Hot Potato, Kool Potato

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 occasions a long look back.

The who is a simpler question than the what. The man bearing the name Remment Lucas Koolhaas, son of the Rotterdam journalist and screenwriter Anton Koolhaas, and grandson of the locally prominent architect Dirk Roosenburg, is now an eighty-one-year-old Amsterdam resident. After a brief career as a journalist and screenwriter, Koolhaas attended from 1968 to 1972 the Architectural Association (AA) in London, and then Cornell University. He did well among the Americans, acquiring social and professional contacts through study in Ithaca and at the storied Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City. (OMA’s glittering 2011 reimagining of the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, which, because it tempers the firm’s signature gestures in concrete and glass with a diligent adaptation of existing structures, is among the firm’s most profoundly useful buildings; following the abrupt departure of designer Joshua Ramus from OMA, Shigematsu was elevated alongside Koolhaas as its project architect.) In 1975, Koolhaas founded OMA with his then-wife, the painter Madelon Vriesendorp, plus another architect-painter couple, Elia and Zoe Zenghelis, who all departed in the middle-1980s. By the 1990s, he was busy and famous.

The peak of Koolhaas’s career, around the turn of the millennium, coincided with the cultural apotheosis of the so-called starchitect—that portmanteau significantly associated with his biggest fan, the late New York Times architecture critic and legendary starfucker Herbert Muschamp. Even as the old media monoculture has fractured into an algorithmically driven attention economy—and even as emerging designers offer diverse alternatives that seek to combine unabashed artistry with engagement in communities—that starry old story remains influential as a developer-driven branding strategy. In a January 2020 profile in the literary journal The Believer (author Johannes Boehme rode along with the architect in a silver BMW on a morning and evening commute between Amsterdam and Rotterdam and spent a day at the office), one can see how, still, Koolhaas’s longstanding public persona reflects and reinforces so many hoary received ideas, from appearances to behaviors, about an imaginary type of larger-than-life male Romantic hero—unapologetic, unyielding, imperious:

SPEAKING OF HIS OWN EMPLOYEES: Long after the buildings celebrated in their time—notably such later and grander works as the Seattle Public Library (2004), the Porto Casa da Música opera house (2005), and the Beijing China Central Television Headquarters (2012)—fade into postpetrotecture obscurity, the most enduring contribution of the OMA office in Rotterdam to architectural history may be how comprehensively it served, for a transatlantic sample of (mostly) Generation X’s most capable and thoughtful architects, as a kind of finishing school. Just as the Berlin office of Peter Behrens famously hosted Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, so did OMA employ Zaha Hadid (from 1977 to 1980) and later a constellation of future stars, including, in no particular order, Bjarke Ingels, partners Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, ex-partners Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi, hometown heroes Winy Maas and Jacob van Rijs, Jeanne Gang, Sarah Whiting, Kate Orff, Hilary Sample, and very many more. These designers founded diverse offices whose creations and cultures were often significantly different from OMA’s. Though they did all seem to give their studios the same kind of name—featuring sequences of capital letters indicating acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms, as if architecture studios were local public agencies or global private corporations or some perfect neoliberal synergy of the two.

Some of the schooling at Rotterdam, accounts suggest, was in the architectural profession’s longstanding traditions of extractive labor practices and associated cultures of cruelty. “[It] was like this cult,” Ingels in 2011 told an Icon magazine reporter, who illustrated the remark with another observation by project architect Mark Veldman: “You can walk out or you can stay the whole night and you can work here. You have a freedom to continue to work.” Andraos, in conversation with fellow architect Michael Meredith in a recent episode of his Department of Buildings podcast, reflected on conditions during her time from 1994 to 2003 at the Rotterdam and New York offices: “I think probably the intensity would be frowned upon a little bit today,” she said, “but to live that for a few years was pretty unique, and you see what you give up to do that.”

Architects Matthias Hollwich and Philipp Oswalt, employees between circa 1996 and 2000, describe in a 1998 Archis essay (framed as a guide for new hires) working conditions and social conventions that they rationalize and normalize as a kind of methodical madness. Or as an egalitarian marketplace of ideas. Or as merely—especially for relatively young people whose physical resilience or social ignorance may make them more tolerant or complaisant, and whose high-turnover transience may preclude any lasting answerability—exciting:

Much of “OMA at Work” emphasizes, in Hollwich and Oswalt’s words, “status” and “awe” and uses a punishing vocabulary of “thwarting,” “foiling,” and “seizing” to describe conduct among employees who are told, “Don’t expect any solidarity from your colleagues.” The office, which they report to be open every hour of every day of the year except for Christmas Day, has “quite an authoritarian structure—who wants to lay themselves open by assessing and criticizing, when the next minute Rem might take the opposite standpoint?” They cover their bases with a strenuously ironical postscript: “You will find everything that we have described in the office, but also its exact opposite.”

