Rem Koolhaas

"It's a critique that manages to mention Pamela Anderson, Brad Pitt and Rem Koolhaas. Estimated reading time: seven minutes."
-  SimCity Dubai - Designing Ottawa Blog (Ottawa Citizen)

Dubai tries to outdo the biggest and the best in the world. It is an amazing display of urban eye candy. But there is a dark side as well.

As a student of architecture, I took a break from my studies in India to work in a furniture factory in Sharjah 1976-1978. I returned to Dubai as an architect in 1988 and again in 2008 , being commissioned to write on Dubai for this edition on Future Cities.

(The essay was written in July 2008 and submitted for publication early Augus. Only in 2009 did the international press catch on, after Dubai’s boom was over. Burj Dubai opened in 2010, renamed Burj Khalifa after its lender who had bailed out Dubai).

Architecture monograph engages with production and marketing instruments to exist within the system of our image-driven society. Challenging its conventional understanding, this article aims to uncover the contemporary monograph as a site of plurality, heterogeneity, divergence, and fragmentation. The paper forms a critical reading of two books in particular: Content (2004) by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), led by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, and Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution (2009) by the Danish practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

El presente texto toma como punto de partida una arquitectura entendida como imagen de mundo-esto es, imagen de un modelo económico-social hegemónico-con el propósito de explorar las posibilidades que posee para articular vivencias e ideaciones. Asumiendo la imposibilidad de un enraizamiento nostálgico, se propone, para bien o para mal, un encaramamiento hacia el futuro que acepte y asimile nuevas formas, tipologías y materiales arquitectónicos. Algunos de los autores con cuyas consideraciones debatiremos son Juhani Pasllasmaa, Josep Maria Martorell o Ignasi Solà-Morales, dentro del ámbito de la arquitectura, y Eugenio Trías, Mark Fisher, Theodor Adorno o Walter Benjamin, desde planteamientos más generales.

This article explores an extended sense of autonomy in contemporary architecture activated through the practice of fashion, by taking architect Rem Koolhaas’ work Prada Epicenter in New York as a case. In doing so, it argues that throughout the work Koolhaas sets up a world in which the corporate and the individual are entangled together in complex ways. Instead of considering Prada Epicenter to be the exemplar illustrating that the global company—Prada—institutionalizes the designed commercial space in a top-down manner, this article claims that such a space imbricates a multiplicity of meaning that is generated at the intersections of the local and the global, the ordinary and the spectacular, and the individual and the institutional. In this respect French philosopher Gilles Lipovesky’s fashion theory works as a critical point: his claim that the ambivalence of fashion—both as corporate power and individual freedom—is a threshold encouraging us to better understand the operativity of late capitalism in daily life is extended to Koolhaas’ case. In other words, Koolhaas’ Prada Epicenter brings forth possibilities that the ostensibly technocratic and institutionalized space in fact works as a resillient field where senses of individual autonomy arise in the aid of corporative practice of branding.

When the structure as the object of architecture is positioned as an entity in the universe, the concept of time is included in its relationship with the user. Many subjects encountered with the structure via temporality produce an experience with the mentioned architectural object. Some parts of the experience developing between this object and subject can be predicted by an expert architect, thus can be included and represented in the architectural knowledge. However, some structure-user relationships cannot be represented in architectural knowledge due to the unknowability brought by randomness. These unrepresented experiences represent a void from the architectural perspective. However, the events that occur in the unrepresented part of the object of architecture present a different reality about the object than the one represented by the architectural expertise, namely, the knowledge.
These knowable and unknowable, represented and unrepresented experiences about the object, which are included within the knowledge and not yet included, are interpreted in the thesis as a problem of truth about the object. In the architectural literature, the truth about the object is revealed by the concepts represented by architecture. For this reason, in the thesis, Alain Badiou's philosophy of truth, which takes the concept of truth from the represented elements of the object and connects to the unrepresented aspects, was used as a model, and a new perspective on the object of architecture was put forward by the unrepresented parts of the experiences of architecture.
The 'Koolhaas Houselife' documentary, which presents a truth for Maison de Bourdeux designed by Rem Koolhaas with its aspects not represented by architecture, was used as a case study to discuss the new perspective proposed by the thesis. This new perspective of truth, which is approved with case study, opens a new understanding about architectural object’s truth that occurs from the events arising from the relationship between the architectural object and the user.

