Rem Koolhaas: designing through

writing, a revolutionary way of making

architecture which started from Exodus

“What is very important is to distinguish two types of writing: one that I

would call writing about architecture and one that I would call writing of
architecture. Writing about architecture is the most common… the texts
are generally descriptive… but in themselves they are not architecture…
since 1968, a number of texts were written that are architecture… They
are architectures in themselves. In other words, they propose forms of
architectural strategies, literally in the form of a substitute. ”

Bernard Tchumi

For Rem Koolhaas writing is a way of looking at the world; his mode of
making architecture through writing- particular talking about the scale
of the city- made him become well known in the architecture world
for his texts way before he started building. This happened because,
in his works, the design is treated as a story to tell, as the result of Rem Koolhaas in his early years
programming and scenarios rather than an interest in the architectural
object as an actual design. As Koolhaas himself said years later, about
his first “written projects” and the one which came after, “..almost at
the beginning of every project there is ... a definition in words - a text
- a concept, ambition, or theme that is put in words, and only at the
moment that it is put in words can we begin to proceed, to think about
architecture; the words unleash design. All of our projects, or our best
projects, are first defined in literary terms, which then suggest an entire
architectural program […] architecture is an intellectual discipline,
writing is the privileged communication of our intellectual disciplines”.
As Roberto Gargiani said in his book about Koolhaas and O.M.A.,
referring in particoular to Koolhaas’ “retroactive manifesto” Delirious
New York, through his writings he was able to make a “metaphorical
project”, “both describing the city and prescribing it” making become the
Manhattan skyscreapers characters of a story. Through his architecture
writings, he is not showing his design intentions and neither proposing
a “real” design, but more offering thoughts about the conditions that
form architecture providing “conceptual transformations” without being
explicit, leaving to the reader the choice of how to interpret what he
meant both in the meaning and in the architecture; this can be considered
a proper approach to architecture, a series of principles that guide the
design work and make the actual design before even starting to draw,
this way of doing, which was seen a little bit unusual in the 70s can be
considered really modern now-a-days. Koolhaas stated that he thinks
that the metaphase could serve as a new way of communication and
urban planning: a “vocabulary of poetic formulas that replaces objective
planning in favor of a new discipline of metaphoric planning to deal
with a metropolitan situation fundamentally beyond the quantifiable”.
Koolhaas’ career as scriptwriter and the competition with Zenghelis

To understand better Koolhaas’ not-so-ordinary approach to architecture

through writing, approach that we can all agree it is way different from
the canonic one, it is necessary to look at his past career before enrolling
in A.A., in fact, thanks to his father influence (who was a scriptwriter)
he was born as both journalist and movie scriptwriter. This two past
experiences, which lasted five years, had an incredible influence in his
architecture, in fact, as he said many times, there is no difference between
a script and architecture; “In a script, you have to link various episodes Exodus: perspective of the strip
together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things
-through editing, for example. It’s exactly the same in architecture.
Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences.” Even
if he kept having this particular approach to architecture in his whole
career as an architect, it is really interesting to focus in his first texts,
such as Exodus or voluntary prisoners of architecture. Indeed, Exodus
is the “project” with which he graduated in 1971 and the one which
made him come to the fore in the Casabella competition “La città come
ambiente significante” (“The city as significant environment”) in 1972.
The greatest particularity of this project is that, in a way, it was not a
project; indeed it was only composed by different drawings made by
Zenghelis’s (his thesis teacher, with whom he submitted the project for Exodus: Plan of the strip justaxposed on
the international competition and future partner of O.M.A.) wife Zoe the London City Centre
Zenghelis and Koolhaas’ girlfriend Madelon Vriesendorp (who will later
deal with making Delirious New York drawings) -both partners of the
project-, collages which were bringing different specific references,
and a text, that we might call it a story, where it was told what was
the program of the project and what was going on through the different
sequences of it, showing different scenarios for every episode of the
story.

Exodus or voluntary prisoners of architecture

Briefly, the project Exodus, which has a clear reference to the Berlin of
the cold war- shows a hypothetic urban project placed in the very center
of London, this design is basically a strip divided from the rest of the
city by two long walls and it is considered the “good half” of London,
the inhabitants of the “Bad Half” began to leave their half to move in
the good one, becoming so “voluntary prisoners of architecture”. It was
thought as a system able to promote a new metropolitan way of living”
marked by moments of almost mystical retreat and other of participation
in social activities, all enclosed within one of the original structures of
architecture: the wall- indeed, in the story they define “the wall as a
masterpiece”-. The idea of Exodus is to use for positive purposes the
“intense and destructive force” of architecture represented by that wall,
which is a “tool and a source of desperation”. Because all the citizens Exodus: Entrance at the Ceremonial
want to move in the good half, the strip is designed as a growing Square
architecture that will go to take more and more pieces of the old London
as a cannibal. The activities inside the strip are enclosed in squared areas,
these activities have something of surreal and absurd, for example “The
Bath”, one of the square, hosts three swimming-pools which help the
meeting and the coupling between people, who later retire in alienating
cells in order to “facilitate the realization of desires”.
Utopias and dystopias: the italian designs

