luxury: the stricter the lines, the more irresistible the seductions. Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimise the shame of consumption, drain embarrassment, to lower what is higher,” he wrote. That’s likely a swipe at John Pawson’s early 1990s minimal-to-the-max Calvin Klein stores, yet OMA’s own Prada Epicenter, the New York flagship store that opened its door in the wake of 9/11, could be accused of pretty much the same strategy. Unnecessary purchases are rendered acceptable in “an all-white ‘clinic’ area” containing “VIP rooms” (a description taken from the OMA website).

Asked if self-contradiction is problematic, Koolhaas said, “I don’t think it would have to be disappointing or humiliating.” What’s more, he prepared himself for this possibility in ‘Delirious New York’ by quoting F. Scoot Fitzgerald’s well-known aphorism: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

The long-standing opposition at play in the Koolhaasian project is his reconciliation of architecture’s task of planning and order with his love of improvised and informal. Also in the frame is the paradox – common to many in the creative sphere – that Koolhaas professes to oppose neoliberalism, yet those with the means to commission his work are likely to be its strongest proponents. During the course of writing this piece, I went to the launch of a building designed for the British public school Brighton College by OMA partner Ellen van Loon. It is an innovative and stylish £55 million structure that boasts 18 university-standard laboratories, a strength and conditioning suite, a roof-top running track with panoramic views and a cinema-style auditorium, all created for the children of the elite. van Loon said her motivation for taking on the project was her love of teenagers, and that she hoped the building could be a model for Britain’s state educators. I don’t really expect a Dutch architect to engage with the blight arising from Britain’s proclivity for private education, but, even so, I smarted.

Quizzed on Koolhaas, his contemporaries tend to offer qualified admiration. An architect I sat next to at a dinner immediately after my first Koolhaas encounter proffered the opinion that, alone in the profession, Koolhaas and Norman Foster have been able to wrest control of the agenda. While most architects, even those thought of as starchitects, are begging for scraps from the client’s table, those two have created scenarios in which those same clients scuttle after them: Koolhaas through concept, Foster through capital (Foster is the only architect ever to have appeared in the Sunday Times Rich List). “He was commissioned by Prada to design a shop. He produces an 800-page publication on shopping, but what does he design? A shop!” said the same architect, who has himself designed several shops.

It does seem to be the case that Koolhaas is always a step ahead of those bidding to work with him. The profile in ‘The New Yorker’ from 2005 includes an entertaining account of him simultaneously winning a job and bagging a venue for his touring exhibition in St. Petersburg. That said, it would be cynical to see his engagement with ideas as pure power play. Before he studied architecture in the late 1960s, Koolhaas worked as a writer in various capacities. “I’ve always had a life as something other than an architect,” he told me. “I was a journalist, and I think I’m still a journalist.” The relationship between the intellectual agenda and the financial rewards is often convoluted, but the journalistic inclination to hunt out and find answers to questions has undoubtedly been present throughout Koolhaas’s career.

The sheer size of ‘S,M,L,XL’ is intimidating and its design tricks, including shunning title pages, allowing articles to overlap and collaging text and images, serve to confound concentration. I bought the book in its first edition, and am full of admiration for it, but, coming clean, I hadn’t read it until the run-up to writing this piece. Among the texts in the volume is the essay ‘Generic City’ which Koolhaas now cites as the “key switch.” Arguing that it was no longer relevant to create one-off portraits of cities because the general condition of “the city” had overcome each one’s singular characteristics, this piece anticipated the current ‘Countryside’ project. With the “similarities of cities becoming vastly more pronounced than their differences,” it was the moment to examine their antithesis, explained Koolhaas.

Now dual frequent flyers, Obrist and Koolhaas have been joined at the intellectual hip ever since. In 2006 they undertook the first Serpentine Marathon, a 24-hour, non-stop interview in a pavilion in Hyde Park designed by Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond. Interview subjects included Gilbert and George, Zaha Hadid, Doris Lessing and Peter Saville. In terms of eliciting insight from individuals, this interrogatory production line was not the most felicitous format, but as a performance it was memorable. In particular, while Obrist bristled with quotations from and references to other thinkers, Koolhaas appeared to derive all his theories and questions from direct observation. Obrist told me that Koolhaas does have important mentors, the aforementioned Ungers and the late architectural historian Charles Jencks among them. Be that as it may, he tends to present his insights as immaculate conceptions – not least the countryside and his epiphany in the Swiss village.

