B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

For an architect aiming to make a mark, a manifesto is not quite the essential prop that it once was. Agnosticism about modernism in the 1970s called into question the sense of certainty required to deliver a convincing example of the genre, with all its prescriptions and its certainties. However, it is a form which shows signs of flickering back into life. Some architects, and a few designers, are once again feeling the need to express themselves through words as well as objects and buildings. They feel the need to underpin their work with the intellectual ballast that serves to dignify what otherwise might be regarded as the frivolous indulgence of shape-making with the rigour of theory.

There is a far from clear distinction between the self-promotional intentions of such projects, and the genuine contributions that they may or may not make to an understanding of the dilemmas that face design.

Of all the aesthetic manifestos of the 1920s, none got more attention than Le Corbusier’s 40,000-word epistle Vers une architecture, or as its first translation into English called it, Towards a New Architecture. Published in 1923, it was an extended version of a series of articles that he had written for his own magazine, L’Esprit nouveau, and then repackaged as a book.

Its impact was instant and incendiary. It provoked a mutiny at the architecture school at the École des Beaux-Arts. In Rome the book was removed from the library of the university’s architecture faculty. It galvanized a new generation of architects and designers from Scotland to Japan. And eighty years later, it was still goading commentators into paroxysms of fury. Simon Jenkins, the Chairman of the National Trust and former editor of The Times, was so provoked by the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition on modernism that, in reviewing it, he claimed that ‘the cruel brutalism of Le Corbusier must have caused more human misery than any other in history’.

As a graphic composition, Vers une architecture was remarkable. Le Corbusier’s enthusiasm for ocean liners, aircraft, concrete grain silos and fast cars was visible on almost every page. I still have the copy I read in my last year at school. It was an edition from 1967, but had hardly changed since the first English printing of 1931. It was like a prayer book, and there has never been much appetite for tampering with a sacred text.

Le Corbusier put an image of a Farman Goliath biplane next to a photograph of Notre-Dame. He reproduced a collage of the Paris Opera House, Notre-Dame and the Arc de Triomphe shown against the silhouette of a Cunard liner, the Aquitania. It was a shocking juxtaposition, an embrace of the modern industrial world that seemed to be saying something powerful, though elusive, about scale, cities and progress. The impact of the images was somewhat undermined by the foggy quality of the reproduction, which made some of the plates barely comprehensible.

Le Corbusier’s arguments were less nuanced to read than the book was to look at. It was shot through with a series of deliberately shocking slogans that set out to provoke the architectural profession into coming to terms with the impact of industrialization, and, perhaps even more, to attract attention to the author. Le Corbusier had no doubt about what architecture was not. ‘The styles of Louis XIV, XV, XVI, or Gothic, are to architecture what a feather is on a woman’s head, they are pretty sometimes, but not always, and nothing more.’

And he knew equally clearly what it was. ‘Architecture,’ he wrote ‘is the masterful, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light.’ This of course is a quite traditional conception of architecture as a material and sculptural process; one that Le Corbusier’s own Villa Savoye, hoisted off the ground on a double file of pilotis, had in common with the Doric temples of Paestum.

The most didactic and famous of all his slogans sounded more radical: ‘A house is a machine for living,’ he once suggested. In an acid review of Vers une architecture for The Times, the English classicist Sir Edwin Lutyens was moved to dismiss it out of hand: ‘To be a home a house cannot be a machine.’ Lutyens claimed that ‘The logic of a French mind may make a Le Corbusier villa, or even a Versailles, but never a Hampton Court.’ To Lutyens, Le Corbusier’s architecture was ‘for robots without eyes, for eyes that have no vision cannot be educated to see’.

Le Corbusier presented himself as a tough-minded technocrat, ready to look his times in the eye unflinchingly.

A great era has just begun. There exists a new spirit. Industry, invading like a river that rolls to its destiny, brings us new tools adapted to this new era animated by a new spirit. The law of economy necessarily governs our actions. Only through it are our conceptions viable. The problem of the house is a problem of the era, social equilibrium depends on it today. The first obligation of architecture in an era of renewal is to bring about a revision of values, a revision of the constitutive elements of the house.

Mass production is based on analysis and experimentation. Heavy industry should turn its attention to building and standardize the elements of the house.

