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 unbuilt 1989 Très Grande Bibliothèque proposal for Paris, in which it was possible to discern the humanist influences of such precursors as James Stirling and John Hejduk—and to which the late success of Milstein Hall at Koolhaas’s alma mater of Cornell University was a thoughtful throwback—OMA’s body of work was significantly driven by aesthetics and appearances. However elegant their details, the buildings were performatively brusque and artfully clumsy in their massing, fenestration, and the decorative expression of their structural systems. Their formalism often suggested a formerly regular shape that—like a stone age hand tool or a cut gem—had become a faceted rhomboid, following some repetitive and deliberative transformation under the influence of insight. A point of such artifacts was to appear as if appearance were their makers’ last concern—a glummer version of the effortful effortlessness that you see among sprezzy menswear enthusiasts. This was less the traditional attempt by a would-be avant-garde to appeal to a bourgeoisie by appalling them with thrilling ugliness than to intimate the presence of all that insight. The work couldn’t look pretty because it had to look smart.

Like many designers from artsy cohorts of painters and novelists and filmmakers, Koolhaas embraced the posture of an urbanist, the role that rewards architects who choose to conceive of themselves as globally minded technocrats, sober complex systems analysts, and philosopher-king policymakers. This affect was supported by a large corpus of seeming research: the production of maps, lexicons, and catalogs in which anything numerically quantifiable and statistically describable became especially important. Information was translated into condition—the singular word that was perhaps OMA’s greatest contribution to discourse—not especially by evidence-based formulations, but by a skillful rhetoric of assertion. As with the first paragraph of this book review above, any statement, especially a sweeping one, next to all those numbers and neologisms, had to be true.

The centering of design research—or even merely of the idea of design research—was a profound contribution to the profession. It was a liberation from the intramural literary scholasticism that had previously passed for the practice’s theory. This contribution endures even as in today’s age of exponentially increased social and ecological responsibilities for architects, it’s unclear what the new XXL megacities of West Africa would take from S,M,L,XL. The legacy media, cultural, economic, and ecological conditions in which a figure like Koolhaas could prosper are no more: He was among the very first, and endured long enough to become the very last, of the so-called starchitects of the turn of the millennium, despite energetic efforts by such older OMA alumnae as Bjarke Ingels to revive that role. Many international designers who passed even briefly through that office, for whom it served as a kind of finishing school, have now surpassed its work—generally by not recapitulating its styles or postures—and constitute a golden generation of enterprising, skillful, serious-minded, imaginative, and idealistic designers and educators. Much as stints in the Berlin office of Peter Behrens yielded Mies, Gropius, and Le Corbusier, this may be OMA’s defining legacy and gift to the world.

Because its office culture, a preponderance of anecdotes convinces, was one of those that normalized a culture of cruelty in which romanticized genius figures were enabled to act—indeed sought to perform and confirm genius and status—with varieties of violence, others who aspired to status may have been inclined to imitate such action. Or merely to repeat a sadomasochistic cycle. This perpetuation—of screamers, of bullies, of master manipulators—is common in the profession of architecture. (The frailty may be compounded by the precarity of the practice’s economic models and the contingent liminality of its practitioners’ social class.) More and more, for my part as a critic and fan, the extent to which such culture seems somehow to leach, like a karmic brownfield, into the resulting built work is the same extent to which that work drains itself of interest.

Reinier de Graaf, somewhere in that golden generation, is one heir to all this. He is a Dutch architect who has worked at OMA since 1996. Not unlike Koolhaas, he grooms himself with a close-shaved head and an intermittent beard. He is one of very many white male architects of a certain age who in their headshots seem consistently to be giving former-semipro-middleweight Limelight bouncer. He has undertaken substantial masterplanning for urban-scaled projects in Rotterdam, Doha, and Moscow. De Graaf is credited with the founding of AMO, which OMA identifies as its in-house think tank. He has written three books: Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, an essay collection; The Masterplan, a novel; and now Architect, Verb: The New Language of Building. The book’s self-understanding, stated intent, tone, and subjects are all efficiently encapsulated in a passage in de Graaf’s introduction:

