Rem Koolhaas

On 29 May, with the city of Jerusalem as millenary backdrop, Rem Koolhaas accepted the Pritzker of the year 2000 far from the racket of the metropolitan periphery that, besides being the starting point of his projects, is the theme around which his polemic writings gravitate. In Delirious New York (1979), S, M, L, XL (1996) or ‘Junkspace,’ published within the context of the exhibit ‘Mutations’ (2000), this iconoclast who was a journalist and a screenwriter before an architect, dissects the contemporary urban phenomena. The award sponsored by the owners of the Hyatt hotel chain has thus gone to the patriarch of the most irreverent generation of Dutch architects, the group now flooding magazines with proposals that make the contradictions and instincts of today’s society its basic work material. The Congrexpo of Euralille (whose general plan he also drew up), the house in Bordeaux or the Educatorium in Utrecht are just a sampling of the scales tackled by Koolhaas, who is now building the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the Casa da Música in Oporto or the Seattle library, and he also designs boutiques for Prada.