Rem Sleep

Far be it for me to engage in any starchitecture revisionist history, or even to take the first tentative steps in the direction of rehabilitating the major projects or figures of that era, the apex of which we might loosely fix on the historical timeline between the heady second half of 1997, when Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Richard Meier’s Getty Center in Los Angeles opened to the public, and August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and in short order laid bare just how bereft of ideas about climate, housing, race, class, and regional culture architecture had become. A fixation with celebrity hollowed out architecture as it has so many other fields, never more clearly than when design-world stardom and the Hollywood variety came together in the form of the Gehry–Brad Pitt post-Katrina housing collab Make It Right, for whose architectural hubris residents of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward are still paying a price. On balance, and with the benefit of hindsight, it’s tough to mount an argument that nearly a dozen American museum wings by Renzo Piano and a parade of photogenic trophy buildings for autocrats, oligarchs, and just plain hyperwealthy men by Zaha Hadid, Wolf Prix, and Norman Foster made the world a better or more meaningful place. And the ways that starfucking disfigured my field in particular, architecture criticism, are many. As a young critic I came up trying, and often failing, to get my byline past the territorial and watchful eye of Herbert Muschamp and into the arts pages of the New York Times, just as he was successfully consolidating his power at the paper and in the design world by writing (often with real idiosyncratic panache, if I’m honest) about the same half-dozen architects again and again, along with more personal subjects like the leather pants he almost bought or—and I  wish I were creative enough to be making this up—Tom Cruise’s schnoz, in a 2006 tribute mounted on behalf of “us full-nosed fellas.”

Still, I did feel a stab of nostalgia for the old days during a road trip this fall from my home in New Haven, Connecticut, to Buffalo, New York, with a stop along the way at the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca. In seeing two projects by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in succession—first Milstein Hall, completed in 2011 for Cornell’s architecture school, and then a gleaming, prismatic wing that opened last year at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum—I understood with a new clarity what it’s meant for the architectural celebrities, or at least certain ones, to give way to what an NFL commentator, in describing quarterbacks who aren’t quite dynamic enough make the leap from directing their teammates’ play to transcending it, would call the “game managers.”

The transition in OMA’s case was a gradual one, taking place over more than a decade; it may be helpful for some of our readers, before we get to the Ithaca and Buffalo buildings in detail, to review some chronology. Though he cofounded OMA with Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis, and Madelon Vriesendorp in 1975, three years before he would earn his degree from the Architectural Association in London, Rem Koolhaas had by the time I began writing about architecture, in the middle 1990s, become the most influential single figure in the field—an ascension that began with his wildly precocious 1978 book Delirious New York and accelerated with the publication, in 1995, of  S,M,L,XL, a doorstop-sized collaboration with the charmingly ursine design-world polymath Bruce Mau. Over the following decade and a half, thanks to projects including the Maison à Bordeaux (1998), Prada stores in New York and Los Angeles (2001 and 2004, respectively), a student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology (2003), the main branch of the Seattle Public Library (2004), and the CCTV tower in Beijing (2002–2012), Koolhaas displayed much of that same inventiveness in built form. The first European building I traveled to review as critic for the Los Angeles Times, in 2005, was OMA’s Casa da Musica concert hall in Porto, Portugal.

Each of the projects I just listed has flaws, most of them having to do with a tendency to elevate archness, irony, and a certain kind of savvy over anything that might be confused, even briefly, with architectural humanism; the detailing, meanwhile, is so often intentionally rough or unadorned that in later buildings it becomes a kind of self-parody. In Porto, where the bone-white Casa da Musica hovers like a sixteen-sided die over a similarly monochromatic hardscaped plaza, I found a work of architecture that was, as I wrote at the time, “muscular, cunning and bloodless,” with “a literal and emotional emptiness right where the heart of the building should be.” (The Gutter—a short-lived weblog and precursor of sorts to today’s anonymous social-media-based architectural meme shops—held that last phrase up for light and probably deserved mockery.) What gives the best of these OMA buildings their power, it’s clear to me now, is a lively, active intelligence that is at war, equally, with nostalgia and bourgeois taste, and that produces a generally bracing brand of architecture. I’m reminded of what the film critic Pauline Kael said in praising the urbane, wholly unsentimental Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1920s and early ’30s: that they “kept the audience in a heightened state of consciousness,” as if “the lights were on in the theatre.”

The buildings the firm completed during this period were of course collaborative exercises, as are all projects of this scale and complexity. As Koolhaas once put it, with a self-deprecation I never found entirely convincing, “It’s not purely my voice. It’s more of an orchestration.” In Porto the design team was codirected by Ellen van Loon, in Seattle by a young Joshua Ramus. Yet in retrospect I have come to believe that Koolhaas himself should be considered the primary author of both of those designs, along with the ones in Bordeaux, Chicago, and Beijing.