We must create a mass-production state of mind. If we wrest from our hearts and minds static conceptions of the house and consider the question from a critical and objective point of view we will come to the house tool, the mass-production house, that is healthy, morally too, and beautiful.

The two most influential architects of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Rem Koolhaas and Jacques Herzog, are both ready to measure themselves against Le Corbusier. Koolhaas gives the impression that he believes he is the reincarnation of Le Corbusier, while Herzog, with the self-confidence of a man who lives in Basel but who has built an Olympic stadium in Beijing, is capable of slyly suggesting that Le Corbusier is over-rated. Koolhaas has clearly learned a lesson from the way that Le Corbusier established his reputation through his books. And perhaps that is why, despite building so much more, Herzog, who has written less, remains somewhat in Koolhaas’s shadow.

No architect since Le Corbusier has published so many words as Rem Koolhaas. He is responsible for a torrent of books, which suggests that Koolhaas is more interested in polemics than he is in actively building architecture. It was only after a screen-writing interlude, and a spell as a journalist that notoriously preceded his architectural studies, that he finally went to the Architectural Association in London. It was a school that he claimed to have selected as an alternative to his only Dutch option, the Technical University of Delft, where, as he put it, he would have learned how to design hospitals for the Viet Cong.

Even then, Koolhaas began his career as an architect not by designing a building, but by writing a book. It was not the usual kind of architect’s book, full of glossy colour pictures of the author’s work and tributes from friendly critics; rather, it was a book of ideas. Delirious New York, as it was called, purported to be a retrospective manifesto, an account of how New York became the embodiment of what Koolhaas describes as ‘the culture of congestion’. Since, by this time, architects no longer believed in the rhetorical ambition required to make a manifesto, given the disastrous outcomes that most of them had had, Koolhaas’s position rested on a carefully nuanced ambiguity poised on the edge of satire. It was a brilliant move, instantly establishing Koolhaas as an intimidating intellectual presence on the architectural landscape when there was nothing to show for what his vision of the architecture of the contemporary world might physically be like.

A second book followed, as thick as a brick. It went by the name S, M, L, XL, a suitably banal taxonomy with which to organize an account of his work. By now, Koolhaas had actually started an architectural practice that seemed to offer at least the possibility of building something. This time, the space was found to publish some resolutely un-glossy pictures of Koolhaas’s buildings. He had built a couple of houses, an exhibition centre close to the TGV station in Lille, a dance theatre in The Hague, an art gallery in Rotterdam. But it was even less of a conventional architectural monograph than Delirious New York. Koolhaas’s work was depicted in its pages as a series of raw cut-and-paste collages and screen grabs, rather than in airbrushed perfection. Maybe there wasn’t much else to show.

Alongside the buildings portrayed in a multilayered collage were many other distractingly engaging images and narratives - a fantastic history of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, Japanese pornography, the Berlin Wall - as well as diagrams recording the time that Koolhaas himself had spent in the hotel rooms of the world. Clearly the intention was to signal that Koolhaas’s career was about something more important than mere architecture. The book did as much as or more than his architecture to make Koolhaas’s name inevitably linked with every new project involving the requisite high-octane mix of fashion and celebrity.

In The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, Koolhaas’s next substantial book, he comes across a lot like Savonarola in a Prada suit. Shopping is a lacerating mixture of Koolhaas’s contempt for his contemporaries and what sounds very much like self-loathing. Here he is on minimalism: ‘a self-righteous crime; it does not signify beauty but guilt’.

According to Koolhaas, the phenomenon of shopping has swallowed the world, making museums and malls and hotels all part of a single chaotic whole. He set his doctoral students at Harvard to work on a three-year study of shopping and concluded: ‘The best metaphor for shopping is that of a dying animal - a dying elephant that in its death struggle becomes completely wild and uncontrollable.’ He paints a picture of the realities facing architecture that is so profoundly, disturbingly, apocalyptically bleak that the only rational response is professional suicide. We have, he writes, just witnessed nothing less than the final extinction of architecture.

In the twentieth century architecture disappeared. The built product of modernization is not modern architecture, but junk space. Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory.

Despite his bottomless pessimism about architecture, Koolhaas just can’t bring himself to give it up. For all the shock-jock violence of his denunciations of the complacency and corruption of consumerism, he wraps himself energetically in its air-conditioned and scented embrace. Koolhaas’s design for Prada’s store in SoHo was carved out of the heart of what was once New York’s downtown Guggenheim Museum, breaching the final frontier between culture and commerce. He accepted a commission from Condé Nast to become a creative consultant to the publisher of the world’s glossiest magazines.

