Credit and contextualism

Koolhaas, on De Rotterdam:

“I can tell you a strange anecdote. In the late 70s in Amsterdam there was a kind of notorious project that was based on hexagons, the so-called Bijlmermeer [a housing development in Amsterdam]. In the late 90s, people started to criticise the inhumane conditions there. Then an Isreali 747 crashed into one of the slabs and then slowly but surely, people started to take it down and replace it with regular housing. Now we have a situation that regular housing is becoming unpopular, and that for preservation and cultural heritage some of these kinds of structures are being resurrected. It really shows the cycle of discredit. Credit is so fast that if you follow it, you simply cannot make a city any more."

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“The building will always be perceived according to a single route or a single journey because – and this is the beautiful thing – it is on the other side of the river. The only way to get there is a single bridge. This means the way the building is perceived is predictable and therefore the design itself can explore that. So from far away it seems like a single mass, but as you get closer you realise its transparent and if you come closer again it becomes an oblique shape.

“The overall effect we tried to achieve was that as you move to different parts of the city, the building also suggests a new identity or different identities. I think it’s boring if a single building is the same from every angle. That is almost inevitable for skyscrapers. But this building is not the same from any angle, and perhaps this is the case even more with CCTV [the China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing]. We consider that not so much an innovation, but really a new ambition in architecture. It reaches every part of the city in a new way, with this changeable identity.

“In 1994 I wrote a piece called Bigness that explored the way in which architecture, beyond a certain scale, begins to respond to and is defined by different rules. In that essay, which really was addressed to Europeans, I suggested that contextualism was an important feature in debate. The interpretation of contextualism was that if you do a building in an environment with other buildings, the correct way is to do a building that is similar to the other buildings. Similar in scale and, if possible, similar in terms of expression.

“I was actually thinking that this was a very limiting way of thinking about it and that there is also another approach, which is to contrast. There are ways – like how the Surrealists were able to combine an umbrella and a sewing machine in the same picture – that architecture can experiment with those contrasts."

Allen, Katherine. "Koolhaas on Place, Scale, and (De) Rotterdam" 29 Nov 2013. ArchDaily. Accessed 01 Dec 2013. http://www.archdaily.com/?p=452813

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Interesting. At first glance of this article, it seems that Koolhaas has done a deconstruction of what a building is. I really love the idea of deconstruction, deconstructing something to obtain the true essence of the perceived concept, and hence further emphasising what the concept actually stands for. Reminds me of that conversation I had with Mark and Katrina on the car, about what she had submitted as a portrait. That if a portrait was intended to display the personality and characteristic of a person through a picture, then who is to say that a portrait had to be solely a picture of the person's face? Why not her hair? Why not his hands?

Hmm, I really like deconstruction, so much so that I'm wondering if that's something that I would like to test out in my MD perhaps.

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