In “The Anthropology of a Smoke-filled Room,” a 2018 paper published in the journal Architecture Philosophy, Tulane anthropologist Graham Owen recollects the experiences of his friends working at the most junior level at OMA in 1991:

Owen reexamines conditions at OMA in 2016 and notes what hasn’t changed, citing “anecdotal but firsthand web reports from the review site Glassdoor” characterizing the work environment as “ruthless,” “incredibly disorganized,” “bad,” and “tense,” with a “very high rate of turnover.” Whatever else may distinguish Shigematsu from his colleagues at OMA, he is an enduring outlier to that turnover, and so since his arrival in l998 at Rotterdam he has become—whether voluntarily or involuntarily—a definitive product of that environment. As he explained to sociologist Albena Yaneva in her 2009 study Made by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, “I came here after I graduated. I haven’t worked in other offices.” The documentary record appears as yet insufficient to assess the extent to which Shigematsu, especially since assuming leadership roles at OMA, has perpetuated or broken the office cultures and patterns of behavior described by Boehme, Hollwich and Oswalt, Yaneva, and others, through which he rose with lasting success.

That such employee accounts and anthropological observations might not seem newsworthy, because they merely epitomize what are generally low industry standards, may be all the more reason to center labor ethics in any assessment of the legacies of OMA as an institution influential in the setting of those standards. But they may also be of use in explaining how the project of that office, especially in the twenty-first century, has become primarily a formalist one.

“Koolhaas is ruthless in the pursuit of his ideas.” A commonplace rationalization for punishing and tumultuous working conditions among creative professionals is that such circumstances somehow catalyze intellectual foment and accommodate a collective intelligence sharpened under duress: Chaos follows in the wake of the genius, who then reaps the whirlwind. But it is possible to infer that the opposite is truer: that what makes it through is whatever is legible and tangible. Which is to say, shapes. “Rem does not promote theoretical discourse within the office,” Hollwich and Oswalt record, “not textual but visual methods prevail in the design process. Rem responds only to that which is to be seen, as a diagram or as model.” Olga Aleksakova, who over about five years of employ worked on the Casa da Música and the unbuilt “NeWhitney” addition, observed in Yaneva’s study, “If you try desperately to find a smart idea, you go cutting foam.… You stop thinking, you just look at the piece of foam and you try to make it beautiful, you cut. Sometimes you slice something, and then another thing.… And you think: ‘Oh, that’s interesting’; it’s there. Of course we always have a sense of what Rem would like.”

WHAT DID REM LIKE? There seems to be an underlying aesthetic and a formal fascination that have driven design decisions at OMA. The generally desired look, since the late 1980s, has been something significantly informed by the scrappy local postwar modernism vernacular to Rotterdam and nearby minor cities: modest steel-framed glass boxes, not so different from nearby industrial and agricultural typologies, that wrapped around, or perched on top of, bunker-like and even blobby cast-concrete aediculae or plinths that added a feeling of groundedness, perhaps especially compelling in a flood-prone country. You can look directly from the spartan but cheerful mixed-use community centers developed between the late 1960s and early 1970s by the engineer turned self-taught architect Frank van Klingeren (de Meerpaal in Dronten, t’Karregat in Eindhoven, and the Agora Theatre in Lelystad) over to the gracile tubular columns, sassy cantilevers, and candid ductwork of OMA’s now-demolished Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague (1987). And follow, via the catwalks and curves of the Utrecht Educatorium (1995), past those same gestures at a larger scale in the Euralille Congrexpo sports and convention center (1994), a through line that reaches an unusually effective and likely conclusive expression at Cornell.

The formal fascination, since the midaughts, was the kind of irregular polyhedron that results when, say, you are skinning and roughly quartering a potato to be boiled. Or of course, like Aleksakova, cutting into that blue polystyrene insulation foam. (The toxicity of polymers incised by a hot wire may have increased when, as Yaneva relays, Koolhaas tired of blue and the employees were obliged to spray-paint the foam white.) Plans and sections that are cut through such volumes—as, for example, at the Casa da Música—often yield trapezoids and rhomboids. These shapes, because you can retroject the more seemingly neutral square or rectangle onto them, give you the feeling that some force has acted upon the design, and that the design in response has deflected or counteracted said force, past some tipping point, to arrive at a new equilibrium. The poise or repose of such top- or bottom-heavy volumes have an anthropomorphic charisma that enhances this impression of activity and reactivity. I suspect that all this originates in the drawings by Hugh Ferriss so lavishly reproduced in Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978), illustrating in four stages how the “sky exposure planes” of the city’s zoning laws chisel away at imaginary infinite volumes to produce forms of compound complexity and spooky appeal. As Ferris explains in The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), “It must be understood that the mass thus delineated is not an architect’s design; it is simply a form which results from legal specifications. It is a shape which the Law puts into the architect’s hands. He can add nothing to it; but he can vary it in detail as he wishes.”