But no matter how pessimistic he is, Koolhaas has succeeded in achieving buildings of genuine power. And their impact is often in the way that they critique the work of other architects. Halfway up the razor-sharp cascade of metal steps that forms a spectacular approach to the main auditorium of Porto’s new concert hall, the Casa da Música, is a curious pair of red crushed-velvet armchairs. They seem to belong to another time and place, translated through a wormhole in the space-time continuum direct from the disco era into Rem Koolhaas’s soaring structure. They were designed by an obscure Portuguese architect in the 1970s. And Koolhaas chose to have them made up from the original drawings especially for use in his building because, as he put it: ‘It liberated us from the need to imagine more than was necessary.’

Koolhaas’s comment is not quite as profound as it sounds at first hearing, but is a sharp elbow in the ribs for those of his peers still unliberated and uncool enough to want to design their own sofas. He has contempt for the obvious and for architects who try too hard to be ‘interesting’ or ‘inventive’.

Speaking of Porto’s auditorium, with its risk-taking use of two glass walls, he writes off the entire architectural profession in the manner of Harrison Ford dispatching a scimitar-wielding opponent with a single shot from his revolver: ‘The ideal acoustic form for a concert hall is a shoe box. And we have seen a lot of architects trying to make shoe boxes interesting, or to design interesting shoe boxes. We got rid of the shoe box.’

By accepting commissions from the retailers and the museums about which he is so savage in print, he hints that he is engaged in attempting subversion from within. But, willingly or not, he has become so thoroughly part of what he denounces so passionately that he can no longer be considered a neutral observer, still less an oppositional figure. And in this murky territory, Koolhaas has found the perfectly ambiguous vehicle for his words. Shopping is published by Taschen, alongside their art and architecture books. They are the deadpan purveyors of over-the-counter hard-core pornography. Shortly after Shopping was launched at Tate Modern in London (an institution that he excoriates at some length), Koolhaas was hired to extend Los Angeles’s sprawling twenty-acre County Museum of Art. In the manner of General Westmoreland’s strategy for saving Vietnam from itself, his scheme started by demolishing it. The museum’s director at the time, Andrea Rich, called Koolhaas ‘the most influential architect of his generation’ and ‘the perfect partner to help LACMA create the museum of the future’. Koolhaas was fired after six months.

But to Koolhaas, ‘Museums are monasteries, inflated to the scale of department stores.’ They are, he writes, ‘sanctimonious junk space’ and ‘there is no aura sturdier than holiness’. While coyly not bringing himself to name the Tate, he rails against museums where ‘no sequence is too absurd, trivial, meaningless or insulting’.

Museums are places ‘where curators plot hangings and unexpected encounters in a donor-plate labyrinth with the finesse of the retailer’. Lingerie becomes ‘nude/action/body’, cosmetics is ‘history/memory/society’. Finally, with withering scorn for his one-time collaborators Herzog & de Meuron, who built Tate Modern, he describes a museum where ‘all paintings based on black grids are herded together in a single white room, and large spiders in the humungous conversion offer delirium for the masses, and the more untreated the oak, the larger the profit centre.’ Such an astringent way with words may help to explain why Koolhaas has managed to lose more than one job with almost as much speed as he has attracted so many others.

Koolhaas’s onslaught on the Tate seems like overcompensation, even pique. There was talk of a joint submission for the Tate Modern competition before Herzog & de Meuron won the contest to build it alone. And later, Herzog and Koolhaas worked on a plan for a hotel in New York for Ian Schrager, which was torpedoed by Koolhaas’s way of breezily antagonizing his client.

Herzog loyally declined to take on the project on his own. Their relationship was a symbiosis. Restless, gifted but erratic, Koolhaas holds the architectural world in thrall. It responds by treating him as its great thinker, although to judge by the meagre intellectual nourishment offered by ‘Koolworld’, the issue of Wired magazine that he guest edited, that reputation may be difficult to sustain when overexposed. Herzog, on the other hand, is subtler and calmer, the one who cares about building and who knows how to draw.

Between them, they have transformed architectural debate - Koolhaas by trying to get people to take in an urban landscape that is changing with dizzying speed; Herzog by inventing a dazzling series of building types and ways of building that sustain a whole school of followers.