If Four Walls and a Roof was about debunking myths projected by architects, Architect, Verb aims to debunk myths projected onto architecture by the outside world—a rebuttal of doctrines which have been applied to architecture over the last twenty years. It recounts the transformation of the architecture profession over the past twenty years, starting in post-Guggenheim Bilbao and ending in Silicon Valley: from the architect as miracle worker to the nerds plotting his redundancy. Knowing the first was never true and assuming the latter will never happen, the chapters of this book primarily dwell on the stages between, in which architecture progressively finds itself at the mercy of extraneous quests which it is neither able to resist nor capable of fulfilling. In order of appearance: starchitecture (1), world-class (2), excellence (3), sustainability (4), wellbeing (5), liveability (6), placemaking (7), creativity (8), beauty (9) and innovation (10).

To summarize some of the content of these chapters: Starchitecture: Herbert Muschamp was a starfucker. The Bilbao Effect was cringe. Attempts to recapture that lightning in a bottle were in the long run economically wasteful. And Rem Koolhaas—who gets his single passing mention in this book as a mere finalist for a would-be baby Bilbao in Galicia, versus Frank Gehry’s sixteen name checks—apparently actually had little to do with fame. Excellence: Architects, like actors, like to give each other prizes. Sustainability: BREAMM and LEED are greenwashing conscience-cleansers. Wellbeing: We are all wellness influencers now. And the genuine insights of evidence-based design as modeled on evidence-based medicine can be deftly conflated—though inaccurately—with shady century-old modernist bullshit about hygiene. Liveability: Forcefully wholesome and performatively outdoorsy upper-middle-class gentrifiers from Vancouver are annoying.

Placemaking: “The times that placemaking was an exclusively Anglo-Saxon phenomenon are well behind us.” Anglo-Saxon here appears to connote not the transatlantic imperium, but something about the British: an idealistic and communitarian sense of duty, genuinely to be found in that green and happy land, that those bracing Dutch are pleased to dismiss as facile do-gooderism and performative piety—and so as a version of prideful modesty. On the basis of exactly two data points, I interpolate that this particular evocation of the Angles and the Saxons is peculiar to the Netherlands. The other data point is that when I was in architecture school and suggested that the program for our studio’s site remain what it was in real life, a social services center for unhoused New Yorkers, instead of being notionally converted to some kind of laser tag playscape, my Netherlandish critic said to me—and reader, the words ring in my ears across the years—“We think you want us to think well of you. We think you are being maybe a little Anglo-Saxon.” (Remind me to send you my unwritten dissertation about all this, which features the earned Redemption by Good Works versus predestined Redemption by Divine Favor controversy of the Protestant Reformation; the glorieuze overtocht co-regency of William of Orange and Mary Stuart; the fierce extractive and colonial rivalry in which the English East India Company pwned the Dutch East India Company; and probably the War of the Spanish Succession.) As a half-Celt, quarter-Norman, and quarter-Anglo-Saxon, I can only speculate on the extent to which that last fraction informs my disappointment that the book’s sardonic lexicon makes such special fun of the phrases HUMAN-CENTRIC ARCHITECTURE, EMANCIPATORY DESIGN, and HEALTHY PLACEMAKING. This language, for all its uncool cheer, speaks to the truth that the service profession of architecture, though in a measure of transactional service to its clients, must always ultimately do the good work of mutual care and serve the world’s repair. De Graaf additionally explains that those Anglo-Saxons, in their hobbity way, prefer the cozy word place to its cool alternative, space.

Creativity: Richard Florida and Tony Blair were opportunists. Beauty: The Establishment wields the picturesque against the sublime, especially on Anglo-Saxon planning commissions. Also, according to the appended would-be devil’s dictionary of a lexicon, there is something that has been commonly called archispeak (although here renamed profspeak, because now other professions have picked up on the cant), which is—get this—a pretentious doublespeak used by architects.

