Adventures in the Scream Trade

As Frank Lloyd Wright was to the nineteenth century, Rem Koolhaas was to the twentieth: the greatest of them all. Koolhaas was a bigger architect than Wright, by exactly ten inches. That is the differential between the recorded 5’7” stature of the former—who made up for it in hats and capes—and the reported 6’5” of the latter. Koolhaas was from the Netherlands, a country notable for its fun-size cities and flat, damp, and man-made landscapes. It’s home—interestingly, given its geographical horizontality—to the tallest median population, which at 183.73 cm is taller than 82.9 percent of men in the USA. In America, our problematic post-Jeffersonian intimations of a natural aristocracy, and our peculiar physiological fascinations, often cause us to mistake, in men, body height for wisdom. It may be to this that some measure of Koolhaas’s towering reputation, in our country, was due.

After such winsome early projects as the 1996 Utrecht Educatorium and u…