There is another way in which Koolhaas’s Le Corbusier fixation manifests itself. Le Corbusier, despite earning a French state funeral and a place on Swiss banknotes, saw himself as a perpetual outsider and a tragic victim: abused by mindless clients, his designs stolen, his ideas ignored. Koolhaas has the same monkey on his back. He documents in loving detail the projects on which he has lavished so much care and effort only to reveal that they have been abandoned by his clients. It’s what happened to his plan for the massive MGM Studios building in Los Angeles, to the Whitney extension in New York, to the City Hall in The Hague. And in the case of the China television headquarters in Beijing, there was a real tragedy. A firework display, for the Chinese New Year, detonated just before the building was completed and set it on fire, killing an undisclosed number of people, overshadowing what might have been the crowning building of Koolhaas’s career. It also contributed to an acrimonious professional divorce: his Beijing resident partner Ole Scheeren left, suggesting that the CCTV building was his design as much as it was his employer’s.

Koolhaas has a morbid fascination for precision in everything except his buildings. He revels in tabulated information, dates, graphs, maps, bar charts and raw data of all kinds. When Miuccia Prada took a group of journalists to the opening of her store on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, Koolhaas showed me the top floor next to the VIP area, where the walls are plastered with statistics.

Later that year, I went to see Koolhaas’s exhibition Content, at Berlin’s National Gallery, staged to mark the opening of the new Dutch embassy he built in the city, which was filled with even more numbers. There was a chart about European immigration; another compared the 800 euros that a Dutch backpacker will typically spend trekking around Machu Picchu to the 4,000 euros a Peruvian illegal immigrant must find to have himself smuggled into Spain. He listed the annual income of every major museum in the world and the average age of the inhabitants of the largest cities - and a head-spinning level of random detail about almost everything else you could think of.

Venturing past these statistics, you found an effigy of the architect himself, in the form of an artwork by Tony Oursler. A doll, impaled on a steel rod, emerged from the middle of a pile of discarded and broken models. Its miniature black shirt and its grey striped trousers, just like Koolhaas’s, were clearly from Prada. A digital projection of the architect’s face played over the doll’s blank white head, and if you listened carefully, you could catch snatches of him reading from one of his essays. It could almost have been a lament for all the dead projects in the show.

Koolhaas took me to his taxi and we set off to see the embassy he had designed. When we passed over into what was once East Berlin, he told me, while carefully studying my expression, how proud he was that the Netherlands had chosen a site for their embassy in what was the DDR, a part of the city that was suffused with a spirit of friendship, as he portrayed it. A spirit of friendship that people were prepared to risk death to escape from, I suggested. ‘You ex-Communists, you are all the same,’ he told me.

When we got there, it was hard to avoid noticing that the carpets that the staff had put down to mop the flood of water had turned the entrance lobby into a trip hazard.

A year later, Koolhaas, very sensibly as it turned out, refused to take part in the Ground Zero competition, fulminating against America’s attempt to create a massive monument to self-pity on a Stalinist scale.

The subtext to all his words is that Koolhaas, once more following in the unsentimental austerity of Le Corbusier, is the toughest kid on the block. While most of his fellow professionals wring their hands in horror about theme parks and urban sprawl, he suggests that he looks the world in the eye and deals with it on its own terms. Talking of the chaos of Lagos, Koolhaas says: ‘What I thought would be depressing was powerful, inspiring and brutal.’

‘Brutal’, in Koolhaas’s vocabulary, is a term of enthusiasm. Koolhaas is trying to prove that the well-intentioned architects who tried to tame the contemporary city with pedestrian precincts and conservation got it all disastrously wrong. They should have been trying to intensify the city’s intrinsic qualities, not neuter them.

What is amazing is that you can draw a genealogy between Jane Jacobs and Disney. Since the Sixties, the most well-meaning brains in our profession have contributed to this final, terminal condition of shopping.

The effort to preserve the street, the hostility to the car, the hostility to all those elements that were the inevitable elements of the twentieth century - all of this has somehow created the space for this preservation, and, in the name of preservation, the conversion of entire areas in the centre of the city to fundamentally anti-urban conditions. This ought to make everyone weep. Nobody could have guessed that the twentieth century could end on a Faustian bargain with a mouse.