It’s even better when the surface of your chopped Maximum Mass Potato is pocked or scarified by some field condition: an ostensibly serendipitously ornamental pattern of openings or markings that seem not to know where the surfaced volume happens to fold or end. This gives the impression that the building has recorded, one with its volume and one with its surface, two ambient systems—perhaps they are light and weight, or nature and culture—and disinterestedly accommodated or skillfully integrated them both. At CCTV and at the squat and rather willfully cantilevered rotunda of the Faena Forum event center (2016) in Miami, structure is pushed out to the walls so that not mere wishes but solemn engineering considerations can be seen and thought to have determined the divertingly irregular incisions and apertures on the façade.

Stuff topping stuff, stuff cutting stuff: It can look so good! Unless, as in the example of the NeWhitney, which—because reasons—cantilevered a chamfered and perforated Maximum Mass Potato over the existing Marcel Breuer–designed museum and neighboring Madison Avenue brownstones, it looks so bad. But so precisely bad, in a way so very studied, that it indicates not that you have no eye or no taste but that your concerns are greater than mere appearances. It takes a lot of skill and erudition and cool and nous to thread that needle, to successfully cultivate this careful carelessness, to convincingly appear not to be good at self-flattery, and so it connotes a lot of status—fancy education and/or social privilege. It reminds me of the closely similar art of longtime OMA client Miuccia Prada, whose jolie laide clothes don’t make you look good but, you hope, make you look like you’re too good (too smart, too hot, too rich) to worry about looking good.

If visually striking and tactilely stimulating shapes are what make it through the potato-peeling scullery at Rotterdam, the ostensibly purely reactive nature of those shapes may have served another purpose in that context—as a kind of defense against any appearance, by any junior designer, of desire. “Who wants to lay themselves open by assessing and criticizing,” one recalls Hollwich and Oswalt saying, “when the next minute Rem might take the opposite standpoint?” This resembles the standard dilemma for architecture students subject to cruel or mercurial instruction in which any especially visibly authored decisions are points of weakness during the drama of the critique. (A defensive system of authorized authorlessness may have, however inadvertently, bolstered the association with Deconstruction in literary theory that, around the time of the Museum of Modern Art’s Deconstructivist Architecture show in 1988, was read by some curators and critics into the work of OMA and other blob-and-zigzag shops of the era.)

A Maximum Mass Potato on every plate! Things had to look a certain way and have a certain shape, either because of “a sense of what Rem would like” or—the engine of the studio’s success being the personal fame of that founder—to sustain with a signature look his fame. The ingenuity of OMA’s approach was in constructing an aura of cerebral disinterest around those very narrowly specific aesthetic desires—the forms are merely determining themselves in response to ambient conditions—and so achieving those desires without ever having seemed merely to want them. This one weird trick (what Owen in his ethnographic study called “the drive to ascribe agency to non-human actors”) meant that the wanted look could be pursued at OMA without the risk or embarrassment, for anyone from the summer intern all the way up to the founding partner, of seeming to want. That potentially humiliating state—of wanting—may have been especially excruciating for anyone educated at a fancy private British design school such as the Architectural Association in the late midcentury, at which visible efforts, strenuous idealisms, and passionate enthusiasms would generally have been, in the class system that predetermined much of its internal social politics, liabilities.

