Interview with Star Architect Rem Koolhaas

A man in a dark-green coat flapping in the wind strides through Hamburg’s HafenCity district. He is almost two meters (6′ 6″) tall, wiry, bald and with the face of a bird of prey. From the SPIEGEL building at the eastern entrance to the northern city’s newest district, he heads toward the Elbphilharmonie concert hall being built at the western end of HafenCity. Two assistants and two culture editors are having trouble keeping up as Rem Koolhaas walks and talks nonstop.

We had invited the 67-year-old Dutch architect to tour HafenCity and to show him the new SPIEGEL headquarters building. Over time, some have starting questioning whether HafenCity, Europe’s biggest urban development project, has been a success. There are also differing opinions on the SPIEGEL building, designed by the Danish architecture firm Henning Larsen. In 2006, Koolhaas’ bid to design the building was rejected. At the moment, he has been commissioned to build the so-called Science Center in HafenCity, but that project has not been moving forward.
Koolhaas is controversial. In July, Nicolai Ouroussoff, an architecture critic for the New York Times, wrote that his spectacular building for the Chinese state television network CCTV in Beijing, completed two years ago, “may be the greatest work of architecture built in this century.” But Koolhaas has also been sharply criticized for helping a dictatorial country create its most powerful structural symbol.