Within a vast arsenal of architectural techniques employed by OMA in their first decade, poché occupies a unique position, for two reasons. First, unlike design techniques adopted from Surrealism, such as the paranoid-critical method or the cadavre exquis, or metaphors such as the medical term lobotomy, the concept of poché is drawn from the history of architecture. Second, while appropriation to architecture of techniques originating elsewhere figures prominently in Rem Koolhaas’ theoretical output, the use of poché is never mentioned by Koolhaas or Zenghelis during OMA’s first decade. Only in 1999 Koolhaas finally acknowledged ‘a fascinating condition to work for the first time with so-called poché’, on House Y2K and the Casa da Música in Porto, thereby denying the apparent role of poché in the ‘strategy of the void’ for the new town of Melun-Senart (1987) and in the project for the Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989). OMA’s ambiguous reception of poché during its first decade can be summarized as negation in writing alongside appropriation in design. It is as such a reaction to Robert Venturi’s extrapolation of the Beaux-Arts conception of poché to urbanism; Koolhaas has described Venturi as both inspiration and threat. Repudiation of Venturi’s and Colin Rowe’s contextualist definition of poché acts as a polemic protective shield which allowed OMA to amalgamate poché with its tectonic antithesis, the free section.

This is a review of the first monograph of the Dutch architecture practice MVRDV; it is a reflection on the practice’s built work from the 1990s up to 2012. The book is edited by Ilka and Andreas Ruby, two self-confessed admirers of MVRDV, and it offers a mainly image-based tome and relaxed read. The article describes the context in which the work came about, the so-called SuperDutch era of relative economic prosperity and favorable cultural policy.

Rem Koolhaas, Śmieciowa przestrzeń. Teksty, Centrum Architektury, Warszawa 2017


Rem Koolhaas – architekt, myśliciel, prowokator, najwybitniejszy intelektualista wśród architektów i najwybitniejszy architekt wśród intelektualistów. Koolhaas jest przenikliwym komentatorem współczesności, który potrafi nazwać to, co inni tylko przeczuwają. Nie boi się stawiać bezceremonialnych pytań o miejsce architektury w zglobalizowanej rzeczywistości, o świat podporządkowany logice kapitalizmu, poddawany ekspresowej urbanizacji, przesycony obrazami.
Śmieciowa przestrzeń to wybór jego tekstów – od lat 70. do naszych czasów. Znalazły się w nim przełomowe eseje, takie jak Bigness, Miasto generyczne czy tytułowa Śmieciowa przestrzeń, a także zapisy wykładów oraz wywiad z autorem.

El presente texto pretende servir como revisión crítica de uno de los hitos arquitectónicos más significativos de la década pasada: el auditorio Casa da Música de Oporto. Mucho se ha hablado sobre este edificio de Rem Koolhaas desde su construcción en 2001. Aquí se abordarán algunos de los aspectos más destacados de la obra,  partiendo de los comentarios existentes y del análisis directo para, en la medida de lo posible, aportar nuevos matices interpretativos.
El estudio de la Casa da Música presenta una complejidad doble, pues este edificio surge de la adaptación de una vivienda diseñada por Koolhaas anteriormente: la casa “Y2K.” En consecuencia debemos considerar, por un lado, la génesis del proyecto original y, por otro, su posterior reconversión.

Perhaps billboards warn about the possibility of a change in attitude that I believe architecture needs to be able to re-introduce itself, but this time, naked and without the self-made shields. 
Despite being halfway and not a destination for anyone, fences  have the task, not to say the obligation,  to demand as much attention as  possible. To achieve this, all its elements of composition sign an agreement of loyalty where they commit to achieve it. This pact involves promises, resignations, solidarity, among other things that will progressively develop during the essay. As if that were not enough, they are also able to orient themselves always in the right direction, to have an opinion on a proportion that allows some elegance and total freedom to publicists. The characters who design them are anonymous. They reject recognition among colleagues, fame and dissemination of their work. They are only obsessed about flexibility and have no shame in whitening it because they learned that a single true obsession is more necessary than many. Billboards, also, propose a certain scale based on certain data and references and achieve something that architecture often wants but cannot: fit into context (and without greater effort). All with maximum efficiency.
Can a billboard call into question architecture?
Can architects think like billboard designers and at the last minute dress up as architects?