“When I came to the Architectural Association in 1968,” Koolhaas told a Tate Museum interviewer in 2004, “it was an incredible scene, because the most moribund elements of English culture were being used as props against which the avant-garde could perform its tricks.” The chief prop master and trickster was the otherwise relatively unsung Canadian architect Alvin Boyarsky, who in 1971 commenced a nineteen-year run as director. This was remarkable at a school without tenure, with a regularly elected directorship, and so with ferociously factional academic politics that played out—students as proxies for the instructors around whom they were enlisted into isolated cliques—in its notoriously vicious reviews. This big fish presided over his small but deep pond by appeasingly and fashionably promoting the aesthetic imaginarium and performatively insouciant manners of post-1968 counterculture but not its politics. And thereby reinforcing the not so moribund establishmentarian conditions suggested by the school’s physical resemblance, in its stately town houses on Bedford Square, to a traditional London private social club. And by, one gathers, perfecting as only a more-English-than-the-English-colonial could, the self-aggrandizing self-effacement and concealment of labor practiced by Great Britain’s ruling classes: “In England, work is not actually to be encountered in public places. In fact, it’s indecent to be seen to be drawing in public,” Boyarsky explained to an American university audience in 1989, “so what [the AA] building consists of is places to eat, to meet, and so forth.” “I am unaccustomed to such a kind introduction,” he said in an icy midcentury transatlantic drawl at the start of that lecture, “Where I come from it’s quite different.” Koolhaas is invariably described as never having been seen to draw in public. An analyst might suggest that at OMA he restaged the rivalrous upheaval and pseudofamilial psychodrama he experienced at the AA—where an affect of dispassionate disinterest would have been the best defense; where ironical deadpan would have been the weapon of choice when bellicosity eventually became embarrassing even to the bellicose; and where foreigners would still have been subject to both fascination and condescension within classist and nativist hierarchies—but with himself, finally, in totalizing authority.

THE NEW MUSEUM WAS FOUNDED in 1977 in a gallery at the New School. In 2007, it moved into a sixty-thousand-square-foot, seven-story purpose-built building by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, on the east side of the Bowery at its T-junction with Prince Street to the west. The building, an instant local landmark, was a miniature skyscraper clad in a pearlescent expanded metal mesh and expressed as six stacked and shifted boxes over a glass storefront. It was a mixed success. At ground level, characteristically attentive SANAA details included the subtle burying of the bottom frame of the glass storefront, such that the eye—and imagination—moved seamlessly from the city sidewalk to the polished cement floor of the lobby. Making a virtue of a necessity, the back-of-house and loading dock shared that façade with the front entrance and the onstage and backstage museum were treated with equal visibility and dignity. Upstairs, the three main gallery levels, though measurably tall, felt cramped. The skylights made possible by the shifts between the stacked boxes seemed always to be covered. Circulation—despite a bravura staircase in a tall and narrow slot of space alongside the third- and fourth-floor galleries—was mostly a tedious matter of corkscrew-tight fire stairs and that legendarily slow freight elevator. Even as annual attendance increased to over four hundred thousand from sixty thousand, and staff to 150 from thirty, the building wasn’t an especially good spot to look at art. The museum bought the property to its immediate south, 231 Bowery, a robust early-twentieth-century structure that had led many lives in warehousing and wholesale commerce, which it used for exhibitions, offices, and its arts incubator NEW INC. In 2019, following a design competition, the museum announced that it would destroy this old building and that OMA would design a new one.

The OMA building, with fifty feet of frontage to the seventy-two feet of SANAA’s earlier structure, is narrower but extends deeper into its block. It doubles both the museum’s total square footage and its gallery space. Two of its design decisions are profound and correct. Outside, from a datum that assiduously lines up with a setback halfway up the SANAA façade, the addition tilts back at an angle that makes it perfectly invisible to a pedestrian waiting to cross from across the Bowery—Hugh Ferriss would be proud. Inside, the three new gallery levels that align and open generously to the existing galleries are detailed, from their polished cement floors to their white-coated-steel-trussed ceilings, exactly to match their tall and narrow precursors—an artful seamlessness and deference that the addition’s design otherwise avoids. Though possibly the match was too exact: On recent visits, those three extended gallery levels (although overstuffed with their inaugural exhibitions) felt to me to be no larger than before and just as airless and as artificially overlit as ever. It’s interesting to imagine the thrift and capaciousness that might have resulted had this copy/paste strategy been used more comprehensively and comprehendingly, inside and out. SANAA’s stacked box composition would have lent itself uniquely well to playful and useful extrapolation—as demonstrated in the competition entry from SO-IL, coauthored by former SANAA employee Florian Idenburg, which deftly stacked and shifted more boxes at the center of the block behind what would have been a spectacular elevated sculpture garden overlooking the Bowery.

Instead, the new New Museum adheres closely to the OMA playbook. The Maximum Mass Potato returns. The Ferrissish sky exposure plane that angles back at the top is complemented by an overhanging cutaway at the bottom—opening up a triangular micro-plaza at street level that, though it leads nowhere, can be mistaken for the main entrance. (Cut an east-to-west cross section through all this and compare it to a southwest-to-northeast section of the Casa da Música, and you can see on both building’s primary façades the same three primary angles.) The façade’s various snips and folds propagate above to generate a skylight and some inset balconies and below to make a pointy little atrium overlooked by a steep staircase that hugs the façade from within. Tilted strip windows along the staircase are rather too high to offer city views for those ascending and descending. But from the outside the apertures provide that OMA signature of a diverting surface pattern gliding seemingly agnostically across the facets of the volume it adorns.