The session began with a discussion of a collage of images of Chairman Mao welcoming various non-white revolutionary leaders. “What was beautiful was that the white visitors were ignored by Mao, while the black revolutionary leaders were being received!” said Koolhaas. “One of the main things about China, something that everyone forgets now that they are the enemy, was that they were actually supporters of revolutionary forces.” Much of the research is done through scouring Google Images and there is an intense focus on the correct pairing of names and faces. The digitally dependent process brings to mind the technique of argument through the conflation of unlikely images practised by contemporary film-makers such as Adam Curtis. Yet, at the same time, it reaches back to the century-long history of political collage. They will use delivery robots – like those employed at Amazon warehouses – to carry images around the Guggenheim, creating random collages in real time.

Inevitably, an element of the observation going on in Koolhaas’s rural lab is related to climate change. In the new era of mainstream environmental anxiety, you cannot discuss the countryside without acknowledging the climate emergency. That said, Koolhaas’s response to the question is notably oblique. “Everything now takes place against a background of global warming. (…) Looking away from the cities and to the countryside is connected to that. I don’t want to pretend the whole thing is about global warming. It’s not a direct response to it, but definitely it has been rewarding to see more of what’s going on.”

In the meeting, turning to explain a particular idea to me – the theory that flat land is amenable to regulation, while hills and mountains render rules untenable – Koolhaas realised he had phrased the argument in a particularly apt way, and the room paused while he wrote it down. Later, Koolhaas suggested that you might be able to map support for leaving the EU onto the UK’s less level regions. You can’t, he admitted: Scotland. Coming from London, I faced several Brexit barbs during my visit.
The Irma Boom-designed catalogue is of a significantly different size compared to both Koolhaas’s breakthrough book ‘S,M,L,XL’ and Boom and Koolhaas’s previous joint volume, ‘Elements of Architecture’, the 2528-page postscript to the 2014 Venice Biennale. Instead it takes the proportions of the first pocket book, published at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries and now held in the Vatican Library. The designer of that book, Aldus Manutius, described the format as libelli portatiles in formam enchiridii (“portable small books in the form of a manual”). Now that information overload has become the permanent condition, the compact has become aspirational, even when the subject is as potentially overwhelming as the countryside in its entirety.

Does this vast undertaking reach a conclusion? “I think the outcome, what I’m confident in being able to say right now, is that the problem can only be dealt with by embracing amazing artificiality, a drastic amount of artificiality, and combining it with an equally emphatic resurrection of techniques and forms of thinking from the past, even from antiquity, that would enable us to be more careful with what we’re doing. We need a new hybrid of artificiality and the organic.” So that’s the way forward? “We’ve found two trends, that, in parallel, each contain a degree of promise. But it’s just short of a thesis, and definitely not a recommendation.”

Cynics might suggest that, just as Koolhaas made shopping an OMA intellectual commodity 20 years ago, he is now attempting to package the countryside in the same way. In terms of a commercial outcome and the possibility of OMA building substantially outside cities, Koolhaas said, without prevarication, “I’m desperately trying to.” In particular he is interested in the vast rural warehouses that are the outcome of the digital revolution. “I think that we’re witnessing a really drastic change. Architecture doesn’t have to be for human beings any more. There are distribution centres that are completely robotic or data centres that are totally automated. These are places where humans are almost an afterthought – I think that’s fascinating territory.”

At the launch of Ellen van Loon’s building in Brighton, it became clear to me that OMA can function independently of Koolhaas’s day-to-day input. He was not at the event, and his absence was not felt. Having had the foresight to allow his partners autonomy, he has won himself freedom. It’s unlikely, however, that he will use that as a licence to go fishing. Koolhaas may have turned 75 last November, but conventional concepts of retirement do not apply. Far from a swan song, the ‘Countryside’ project is the opening of a fourth chapter, with innovative agriculture and architecture for non-human users on the agenda. It’s hardly surprising, this being Koolhaas, that nothing is set in stone, but, given the general longevity of architects and his daily swimming habit, a further 25 years of amassing information and conquering fresh territories seems possible. Above all, in planning a sideways step into research-led practice, he is evading the expectations – bigger, shinier, more costly – that arrived with his “starchitect” status at the end of the last millennium.