Over time, as OMA’s global practice picked up and Koolhaas grew older—he turned eighty this year, on November 17—it was only natural that a younger generation would rise to the fore. Ramus seemed poised for a central role before announcing in 2006 that he was leaving to start his own firm, called REX—and taking the entirety of the New York office with him. Rebuilding the office has taken time, as you might guess, and to a large degree the work of doing so has fallen to Shohei Shigematsu, who was born in Fukuoka, trained at Kyushu University and now, at fifty-one, is one of eight OMA partners. Ramus—along with Bjarke Ingels, Ole Scheeren, Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, and Jeanne Gang, among other recognizable names—left the firm during this period. Shigematsu is the one who decided to stay.

Milstein Hall, the home of Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, was one of the key projects marking this uncertain period in OMA’s evolution. After earlier proposals by Steven Holl and Berlin’s Barkow Leibinger Architects fell through, Ramus helped secure the job in January 2006; in the wake of his departure later that year, it wound up under the direction of Shigematsu. Yet Koolhaas’s sensibility is stamped all over Milstein. It is one of the last buildings to emerge from the New York office that shows something close to the full range of the older architect’s talents.

Cornell first hired OMA to lead a master-planning phase, from which the building scheme emerged. The site (“once occupied by a sad parking lot,” according to Search Term, a 2021 book on the work of OMA New York by Shigematsu and another partner in the office, Jason Long) marks the entry to the northern edge of the university’s campus, with the Falls Creek Gorge in one direction and several buildings leading to the Arts Quad on the other. Unlike the ill-fated earlier schemes, which called for demolishing one of those buildings, Rand Hall, the OMA design retains Rand (itself controversially updated in 2019 by Wolfgang Tschapeller) and connects it (by means of a box-like form, which resembles a briefcase but the architects refer to as a “plate”) to another nearby classroom wing, Sibley Hall. The plate—the metaphor appears to recall the cell culture dishes used in science and medical labs (so the school can incubate better architects, get it?)—then extends to cantilever out over University Avenue. Where it turns to face the interior f campus, the building extends another cantilevered section, this one with the words MILSTEIN HALL engraved faintly into the lower fascia’s panels of Turkish marble.

Passing beneath that second overhang takes you to the front entrance, where the building opens up to reveal a sectional and material variety largely hidden on the outside. A stair, which bends over the top of a domed room, leads directly to the top floor, where the student desks are lined up in dense rows, as is the case in every architecture school in North America. A footbridge bisecting the dome, meanwhile, offers views of a sunken crit space before leading to the top rows of an auditorium with 282 seats.

The design is muscular, adventuresome, attentive to context, busy, and thoughtful all at once. It is also willing to risk a misstep or two. OMA earned a good deal of capital with Cornell’s leadership by committing to protect Rand Hall and by slipping the new building in and around existing campus architecture, with a kind of patient but also showy pragmatism. It then spent that capital in winningly profligate ways on the interior—a dynamic combination, largely drained of bright color and consisting of steel; glass; stamped perforated aluminum panels meant to evoke a vintage tin ceiling (a detail somehow less cloying in person than it sounds); exposed, cast-in-place concrete; naked fluorescent lighting; and, lining the walls of the auditorium, a curtain digitally printed with black-and-white drawings by the sixteenth century architect and artist Hans Vredeman de Vries.

It is impossible of course to say with total precision what Koolhaas himself contributed to the Milstein design. He held on to the project even as he let Ramus take others with him on his way out the door. Koolhaas appeared at Cornell (where he had studied in the early 1970s and where he began writing Delirious New York) to unveil the scheme personally in the fall of 2006, calling it “a miracle box which at first sight seems very straightforward.” He returned five years later for the ribbon cutting. He did a round of interviews on each occasion and at several other moments in between. It was clearly a building whose success mattered to him personally.

It is far easier to quantify Rem’s lack of involvement in the extension of the Buffalo AKG, for which he did none of those things, and which has clearly been spearheaded by Shigematsu. The AKG’s director, Janne Sirén, who arrived in Buffalo in 2013, confirmed as much in an interview with Architectural Record, stressing that the institution’s board and leadership had been “very specific about who we selected. It wasn’t Rem Koolhaas, but Shohei Shigematsu.”