Exodus, at that time, was considered by many an utopian project, very

similar for example to the 50s project of Archigram and Metabolism,
but, looking carefully, the project is way much closer for example at the
urban works of Superstudio and Archizoom (i.e. Monumento Continuo
or No-Stop City) where a critic was moved to the previous cited projects
through a “demostratio quia absurdum” developing a thought at the limit
of the possibilities of architecture as a means critical, in simple terms, Monumento Continuo, Superstudio
they criticized an utopia through a dystopia. So, even if in Italy the work
of Archizoom and Superstudio was considered somehow marginal, this
was considered highly interesting by Rem Koolhaas, who went several
times in Florence to meet the Superstudio, impressed by their work,
inviting them to held some lecture at AA. Thanks to them he came in
contact with Archizoom and their project for a grid of thick, trasparent
walls that would divide Berlin into parallel quarters.

The Paranoid Critical Method, the influence of Dalì

At the same time is really important to mention the influence that

the painter Salvador Dalì had on Koolhaas; indeed, Dalì developed
a Paranoid-Critical Method with which he embarked his Surrealist
career as a painter. As the name suggests, this method is composed by
a sequences of two consecutive but discrete operation: (1) the synthetic
reproduction of the paranoiac’s way of seeing the world in a new Reminiscenza archaeologic, Salvador
light-with its rich harvest of unsuspected correspondences, analogies Dali
and patterns (paranoid part) and (2) the compression of these gaseous
speculations to a critical point where they achieve the density of fact,
the critical part of the method consists of the fabrication of objectifying
“souvenirs” of tourism, of concrete evidence that brings the discoveries
of those excursions back to the rest of making, ideally in forms as
innocent and undeniable as snapshots (critical part).
According to Koolhaas in his comment to Dalì’s paranoid critical
method in an Architectural Design article, architecture is inevitably a
form of paranoid critical activity. “The transformation of the speculative
into the undeniable “there” is traumatic for modern architecture. Like
a lone actor who enacts an absolutely different play from that of other Diagram of the inner workings of
actors on the same stage, modern architecture wants to perform without the Paranoid Critical Method: limp,
belonging to the scheduled performance: even in its most aggressive unprovable conjectures generated
through the deliberate simulation of
campaigns of realization it insists on its otherworldliness”. As we can paranoic thought processes, supported
see further, in Exodus, thanks to the text which comes with the drawing, by the “crutches” of Castesian
Koolhaas stressed this method to its limit. rationality
The importance of the writing in Exodus

This is the background through what Exodus was thought and written.
Between the dystopias of the Italian architects and the paranoid critical
method of Dalì. Can be said that Koolhas did nothing more than
applying the same critic theories of Archizoom and Superstudio with
the “demostratio quia absurdum” method, but what makes Exodus a step
further (maybe even more than one) was its text and its collages. In fact,
through his writing Koolhaas is able to stress more and more this dystopian
idea, making it seems more like a critic to Monumento Continuo than an
actual praiser to that project. He stressed this idea pushing further and
further the surrealism inside that project to make it seem an utopia, and
then again a dystopia. As said, the description of the project together with
the collages, is a fundamental part of the project, much more than the
drawings because -more the text than the collages- explains the various
functions in the strip which is the most important part of the project, with
the two long walls as well and, showing them through words, he is able
to use at its best the paranoid critical method selecting specific words to
write more and more time such as “indoctrination” or, writing a series of
contradictions, for example, to express their everlasting gratitude to the
voluntary prisoners, the inventors in the Science square, sing a grotesque
song where, instead of showing how nice the strip is, they picture it as a
“Terrible landscape that mortal eye has never seen”, or again “[...] In the
accelerated atmosphere of this prison, no one is important long enough
for them ever to reach a conclusion.” there are a lot of contradictions in
some sentence that show the paranoid critical method that Koolhaas uses
at its best: “[...] Mirage machines project images of desirable ideals. But
actual contact can never be established: they run on a belt that moves in
the opposite direction at a speed that increases as the distance between
mirage and runner shrinks. The frustrated energies and desires will have
to be channeled into sublimated activities.” “[...] The hospital, contains
the complete arsenal of modern healing, but is devoted to a radical de-
escalation of the medical process, to the abolition of the compulsive rage
to heal. This new strategy lowers the average life expectancy and with
it, senility, physical decay, nausea, and exhaustion. Patient here will be
“healthy. [...] Doctors select their patients from this belt, invite them
on their individual pavilions, test their vitality, and almost playfully
administer their medical knowledge. [...] But it soon becomes apparent
that the belt leads beyond the pavilions and straight into the cemetery.
The mood here is continuously festive.”
Through these sentences it is possible to perceive the surrealism, the
absurdity, the contradictions, the non-logic that shows this project as
a surrealistic dystopia, reacting to the real, exaggerating the observed
reality, imagining future scenarios; Koolhaas and Zenghelis pictured the
supposedly “good half” part of London as place where there is a sort of
dictatorial regime where people are told what to do and what to think, a
place dominated by luxury where people vent their sexual desires like
animals, a place where things are done to you in order to make you feel
better but, in the end, they just bring you to death. Through this script
Koolhaas doest not only design a dystopia, but makes really clear his
intention about using writing like a new and innovative design tool and
pushes this approach to its extreme, the text does not go with the design,
the text come first the design and, the design itself it is not even
necessary anymore, the script literally release the concept of the design
as a force that trail it. Koolhaas, from Exodus and then on, is probably
the first architect that transform architecture from a technical and
artistic discipline to an intellectual one, and not only he transforms it in
an intellectual discipline, but he make it deal with other disciplines as
well in order to exchange with them the different and reciprocal ways
of reading and transformation of reality. This is maybe Koolhaas’ most
original component, because this factor inflect the design process like
never before and define and identify the design elements in the clearest
way.

