Rem Koolhaas, lecture at USC

Hell of a Rock concert! Rem Koolhaas, head of OMA, stopped by the University of Southern California to lecture at Bovard hall. The hall was more then packed, to the latest row on the upperrmost tier. Yes, that´s where I was sitting, and from up there the entire lecture seemed more like a KISS concert, including stroboeffects by photographers. The introducing words by the new Dean of USCs architecure Department, Quinyun Ma,  embraced Rem Koolhaases architecture approaches and introduced him as the inventor of congestions....as he could also observe within the lecture space: "What a mess, I mean mass..like I mean the amount of people.." This was absolutely the only mess/mass situation, that night, as I´ve rarely seen a so well organized lecture. For those who don´t know Rem: He is famous for two reasons: His writings, and his Architecture. Among his books are Delirious New York, a Retroactive Manifest, S,M,L,XL, a coffeetable Bible in a lot of architecture offices (not mine, by the way) and Content, a hysteric and hilarious collage of ideas, analysis and infoporn with a lot of cojones. His architecture include the CCTV, under construction by now, the Seattle  public Library, the opera house in Porto and the famous Prada Epicenter Stores in New York and Los Angeles. His lecture encompassed some of the problems his company OMA is scrutinizing by now, which encircles issues of politics, globalization and architecture as well as ideas of generic buildings, minimized in its articulation, and very readability. This new projects, like his competition entry for the Gazprom Building in St. Petersburg as well as competitions in Dubai and New Jersey play with aspects of generity and reduction.

The projects reminded me of countless architecture student projects, though by now it seems that the direction of influences is getting blurred. It´s obviously not neccesarely said that starchitects influence a huge following, that will recreate whatever this "masters" produce, but that this influences has become bidirectional. Rem finished his lecture by showing a project for the European Union, the design of a new graphic representation for the Union: a new flag, consisting of a colored barcode, representing every single flag of the EU members. The acceptence for this new identification factor is growing very slowly in Europe, and as a last image Rem showed George W. Bush, at a press conference in Vienna, Austria, standing at a lectern sporting Rems Euroflag design.