The museum, founded in 1862 as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, is now called the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. (The G in AKG is for Jeffrey E. Gundlach, CEO and founder of DoubleLine Capital, who helped pay for the new wing. In 2021, while it was under construction, he appeared at a museum event “to discuss art as an asset class.”) Since 1905 it has occupied a low-slung, neoclassical building by architect Edward B. Green, on a site overlooking Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1876 Delaware Park. In 1962 it added, to the south, an extension designed by Buffalo native Gordon Bunshaft, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). It consists of a two-story building in dark glass containing a 350-seat auditorium above a small suite of galleries and, wedged in between that structure and the original museum, a square sculpture courtyard with hallway galleries along its perimeter. While I don’t agree with Kenzo Tange’s claim that Bunshaft’s addition was, at the time of its completion, “the most beautiful building in the world for an art museum,” it does find him operating near the height of his powers, in a coolly Miesian vein. And though the auditorium, wrapped in glass on three sides, with blood-red seats, has been rather unloved over the years by the museum, it remains to die for. When the Bunshaft wing was christened, in a ceremony featuring New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and other dignitaries, the curator and critic Katherine Kuh observed that “one did not feel trapped in this beautiful glass room where a pleasant parklike view neutralized the droning voices of city, county, and state officials.”

OMA’s first expansion scheme, made public in 2017, called for replacing the Bunshaft courtyard with a 13,000-square-foot new wing, with another 10,000 square feet of gallery space (and a parking garage) buried belowground. After critics and preservationists objected to the loss of the courtyard, and to the rather ham-fisted way the proposal treated Bunshaft on the whole, OMA and the museum reversed course, with Shigematsu helping broker a commendably pragmatic solution. The firm released an updated design in the summer of 2018 that moved the new wing—officially the Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building—to the northern edge of the site and left the Bunshaft wing largely intact. Though this elongates the museum, requiring visitors to walk a fair distance to complete a full circuit of the galleries, it has the benefit of rebalancing the campus architecturally, with the original Green building now flanked on each side by an extension, creating a larger symmetry that mirrors the tripartite elevation of the older, templelike neoclassical building itself.

It also connects the museum more solidly to Elmwood Avenue, which runs along the western edge of the site, the side farthest from the park. This reorientation, as OMA has pointed out, establishes the Buffalo AKG as a rarity in being both “a museum in the park, embedded in the tranquility of nature, and a museum in the city.”

And so, urbanistically at least, the OMA plan has significantly improved matters for the museum. This helps make up for the fact that the victory won by preservationists fighting to save the Bunshaft courtyard was largely a Pyrrhic one. While it is still physically there, what spatial grace it once possessed has been obliterated by Common Sky, a 2022 artwork by Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann, made of stainless steel, glass, and mirror foil, that operates like a ceiling, turning the courtyard into a winter garden, with a funnel-like form touching down melodramatically in one spot. The installation has the effect of neutering (or at least neutralizing) Bunshaft’s intentions, turning his precise geometry and material sensibility into a banal scaffolding for selfies and an upscale museum restaurant, whose tables spill out into the courtyard. I have no idea if Eliasson and Behmann (and OMA, which facilitated this “intervention”) meant it this way, but the gesture comes across as a petulant response to critics of the earlier scheme, as if to say, Fine, we’ll keep the courtyard, but you might not like what we decide to do with it. I liked it better when it was open to the sky and could be counted on to be full of snow at least four months per year.

The new gallery building, on the other hand, just might be the clearest summation of the Shigematsu method OMA has yet produced. Connected to the Green building, umbilically, by a raised pedestrian walkway, it is otherwise an entirely freestanding architectural object—photogenic and approachable, like a puppy. Three floors high, it has a tentlike silhouette, with the ground floor (and the front entry) faced in marble and the upper levels wrapped in fritted glass. The galleries fill a cross-shaped plan on the entry level, leaving the corners of the grid produced by that shape free for circulation, offices, and a loading dock. The floors are oak; portals leading from one gallery to the next offer a reprise of the marble on the exterior. I spent nearly two full days in the museum and for the most part walked through these spaces in a pleasant haze, as if faintly anesthetized.

The project, on the whole, is handsome. Well-made. Unobjectionable. Genial.

I’d be surprised if that last adjective has ever appeared in a review of an OMA project. Full-service competence—the ability to meet clients’ needs without too directly challenging their taste—has not been the firm’s calling card. But my sense is that this quality is part of what Sirén and his board were after and explains why they were so “very specific” about the architect they chose.

