New York Times November 4, 1994 ARCHITECTURE REVIEW Rem Koolhaas's New York State of Mind By HERBERT MUSCHAMP NEW YORK CITY'S most inspiring architect lives in London, works in Rotterdam and has yet to build a thing on the North American continent. But for the next three months, Rem Koolhaas has the stage at the Museum of Modern Art, where New Yorkers can see for themselves how their city continues to shape the world even as their own architecture has slipped below world-class standards. Considering all the fanfare this show has generated, including lavish spreads in the fashion glossies, "O.M.A. at MOMA: Rem Koolhaas and the Place of Public Architecture" turns out to be relatively modest in scale. Confined to one top- floor gallery in the Modern's department of architecture and design, the show presents models and drawings for five projects designed in the last five years by Mr. Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.). Three additional models, depicting urban plans, are displayed on the landing outside. (Models for three private houses are on view in the museum's Education Center on the ground floor.) But anticipation for this show, which was first scheduled to open more than a year ago, has been mounting for some time. And the hoopla is not incidental to the work on view. This is a show about buildings and cities, but it is also a show about aura: the aura of the city, the role buildings play in creating that aura and the glamour that occasionally surrounds an architect of promise, leading excitable critics to plunge recklessly overboard with extravagant words of praise. Mr. Koolhaas, who was born in the Netherlands in 1944 and educated at the Architectural Association in London, first achieved public attention with the 1978 publication of his book "Delirious New York," an ecstatic love poem to Manhattan that challenged conventional thinking in urban design. While planners and urban designers struggled to bring logic, sanity and order to the built environment, Mr. Koolhaas argued that the glory of the city lies in the exceptional, the excessive, the extreme. A champion of what he called "the culture of congestion," Mr. Koolhaas viewed the Manhattan skyline as a kind of euphoric party, as if architecture had been squeezed vertically not by real- estate values but by the eagerness of people to get together on a small island and laugh it up. Since that colorful debut, Mr. Koolhaas has accumulated an impressive body of built work, including apartment buildings in the Netherlands and Japan, the Netherlands Dance Theater in the Hague and the Kunsthal, an art exhibition center in Rotterdam. He has also pushed the limits of architecture with provocative designs for projects that so far remain unbuilt, like the Jussieu Library in Paris. But the achievement that has established him most solidly on the international map is Mr. Koolhaas's master plan for Euralille, a commercial project now nearing completion in northern France. Designed to exploit Lille's position as a major hub for Europe's high-speed trains, Euralille includes buildings by the architects Christian de Portzamparc and Jean Nouvel, in addition to a trade and convention center designed by Mr. Koolhaas. These projects, too, display Mr. Koolhaas's enduring passion for New York: the glass-curtain-wall skyscrapers pioneered by Mies van der Rohe; the bustling street life of places like Times Square, where peril and pleasure jostle each other in a synergistic mix. But Mr. Koolhaas's most highly burnished New York touchstone is the work of the architect Wallace K. Harrison. Harrison, the subject of a show organized by Mr. Koolhaas in 1980 at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in Manhattan, designed such fabled New York landmarks as the United Nations Headquarters, the Trylon and Perisphere at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and the Hall of Science at the 1964-65 World's Fair. For Mr. Koolhaas, these projects represent the ideal of an architecture at once modern and romantic; they defined an urban mythology for changing times. Organized by Terence Riley, chief curator of the Modern's architecture and design department, the Koolhaas show was at one point scheduled to run concurrently with last season's mammoth show on Frank Lloyd Wright. The two would have made an illuminating pair, for Mr. Koolhaas's vision of the city is nearly the antithesis of Wright's. Wright, at the threshold of the automobile age, championed the centrifugal city, dispersed into the suburban landscape by the car, the highway and the romantic ideal of individual autonomy. Mr. Koolhaas stands, by contrast, for the centripetal city: for the urban center that, at the end of the century, continues to act as a cultural magnet and an incubator for ideas. Mr. Koolhaas's designs for archetypal urban institutions - - two libraries, a museum, a school, a marketplace -- are the core of the Modern's show. On a certain level

Once upon a time, before I discovered Flickr, the idea of going out to DO a bit of window shopping, on the understanding that the small collection of lower denomination coins and discontinued coupons between the entire shopping party could not amount to anything more than a Mars bar would leave me shrugging despondently. These days however, I see this as a great opportunity to go on a walkabout in search of some shots. Here I found myself on one such group excursion. I had been doing some walking, shooting and waiting in and around quaint little Braughnton shops for absolutely ages and hadn’t really been getting anything good. The light was rapidly fading, I had no speed-light with me and it was beginning to seem like I would never get a Mars bar. In almost the same moment as I had established a personal protest in favour of returning home; my attention was suddenly captured by a glowing marvel. I am sure that I must have walked past a million shop windows like this one (see comments) with nothing more than a casual glance across the ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of glimmering mantle tut and modern made, antique style bric-a-brac. Today was different. Perhaps it’s the age that I’m getting to or maybe I have always been in denial but I find myself increasingly drawn to this kind of crap. Whatever the reason, I stopped my moaning and steered towards this luminescent beacon, transfixed while my hands fumbled blindly with camera settings. There was so much to choose from. Each piece standing or hanging among it’s rivals with ever eroding earnestness. Each piece in it’s own desperate plea. Waiting in a perpetual state of readiness for the possibility of passing adoration or that it might one day escape from the amber glow, through the thin sheet of perfectly polished shop window glass to spend the rest of its days… err… somewhere else. What am I on about?! Seriously though, if this stuff could cry, the shop would be a swimming pool. I mean check out the porcelain dog on the front row (in comments). This guy is literally on the edge; physically AND emotionally. In the end I opted for a shot of the small dancing figurine stood just in front of a lamp and a Winston Churchill statue.