Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect

Rarely has an architect caused as much sensation outside of the architecture community as Rem Koolhaas. His outstanding creations—such as the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the Seattle Library and the Casa da Musica concert hall in Porto—are working examples of the Dutchman's visionary theories about architecture and urban society. But Koolhaas' work is as much about ideas as it is about constructing buildings; he is equally celebrated as a writer and social commentator. For Koolhaas, what is essential is not to create individual masterpieces, but to provoke and excite through the wide range of his activities.

REM KOOLHAAS: A KIND OF ARCHITECT is an engaging portrait of a visionary man that takes us to the heart of his ideas. Directors Markus Heidingsfelder and Min Tesch have made a visually inventive, thought-provoking portrait of the architect, prompting Rem Koolhaas to state, "It's the only film about me that I have liked."

Rem Koolhaas stands on the ironic horns of a dillema. The media, especially US media, treats him as a starchitect, and his practice benefits from the perquisites of being a celebrity, and on the other hand his art philosophy is built on being an anti-individualist, anti-auteur, anti-French utopian. As Rene Daalder says in A kind of Architect about his early cinematic collabs with Ren "It was all about how eveybody is an auteur."

Considering this, A kind of Architect is a good documentary when it bypasses the subject and almost too vague to understand when it directly interviews (or uses archival footage) of Rem. The interviews with Rem are the least informative, It's almost like Interviews with the people in OMA, as one interviewee points out, is like interviewing different parts in Rem's head. A better documentary would have totally ignored Rem and only interviewed the ideas in his head, with the light out.