“Una vez delimitado el campo particular de un tipo de arquitectura dominada por una morfología de matriz cúbica; y a partir de la generación de un análisis crítico de los aspectos externos, que aunque a veces más relegados, son los leitmotivs principales que disparan a través del tiempo nuevas exploraciones espaciales y materiales, nos hemos abocado en este trabajo al estudio y análisis de las principales motivaciones de cada autor, que eligieron orientar una respuesta de tipo cúbica a su arquitectura. Del análisis precedente se deduce que aun cuando las obras tengan en común el mismo determinador espacial, es decir, una concepción material cartesiana o rectilínea, los arquitectos llegaron a esta solución a partir de motivaciones diferentes. Analizamos en cada caso como se desarrolla esa lógica cúbica que en principio como tesis de investigación, si se estudia solamente desde un punto de vista meramente morfológico resulta una motivación banal o elemental. En cambio el estudio de las transformaciones espaciales sobre una forma de determinación que constituye una abstracción básica de la estructura física de la arquitectura (que si bien es primitivamente clara y corriente), ha generado a los artistas y arquitectos a través del tiempo, asumir como desafío no solo la morfología del “elemento-cubo” , sino también abarcar las transformaciones geométricas que este espacio intuye, es decir, el hecho de proyectar operaciones para elidir una matriz geométrica fuertemente implícita a través de la alteración  de un modelo rígido, determinado y de isotropía espacial”.

Starting with the urban changes in the1990s, Vinex policies aimed at interrelating the city center and peripheric areas through developing and evaluating existing housing stock at the waterfront, and stimulating affordable and attractive housing production. The Ij-plein located on the northern bank of Ij River in Amsterdam and designed by seven architectural firms managed by Koolhaas and O.M.A. in the 1980s, stands at the threshold of a critical importance in confronting the change of urban policies. Before this change, Koolhaas and O.M.A. approached Ij-plein with a reluctant and skeptic approach. The housing area aimed to implement a compact urban plan through involving various functions and typologies inspired from various plan schemes of modernist architects; including Le Corbusier, Jan Duiker and Lotte Stam-Beese. The plan of the housing area is designed as fragments with different typologies and forming a cinematic relationship observing change, while both being an observer and observed.

When evaluated within a large spatio-temporal context, it is observed that the housing area is distant from the idea of the house as a marketable object or a landmark compared to its neighbourhood. According to Christiaanse, Ij-plein is an “urban sensibility and typological inventiveness” and forms a regarding strategic waterfront location. From another point of view, the area fails in creating low-density and a schema and cuts lively and dynamic urban center.
Therefore, in this article, Koolhaas and O.M.A’s dialogues and approach strategies on the design of the IJ-plein at the threshold of change in urban policies are evaluated regarding the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic Amsterdam city center term.


Keywords: rhizome, Vinex policies, waterfront, Amsterdam

o artigo analisa as atuais condições sócio-espaciais por meio de aproximações, mas sobretudo de contrastes com conceitos espaciais que pautaram, em grande medida, a compreensão da espacialidade da década de 1990. Evidencia-se, neste quadro comparativo, que aquele período fora marcado por  esvaziamento da vida urbana, uma tendência aos consensos públicos, uma dissolução de fronteiras entre público e privado; já o contemporâneo, embora traga continuidades, é marcado por uma reintensificação da vida urbana  alavancada pela volta aos espaços públicos enquanto espaços de cidadania ativa, dissensos e desejo por participação social.

In writings such as Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960) and Peter Blake’s God's Own Junkyard (1964), post-war urbanization or suburbanization is cast as a terrible or horrifying form of ugliness. By contrast, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Peter Corrigan and Maggie Edmond, and Rem Koolhaas took up the complexities and contradictions of that urban ugliness as a generative compositional tool for architecture. This chapter examines how they conveyed their non-judgemental stance towards ugliness through comic tenets of satire, irony and wit. This concluding essay rethinks the ugly as being caught between the axes of the ordinary and the monstrous, the axes that gave this volume its structure, through a dynamic modulation between the register of terror and the comic.

