WHAT WAS REM KOOLHAAS? The question arises on the occasion of the opening, in March of this year, of an addition to the New Museum, the contemporary art venue on the Bowery in lower Manhattan, by his Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). The design is attributed to Koolhaas and to Shohei Shigematsu, a fifty-three-year-old architect originally from Fukuoka, Japan, who as a precocious young employee in 2001 contributed significantly to OMA’s attempted addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is now one of eight partners at OMA, and since 2006 he has led its New York City office on Varick Street. There’s a great photo of Shigematsu bestriding the structural steel at the museum’s construction site and doing his best Gary Cooper. “Rem,” he asserts in an associated cover story for PIN-UP magazine, “is a great liberator—he encourages young designers to conceive something radical, something you’ve never seen before.” Because the new building so conservatively and so discouragingly confines itself to everything that you’ve ever seen before from OMA, it occasi…
Hot Potato, Kool Potato