One of the glories of visiting New York museums is glimpsing our streetscapes and skylines from the galleries. But the circulation carapace at the new New Museum seals the art away from the city. The busy visual effects of the atrium and lobby within this carapace—shiny and silvery surfaces, linear lighting redoubled by reflection, colorful supergraphics on the walls—closely recall OMA’s nearby Prada Epicenter store (2001) at Broadway and Prince Street. But, despite some pretty metallic cork and some pellucid suspended ceilings, the overall effect is more frantic than the calm and voluptuary luxury evinced over at Prada. The staircase expands on the museum’s fifth and sixth levels to create some bleacher-type seating in a glassed-off mini auditorium (it looks able to accommodate maybe sixty souls in close proximity, before a very shallow stage) whose overall lean neatly parallels the pitch of the ceiling. There’s not too much headroom, though—everything up there feels about two-thirds life size. The feeling of being inside a model is enhanced by the coloration of the auditorium area, which closely approaches the cornflower hue of blue polystyrene insulation foam.

Overlooking the mini auditorium is the best room in the whole place. A sort of lobby for the mini auditorium that may serve as an event space, this room is awkwardly but spectacularly linked to an understated multipurpose room in the old building by one of three glass-walled bridges between the two structures. It offers through various angular apertures—these are residues of the Massive Mass Potato operations on the façade—glimpses of sky and of the remarkable raking views of lower Manhattan that can be had from tall buildings in the relatively low-lying East Village and the Lower East Side. A design less interested in external appearances might have found a way to enhance these effects, and to bring something of the urbanity and daylight experienced at this level into the nearby galleries and staircases and even down to the ground level below.

THE URBAN GRIT of our streetscapes and the urbane glamour of our skylines added gravity to Delirious New York, the slim volume that began as lectures delivered in the middle 1970s at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. In one of architecture’s more deft and presumptive turns of rhetoric, Koolhaas pitched the book as a “retroactive manifesto” for a Manhattan that needed none. (One can only imagine the local drama around Bedford Square that inspired Reyner Banham—he of bucolic Norwich, England—to give the book the most New York Fucking City possible review in 1979: “Is Koolhaas, too, trapped in some European parochialism and convinced that he understands when he does not, or does his easily impressed provincialism give him genuine insights into the skyscraper jungle that a true cosmopolite from, say, Rome or Leningrad or Edinburgh might never possess?”) Delirious took a particular interest in the picturesque and surreal leisure infrastructures of the urban working class—the antic and electric amusement parks at Coney Island were suggested to be a synecdoche for Manhattan Island itself—though not in the concomitant but far less winsome architectures of their labor and dwelling.

The incomprehension, euphoria, and prioritization of entertaining spectacle experienced by a certain kind of privileged urban tourist or transplant were projected outward by the book as if those were qualities of the city itself. The boring but ultimately reassuring prospect of returning home to some tidy European province may have afforded its author greater relish for the macabre and abject in the five boroughs than New Yorkers, in their long endurance of the greatest city on earth, can allow themselves. Delirium is a quintessentially impermanent state and not one that confers responsibility for oneself and others. “The Metropolis is an addictive machine,” asserts the book’s appendix, which features some speculative projects—rendered in the apparently highly Hejduk-aware cartoony isometrics that constituted OMA’s house style before the departures of Vriesendorp and the Zenghelises—for places like Times Square and Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island, “from which there is no escape unless it offers that too.”

The would-be cosmopolitan localism of Delirious New York gave way to the aspirational global universalism of S, M, L, XL (1995). This was the biblically fat book undertaken with nominal coauthor and celebrity graphic designer Bruce Mau. Its mostly monographic content was organized, small to extra-large, by the scale of the previous twenty years of built and unbuilt OMA projects. Providing a through line was a devil’s dictionary of quotations applied to features of the built environment, from ABOLISH (from Susan Sontag’s 1963 novel The Benefactor: “To execute an intention amounts to abolishing a desire”) to ZOOM RATIO (from the 1989 edition of the AutoCAD Reference Manual: “AutoCAD’s ‘zoom ratio’ is about ten trillion to one, more than adequate for most applications”). The 1,344-page, six-pound, three-inch-thick volume was a self-described “novel about architecture.” While it was not a novel about architecture, there were, scattered among the many photos and illustrations, some brief memoiristic essays and chatty project narratives, alongside that sly word list with its anthology of banal and brainy quotations. The sententious rhetoric tended toward false oppositions, unanswerable questions, and irrefutably indeterminate both/and pronouncements whose concision tacitly claimed for them the very precision they explicitly elided:

“The architect is no longer condemned to stardom.”