Chapter keywords: Edmond & Corrigan, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas, Robin Boyd, cathexis, architectural humour, architectural joke, architectural horror, displacement.

While the established histories of architectural theory generally focus upon the discourse produced by eminent architects and/or famous scholars, there is another counter-discourse that has developed gradually in the background. This is a discourse against architectural theory, in an effort to undermine theory’s importance, even to eliminate its value, scope and use altogether. Yet this implicit anti-theory – which has slowly but steadily become embedded in the international architectural scene over the last decades – is usually ignored or underestimated by architectural historians.

Drawing upon the recent literature on populism (e.g. Arditi, Moffitt, Taggart, Laclau), and also taking into consideration the few, but valuable, recent texts about populism within architecture (e.g. Fausch, Fowler, Shamiyeh, Lootsma), I will argue that a populist trend against theoretical inquiry is nowadays dispersed horizontally, thereby legitimizing particular, even if diverging, research methods and design practices. The fight against intellectualism and the elites, the promoting of a new sense of architectural ‘morality’, the use of simplistic procedures, forms and slogans, are among the many symptoms of a populist mentality that traverses ideological boundaries, social contexts and conflicting political identities, linking dreams of radical communal utopias to fantasies of limitless post-capitalist markets.

This essay discusses in particular the ways in which such a counter-theoretical discourse has re-emerged in the last decades among architects in Greece. By examining the publications about twentieth-century Greek architects (notably Dimitris Pikionis and Aris Konstantinidis), as well as looking at the informal talks and interviews being spread today through the internet (such as greekarchitects.gr on the Vimeo channel), I will comment on how, in the case of Greece, a long established populist architectural rhetoric was, and still is, disguised behind various anti-theoretical façades.

Rem Koolhaas étant quelqu’un d’extrêmement productif mais surtout évolutif, il est difficile voir impossible de résumer sa production graphique à un style ou a une manière de faire. Le texte ci-dessous se focalise sur la dialectique surréaliste de Koolhaas et la production graphique en conséquence.

As private enterprise has triumphed over public investment as the preferred means to urbanization, two books that sought to reorient architecture towards the liberal city should be scrutinized. 
Learning from Las Vegas  and Delirious New York are two books are about American cities, and they are two books about urbanism at specific moments in time: the 1960's and the 1920's. The former is a moment after the decline of Modernism , the latter, a moment just before its advent.
Beyond being about places and times, they are about forms: successful forms of architecture, pleasurable forms of architecture and popular forms of architecture.
Beyond being about places, times, and forms, these texts are about the market and the discipline of architecture.  They study commercial architecture and the urbanism its produces. They are about the forms of architecture and cultural engagement that liberal development was able to generate and which the discipline was failing to produce.
Though their subject cities are both American, they are a study in contrasts.  Both describe the architecture under intense pressure conditions: the positive pressure of early 20th century Manhattan produced a "culture of congestion;" while the negative pressure of the American suburb produced an "architecture of vast space and speed."  The reversal in these pressure dynamics was brought about by radical changes in urban technologies between the 1920s and 60s.
Together, these two texts can be considered as the progenitors of "Learning From" as a method of addressing sites and drawing out architectural polemics.  In contrast  to Kevin Lynch's Image of the City or Ian McHarg's Design with Nature, which offered techniques to analyze sites in anticipation of design action, "Learning From" confronts sites to extract architectural polemics.

Introduction: It is originally considered that a pavilion is a ‘portable accommodation; tent; hut; isolated construction, in the centre or on the sides of the main body of a building…’ Encyclopaedia Verbo (Siza 2005:5). Unlike other ordinary pavilions, however, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, which is a series of contemporary architectural exhibition, has played an active role in creating various cultural and social occasions for the public every summer. Moreover, it has gone through some major challenges including costly construction process without allocated budget, a creation of large fund through sponsorship deals, and consultation with many expert advisory panels under the statutory regulations every year. Having undergone the complexities of the project system, it has become one of the cultural landmarks in the centre of London for the past decade.