This might seem a dramatic shift in OMA New York’s approach and in its attitude about winning and keeping commissions, not to mention one that promises to fundamentally change the firm’s place in architecture culture. But in fact this process has been underway, perhaps just below the public surface of OMA’s work, for some time now, producing a clutch of projects that share some of the Buffalo building’s lack of ambition. An outlier, since every game manager tries to act like a star quarterback once in a while, with predictably clumsy results, is the Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Los Angeles, an event space adjacent to (and operated by) the Wilshire Boulevard Temple that opened in 2021. With all the uproar in LA over Peter Zumthor’s remake of LACMA, surprisingly little ink has been spilled on this ungainly leaning trapezoid, its façade strangely pockmarked with more than a thousand hexagonal, ridged GFRC panels (most of them, stranger still, containing their own small rectangular windows), just three miles east on Wilshire. Koolhaas, at least, appeared to see what was coming; he chose to be credited on the project, which was led by Shigematsu, as “partner in collaboration.”

In 1973, as Bunshaft’s star was beginning to fade within SOM and in the architecture world more broadly, Ada Louise Huxtable published an essay in the New York Times lamenting the declining quality of the firm’s output, which had reached such sublime heights with projects like Lever House on Park Avenue (1952), the Beinecke Library at Yale (1963), and the Marine Midland tower at 140 Broadway (1967). “Something has gone wrong at SOM,” she wrote, “and saying so is a little like attacking the Pope.” The problem, as Huxtable saw it, was a growing aloofness and arrogant monumentality, a jarring shift after the great sensitivity of those earlier buildings, which in her mind owed a great deal, and were natural successors, to Mies’s “pragmatic poetry.”

In OMA’s case what has emerged is not arrogance or aloofness but something closer to the opposite: agreeableness. What was once an energizing crudeness in detailing and even execution has become in these recent buildings crudeness in strategy and intent, or at least an appreciable softening in that department. It was always clear to see which architectural or social conventions Koolhaas was impatient with, which sacred cows he wanted to slay—donor expectations be damned—as when he and Ramus insisted on lining a ninth-floor event space at the Wyly Theater in Dallas with Astroturf or made the entry ramp to that building steep enough to be treacherous in heels (or even loafers). Or when he made his debut on the Mies-designed campus of Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology with a student center that not only declined to genuflect in the German architect’s direction but took the shape of a Miesian glass box that appears to be cartoonishly deformed by a train line running overhead.

But what is the AKG wing trying to say, aside from the fact that daylit circulation spaces can be a nice touch during a Buffalo winter or that the Bunshaft courtyard needed to be covered by any means necessary? Why does the pavilion on Wilshire Boulevard have rocks in its mouth?

Even the wide-ranging role that Koolhaas filled as the single and unquestioned leader of the firm for a time—as designer, writer, and brand whisperer for Miuccia Prada and so many others—has been pragmatically chopped up and distributed across a number of OMA partners, with Shigematsu taking on the design lead for many prominent projects, at least in North America, and Reinier de Graaf, who is based in Rotterdam, gaining prominence as a writer. In New York, OMA partner Jason Long has taken the editorial lead while also heading up a number of adaptive-reuse projects.

Another high-profile OMA New York project, the firm’s addition to the New Museum, extending a 2007 design by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, is set to open on the Bowery in 2025. But I think it is just as likely to muddy the authorship waters as clarify them, as it is a project in which Koolhaas has been heavily involved and also one that appears to reflect Shigematsu’s smoothing touch. (We’ll find out once it’s done.) Instead, I’d recommend the same Ithaca-Buffalo road trip that I took to anybody interested in understanding what OMA New York stands for when Rem is in, as opposed to out of, the picture.

The Kael essay I quoted earlier was dedicated mostly to analyzing the mastery of Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane, which she described as “a shallow masterpiece.” For her this was the highest of praise, shallowness being a sign of sophistication, of letting the audience in on the joke—as opposed to Luis Buñuel’s claim that what cinema offered was “the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious.” Movies like Buñuel’s, Kael wrote, left her wanting “to scrape off all that mist and sentiment.”

The best of the projects whose design Koolhaas led for OMA in the decade between 2001 and 2011, which is to say between Prada New York and Milstein Hall, have a sensibility very much in line with Kael’s favorites. The mist and sentiment come pre-scraped.

There are times when I wish I didn’t admire those buildings quite as much as I do. Intellectually, I’d love to stay firmly in the camp that insists that all architecture is not just a product of collaboration but a complex cocktail of money, physics, labor, power, and embodied carbon, a mixture that individuals, even if they possess real genius, have little ability to fully control. But I’ve had too many architectural experiences that teach me otherwise, that make clear that OMA without Rem—or, to go back to an earlier example before the word starchitecture was born, Moore Ruble Yudell or Centerbrook Architects without Charles Moore—means designs that are not so much diminished as inert, robbed of a certain spark and sex appeal. Give me a shallow masterpiece every time.