“Bigness is where architecture becomes both most and least architectural.”

“The built is now fundamentally suspect.”

“How to inject a new ‘sign’ into a landscape that—through scale and atmosphere alone—renders any object both arbitrary and inevitable?”

Just as the retrojective potential of all those trapezoidal and rhomboidal shapes encouraged you to suppose that a building thus formed had merely involuntarily transcribed various forces and conditions into an inevitable geometrical result, so did the seeming comprehensiveness and capaciousness of all those gnomic assertions and incontestably indeterminate diagrams claim for the book not a polemic’s reedy stridency but an encyclopedia’s magisterial authority.

IF OMA, ESPECIALLY in the twenty-first century, were not so invested in its shapes, and were more devoted to the disinterested collection of and deflection to existing conditions that those very shapes are supposed to index, it might have been more genuinely interested in historic preservation and adaptive reuse. In the 2003 OMA publication Content, Shigematsu observes:

A more ambitious consideration of historic preservation came in 2011 to the ground floor of the very building at 231 Bowery that OMA caused the New Museum to destroy. This was Cronocaos, a traveling version of the firm’s exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale the year before, which proposed what Koolhaas, in his remarks at its New York opening, called “the apotheosis of heritage.” The premise was the simple but witty observation, as he put it in a lecture at Columbia University in 2009, that “the interval or the distance between the present and what was preserved [is diminishing]. In 1818, it was two thousand years. In 1900, it was only two hundred years. And near the 1960s, it became twenty years. We are living in an incredibly exciting and slightly absurd moment, namely that preservation is overtaking us.” Cronocaos can be understood as a dignifying sublimation of the challenges and failures that OMA experienced with major projects at historic sites, such as with its proposals for Hermitage Museum (2008) in Saint Petersburg, and the Whitney, where not even the world’s most starry architect could master the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Cronocaos was emphatic about the imagined cultural capital of brilliant masterpieces, real and alleged, as later evoked by Shigematsu in reference to the Whitney; about ugliness and beauty, surprisingly conventionally considered; about the charms and perils of historicity, actual and perceived; and about a notion that the “iconic” formalism that is purportedly the tedious duty of the starchitect might—Atlas shrugs! Cincinnatus plows!—voluntarily ease into the relaxing formlessness offered by merely intervening in existing structures. But Cronocaos appears not to have significantly attended to what is the primary ethical imperative, in 2011 no less than in 2026, behind adaptive reuse: Decades into the climate crisis, the energy and carbon embodied in the already built environment make it a precious nonrenewable resource; it’s no longer interesting to default to the destruction of existing buildings for the construction of new ones, rather than to strategies of transformation and regeneration wherever they are realistically or even remotely available.

Tucked deep into Search Term, the 2021 monograph of twenty-first century work by OMA’s New York office, is a diagram that shows the correct strategy: retention of 231 Bowery, in the manner of the loft living and “urban homesteading” that in the 1960s and ’70s repurposed the nearby SoHo warehouses and factories into residences, studios, and galleries; construction of a new tower at the center of the block, behind the retained building; and expression of circulation not as a Massive Mass Potato on the façade but as a spectacular crossroads structure between the three building masses that would then result—fulfilling the potential of that glassy bridge leading to the as-built museum’s one truly great room. It’s significantly to the credit of the editors of Search Term that they admit the path not taken.

Captions around this diagram protest in many ways—and to my ears too much—that this path would have been impossible:

Little in the facts of the matter seems to support this assertion. Unanswered is why OMA would shy away from practical difficulty and resort instead to an S-sized architectural retrospective of its signature aesthetics and forms. To be sure, it would have been harder to carry out the capital campaign (a reported $63 million for construction, $26 million for endowment plus cash reserves) that went along with the addition had said addition been invisible from the street. And nobody, maybe not even architects, wants their name on an old building. New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, interviewed by Shigematsu for Search Term, remarks, “I think in our case paradoxically we need an iconic building to ground our temporary shows: The building provides a sense of permanence.” “That’s interesting,” Shigematsu replies.