What should we learn from Exodus and more generically speaking

from this Koolhaas ‘ tool?

In conclusion, we can say that for Koolhaas, overall at the dawning

of his career, using writing as a tool, as such a powerful tool like he
did, has been probably his keystone for Exodus and the projects which
came next (such as Delirious New York but not only strictly talking, he
applied a criteria linked with writing even in project like the Binnehof
Parliament or the Kunsthal) and his turning point as well, because as
said, he became well known thanks to his texts before he even started
building. Writing for Koolhaas is a process of transforming designing in
metaphors, making pay attention to determined details that he wants you
to pay attention at; as he said talking about his process of writing is ‘a
vocabulary of poetic formulas that replaces objective planning in favor
of a new discipline of metaphoric planning to deal with a metropolitan
situation fundamentally beyond the quantifiable.’. Later he did not
lost his approach to architecture through writing, he just developed
it, the O.M.A. indeed, works with metaphors, plays with reality and
imagination. This could be a reason why Gargiani defined Exodus and
others Koolhaas’ projects merveilles.

Even if right now seems that the most modern techniques of architecture
are about new computer programs, writing, still now-a-days, can be seen
as the most modern designing tool. This approach is really revolutionary
and should be taught in architecture schools, students should be
encouraged to try to show a project with such a different communication
method, trying to join sketches with written notes in order to have a multi-
communication design, integrating together different disciplines; now-
a-days, sadly, happens very oftern that every project looks alike all the
others, where all the buildings are present in similar rendering in digital
sunny days, when Koolhaas himself states that architect’s “influence has
been reduced to a territory that is just two centimeters thick” (or rather,
he refers to the facade, because architecture now-a-days is a lot about
appearance), the power of words cannot be underestimate. Words allow
us to express ourself and to express something that we could not transmit
through drawings, allow us to show our design and make it appreciate not
just because “it looks nice”, and can make a design magic, the narrative
can explore the possible programs and events that it may accommodate,
can be a base for architectural composition and a mode of investigation
as well, and should be developed more.
Because designing could be a fantastic story to tell.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

JOURNALS

DAVIDSON, C. C. 1993. Bernard Tchumi: Modes of Inscription. ANy,

0, 50-51
DAVIDSON, C. C. 1993. Rem Koolhaas: Why I wrote Delirious New
York and other textual strategies. ANy, 0, 42-43
KOOLHAAS, R. 1978. Dalì and Le Corbusier: The Paranoid-Critical
Method. Architectural Design, 48, 152-164
KOOLHAAS, R. & ZENGHELIS, E. 1972. Exodus. Casabella, 378, 42-
45

BOOKS

KIPNIS J. 2001. Perfect acts of architecture, New York, MoMa

GARGIANI R. 2008, Rem Koolhaas/OMA: the construction of
marveilles, Lausanne, EPFL Press.
KOOLHAAS, R. 1995, S M L XL, New York, Monacelli Press
SCHRIJVER, L. 2014. Between architectural autonomy and urban
engagement. Delft Lecture series on architectural design. Delft: TUDelft
HAVIK, K. 2014. An introduction to literary methods in architectural
design. Delft Lecture series on architectural design. Delft: TUDelft
VAN SCHAIK, M. (ed.) & MÁCEL, O. (ed). 2005. Exit Utopia,
Architectural Provocations 1956-76, Munich, Prestel.

WEBSITES

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students-exodus-or-the-voluntary-prisoners-of-architecture/>. [28
Novembrer 2014].
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[28 Novembrer 2014].
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of Architecture. Available from: <http://socks-studio.com/2011/03/19/
exodus-or-the-voluntary-prisoners-of-architecture/>. [28 Novembrer
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watch?v=JYMZ3ljcsGg>. [18 October 2014].
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