A lot of this is true enough. Or once was. Much of it is breathlessly reported by the author, who nevertheless also goes for a vibe that is wised-up (“Knowing the first was never true…”) and world-weary to the point of fatalism (“…and assuming the latter will never happen”). All the information in the book doesn’t quite seem to inform all the deliberation. “I opt for a Google search,” the author tells us, “I opt for a knowing look.” Yes, the reader thinks, yes you do. He calls himself “intimidated” when he was intimidating. He says, “I still have no idea,” when he has an idea. He says, “I do not remember exactly,” when he remembers exactly. This semi-gaslighting deployment of self-deprecation that is actually its opposite is, of course, rather Anglo Saxon. The bridge between information and deliberation is curiosity. Bryant Park, we are informed, is “a small public park in midtown Manhattan, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street, across from the New York Public Library.” The park is of course not across from the library: Its main entrance addresses greater Times Square, and so wildly asserts pastoralism to its definitive opposite. The library is not across from the park: What makes this complex back-to-back urban assemblage such a delirious condition is that the park shares its block with, yet faces away from, the library; which in turn is across from nothing because, vanishingly rare for a Manhattan landmark, it addresses a terminal T-junction between an avenue and a cross street, in this case East 41st, all the way to the Robert Moses Dog Run on the dour coast of the East River. To describe the park as on the corner of 42nd Street is accurate without being true: The psycho-geographical dilemma and delight of the site is that it spans 42nd to 40th, a chord that must accommodate the most major of all Manhattan’s cross streets, and its most minor.

The brilliance of the book is in its final chapter, Innovation. We must attend to that chapter’s chilling intimation that today there has been a triumph not of design but of—precisely at design’s expense within the cultural and political contexts that it might inform and transform—the affect and mock-turtleneck aesthetics of designerliness. This is exemplified by the vacuous and unmeaning straw man of a phrase “design thinking,” which has been appropriated significantly by coders, user-interface boffins, and the natural intelligence behind the artificial kind: All those who are pleased to call themselves information architects. The book’s lexical definition of its title amuses and alarms: “ARCHITECT, verb. 1. to design and configure (a software programme or system) (few software packages were architected with Ethernet access in mind). 2. the activity architects are considered to engage in.” The displacement between the first definition and the second is deep, even as the spatial and virtual, the natural and the artificial, are now inseparable; even as Nature itself, thanks to the Anthropocene, has been reduced to Culture. (This chapter also reports that Christopher Alexander was a culty dummy who presented his own private tastes as innate human nature and mistook his own attempted apotheosis for universal popular liberation. Hard agree. But not news.)

The book that this could have been is architecture’s version of Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman’s 1982 Adventures in the Screen Trade, in which a seasoned operator and master craftsman sells everyone and himself out, with his intimate witness to the operations of his industry and to stardom (for Koolhaas substitute Goldman’s patron Robert Redford, a man not as tall but just as handsome); searchingly examines his own complicity in his industry’s cultures of cruelty; and offers a master class in how he practices, despite and because of all that, his own extraordinary craft. To the extent that the golden generation that passed through OMA may prove to be the architectural equivalent of the filmmakers of the New Hollywood, a retrospective in its deliquescence of the office of our Peter Behrens and our Frank Lloyd Wright, of so much greatness without so much goodness, would have been a great and good service to history. It would have forthrightly described Remment Lucas Koolhaas, who is here otherwise the inverse of Banquo’s ghost at the feast in that it seems all can see him but the author. It would have been, like Goldman’s, a true confession and a reckoning with power. And one hell of a read. (Just in time for Y2K retro, too.) Yet that last chapter of the book, as de Graaf chose to write it, makes one eagerly await his next volume, and how it may help us see more clearly into the future. Now that—in all senses of selectively transcribing, slighting, dismissing, diminishing, disavowing, and relinquishing—he has put down the past.