WHAT DO YOU THINK about loft living? Interview magazine asked Koolhaas in 1979. He replied, “It’s corny and passé.” That was the smart answer. When urban homesteading in SoHo still connoted earnest hippie idealism and the avant-garde, the cool thing to do was call it corny—especially to a publication founded by Andy Warhol, for whom corniness was both anathema and useful raw material—and passé. In 1979, the New Museum, founded in 1977, would still have been actually as well as nominally new. I imagine that as an adjective in the name of an art museum in downtown New York, the word new was in tacit dialogue not only with the new in New York (“New York has a benefit of having ‘new’ in its name,” Shigematsu brilliantly observed in a 2013 interview, “You know, ‘New York.’ It sounds like there’s always ‘new’ things happening [here]”) but with the word modern. That word once felt new but is now also strangely timeless, was once revolutionary but is now also strangely establishmentarian, and is to be found in the name of that other very New York museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown.

In “Dutch Reformation,” an essay expanding on his 1994 New York Times profile of the architect, Douglas Coupland asserts that Koolhaas had transcended modernity—or at least an ethically idealistic response to modernity by culture, literature, and architecture, which is called modernism—and arrived at something the novelist called The New. Coupland insists (incorrectly, not least because one of Euralille’s major roads is the Avenue Le Corbusier) that in OMA’s Lille Congrexpo complex near the TGV train station, “there are no witty little allusions to Mies, no casual homages to Corbu.” This sets up a reported Koolhaas remark: “He says that, ‘by the late 1980s it became humiliating to depend on an intellectual outburst that was almost one hundred years old.’”

S, M, L, XL briefly answers to its self-description as a novel in a passage of memoir, entitled “Field Trip,” in which Koolhaas recalls an idyll during his education: “AA, London, early seventies.” The school, he writes, was “in upheaval about mystic takeover plot” (presumably a comment about the annual turmoil around faculty reappointments and the prospect of directorship elections). After “a monstrously idealistic appearance by Louis Kahn” (presumably an allusion to the metaphysical Philadelphian’s remarks about the numinous and luminous upon receiving a medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1972), Koolhaas says, “Never again…” and absconds to Berlin. He has thoughts and feelings about the Berlin Wall. He professes himself shocked—shocked!—to find it beautiful and concludes that “the wall suggested that architecture’s beauty was directly proportional to its horror.” Also that it “made a total mockery of any of the emerging attempts to link form to meaning.” And that “its range from the absolute … to the deformed was an unexpected manifestation of the formless ‘modern,’ alternately strong and weak, imposition and residue, Cartesian and chaotic, all its seemingly different states merely phases of the same essential project.” The author records a happy ending: He returns home and to his own satisfaction delivers his first presentation as part of a juried review.

So vividly haunted is this passage by intimations of the AA’s intramural dramas, by its “semifestive, semicynical” dynamics to which its author was so exquisitely attuned, that the Berlin interlude, perhaps all the Cold War itself, seems somehow to have been mainly an episode in the important humiliations that Koolhaas received and dispensed at school. But the lesson was clear and enduring: The speech act of the winner is to say that something loved or hated by one’s opponent is much the same as its opposite (order and chaos, strength and weakness, monstrosity and the idealism summoned against monstrosity), precisely the rhetorical procedure perfected in the caustic epigrams of S, M, L, XL.

It must have felt nice—a few years after 1990, Berlin reunited—to think that the world was new. That old dialectics could be collapsed. That idealism (especially idealism in design, which found durable expression in that now more than one-hundred-year-old intellectual outburst called modernism) could be corny and passé. That everyone, finally, could be semifestive and semicynical. “Architects are almost insanely interested in the future,” Koolhaas suggested at his 2011 Cronocaos lecture, “though at this point we are wise enough to know that real progress is not really possible.” The affect of such a remark—the sardonic performance of disappointed optimism wising up into deterministic fatalism—reminds me of the decay of once buoyant text message acronyms, from indicating the escalation to ecstasy that is laughing out loud or saying oh my god into bathos; into a theatrically low-effort terminus; into a flattening punctum that deflates or deflects all previous affects or advances: S, M, LOL.

For a would-be cosmopolite of circa 1994, it must have felt calming to imagine that there was a vast leveling—the world as flat and neat as Dutch landfill—where everything could be scaled, where nowhere was parochial, where beauty was proportional to horror. For even an involuntarily cultural Calvinist of that time, it must have been a relief to figuratively whitewash evidence of the messy passions of the past from the churches of the old religion—modernism—into something less incontinent and more phlegmatic. “Originally, I may be Calvinistic with an Asian dimension,” Koolhaas told W magazine in 2014, “Then, Anglo-Saxon with a Continental dimension. That gives me some duality.” The asserted Asian dimension must have been a reference to four childhood years, much cherished in this and other interviews, in postcolonial Indonesia. The Calvinism, rather more substantially, was that Dutch Reformation mentioned by Coupland: the local expression of the sixteenth-century crisis in Christianity that inaugurated what historians call the Early Modern era.

