The hybrid building concept. Topological characterisation as a project resource

Abstract

In the recent history of architecture the notion of bigness has be closely related to the launching of Rem Koolhaas career in the early 1990s. In the times of disciplinary autonomy and critical regionalism Koolhaas' bigness meant freshness, liberation and a certain sense of freedom from prejudices. As a consequence, a younger generation of architects and theorists has claimed Koolhaas' work as a model for a new "post-critical" position, mostly pragmatic or even cynical, and successfully led by the Dutch architect. This text, however, tries to prove the opposite through a formal reading of Koolhaas' work; this is, that the fundamental principles which drive Koolhaas' work are mainly critical to the existing spatial production and the social and cultural conditions in which this is generated as a principle for his endless formal investigation. Focusing on Koolhaas' production between 1987 and 1993, and conducting a formal reading of his architecture, this essay tries to prove the hypothesis that Koolhaas' displacement from an interest in revisiting the language of the architectural avant-gardes to the recovery of the concept of bigness and other design tools form the late 1980s on, is based on a continuous search for the liberation of users' action with respect to the normative social and cultural values inscribed in the production of space.