“All buildings in Holland have to be cheap,” it says in S, M, L, XL, “in the name of a Calvinist afterburn.” The quintessential afterburn of Calvinism is less performative frugality than the doctrine of predestination: God knows, because He eternally already wrote it, how the story ends. (As Koolhaas wrote in another context, about the 1916 zoning law so dramatically illustrated by Hugh Ferris, “the outlines of the ultimate Manhattan have been drawn once and for all [time].”) This theological assertion presents certain paradoxes around the ethics of human agency and liberty, around coercion and persuasion, around arbitrariness and inevitability: If professing that we have free will “is meant [to say] that after we are once subdued by the power of the Lord to the obedience of righteousness, we proceed voluntarily.… I have nothing to object,” wrote John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536). Our actions can only become voluntary, he says, once we have first been made obedient and subdued by power into involuntary action.

As for Calvin, maybe so for Koolhaas: The voluntary and the involuntary are the whole point. As in the title of his 1972 AA thesis, “The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture”—a fantasia in which Londoners are involuntarily compelled by their own fascinations to voluntarily enter internal exile and incarceration within a West Berlin–like walled enclave. As in the well-known fable in Delirious New York about the Russian Constructivist architects who accidentally undertake a forty-year swim to New York City (“they were amazed at this involuntary locomotion; actually, it was explained by a simple law of physics: action = reaction”). As in more recent statements, such as the assertion from his Cronocaos lecture that “for me the most compelling case of heritage is involuntary heritage such as … what happened to Pompeii [which is] unbelievably eloquent,” and beside which the more deliberative efforts of such entities as the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission can be made to seem comparatively sentimental and trivial. As in his Columbia lecture in which he asserted that his Beijing CCTV project “was in fact more or less a political statement [and] not necessarily part of a grotesque, exaggerated form of involuntary newness.” Or as, in that same lecture, his needling of Peter Eisenman, erstwhile master of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, who in a slide is pictured “in the center of his monument”—the ostensibly labyrinthine 2005 Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe—“as a kind of involuntary Minotaur with the press in hot pursuit.”

The creation of a peculiar aura of predestined involuntary inevitability around your person and persona—around both your behaviors and your designs—would seem to confer a significant license and a significant defense. The license is to do what you want, and to get others to do what you want—without necessarily feeling, or being held, accountable for outcomes and effects on others. The defense is from being seen as either pious or desirous. Especially in certain Anglo-Saxon and Continental circles, the stridency so easily prompted by piety and desire, by explicit idealism and visible neediness, can come—so corny—at a social cost. Better to instead appear, even to oneself, as an ascetic avatar of discernment and disinterest.

It seems to me that if we seek at any cost to sustain that public persona that has long been useful to us architects—the performance of cerebral and ironical detachment once so admired by Continental outsiders among upper class Anglo-Saxons; the cowboy cool and astronaut competence once so impressive to transatlantic observers among middle-class Americans—then all the heat of our remembered humiliations, and all our suppressed desires and furies and hopes and fears of only being human, must go somewhere. An aspect of the self, artificially abnegated in the performance of an observant equanimity in which we discern everything and desire nothing, must naturally seek to be gratified in other ways.

For this reason, it may be that the backstage drama still so characteristic of the architectural profession—the cultures of cruelty emerging from extractive labor practices—must be not some bug in the system but a feature of certain kinds of offices that sustains the onstage personae of their principals. Maybe in order to support an open fiction that certain kinds of conflicts, dialectics, hierarchies, and outbursts are things of the past, we perform those things provincially and privately, and so at moral hazard.

History, we know now, did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are all angry in public now. We are all afraid in the streets. And upstairs in the offices, too. If there is any silver lining—or is it merely a moral imperative?—to today’s especially visible return, buoyed by tired tropes of genius and greatness, of monsters and monstrosity all around the world, it’s that it is no longer sufficient or interesting to be semicynical and semifestive. It’s no longer wise enough to believe that real progress is not really possible. It’s no longer corny or passé—onstage or backstage—to be an idealist. To be a fighter for the weak against the strong and for the better against the worse. And to know the difference between the inevitable and the arbitrary. Once again, just like those who came a hundred years before us, after industrialized war and global pandemic and anti-humanist technological folly, we learn how to be modern. Nothing gets old faster than the new.