This essay will examine the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion project, focusing on its impacts in the economic, cultural and social context. First, it will assess the appropriateness or raison d’etre of the project. Second, through the assessment, it will evaluate the project in practical and artistic aspects. Third, this paper will discuss the impacts of the arts sponsorship to assess the success of the financial aspects of the Gallery in its economic context. Fourth, it will also attempt to account for the cultural impacts of the project, from the perspectives of transience, uniqueness and immediacy in relation to pop-up cultural events as the current cultural context. The last, it will discuss the social context that the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion has produced and its status as a ‘democratic space’ for the public (Jones 2008: 31). In connection with this notion, this part will examine the audience participation in the Pavilion project.

Since 2004, when it first opened its door, the Seattle public library drew both appreciation as well as critics. Such contrasting views were inevitable since the project explicitly challenged preconceived notions of a public library in terms of form, space and program. The project reconstituted the public library that would facilitate the current intellectual atmosphere as well a future shifts. Stated to be " a library that puts on fishnets and hits the disco " 1by New York Times, the Seattle Public library aligns with the ideals of Post modernism and exhibits signs of interior urbanism. Characterized by a sense of hyper rationality, challenging the high modernist notion of flexibility while aligning with Koolhas's five key aspects of interior urbanism, the Seattle public library stands in direct opposition to the high modernist agendas. Joshua Prince Ramus, one of the key architect of the Seattle public library defines the hyper rational process as " a process that takes rationality to an absurd level " 2 as result producing instances that transcend expectations. The project is characterized by hyper rationality as it defies generic notions of space and archetype that may appear to be the result of OMA's and LMN's " whim and ego " 3. Joshua Prince however, explains that the from, as well as the spatial distribution is the direct diagram of the square footage each program consumed, sized and aligned wit zoning codes. This notion of hyper rationality is evident in works of pioneering post modernists, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour who identified archetype " duck " 4 and " decorated shed " 5 that came about as a result of a rationale that was deeper-speed and scale in case of Las Vegas-yet transcended common notions and understandings while rejecting modernist ideals of deriving rationale through structure. Venture, Brown and Izenour, in rejection of the homogeneity [Type text][Type text][Type text]

The following essay sketches varieties of imagination operative in the best architectural work. It was published in Warehouse Journal, a student-edited journal produced annually by the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba. Student editors for Warehouse 25 were, Alena Rieger and Ally Pereira-Edwards.

In Project Japan, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist revisit what is
arguably the last Utopian movement in architecture, the Japanese
Metabolists. In 2005, in the realisation that the members of this diverse group of architects, designers, and artists were soon to pass away,
Koolhaas and Obrist embarked on a series of marathon interviews with
them to document the group’s contribution to architecture.
The strength of both the Metabolists and the book is that the existential questions of birth, growth, renewal, destruction and death are never far away, that it is especially important to use our powers of imagination to imagine more peaceful, just and harmonious futures.

With the growing problems of human congestion and hygiene in the biggest European capitals during the early phases of the industrial revolution, new means of control had to be established, that allowed to handle big amounts of people for lucrative goals. Biopolitics, as Micheal Foucault designated the processes that related life and the individuals, would materialise in its most radical form in the Panopticon. The prison project by Jeremy Bentham followed a geometry, that was explicitly designed to exert control and induct any form morality by the few to the many, in analogy to the tayloristic factories. But with the transition from a sovereign nation-state society of production, to a society of consume of capitalist governance, environments of enclosure entered in crisis. The never built project by Rem Koolhaas at the Koepel Panopticon Prison, captures the transition of architecture and technology to the society of consume, in which the illusion of freedom and of choice, had grown along an omnipresent surveillance.

Kapitalizmin doğumundan günümüze kadar uzanan sürede mimarlık ve sanat yeni bir düşüncenin arayışındadır. Yaşamın sürekli yenilenmesi var olan nesnelliği sürekli yeniden biçimlendirmektedir. Bu değişim kapitalizmi ve içindeki bireyler için bir varoluş mücadelesine hapsetmiştir. Ancak 20. yüzyıl başında Ekim devrimi ve Rus avangartları ile bunun dışında bir yaşam farklı bir yenilik arayışı kendini ortaya koyabilmiştir. Rus avangartlarının anlatılmayan mirası 20. yy mimari ve sanatını büyük oranda etkilemiştir. Kapitalist modernitenin hala ilerici olduğu dönemde Rus avangardı Bauhaus ve Le Corbusier'i etkilemiştir. Kapitalizmin en saldırgan olduğu neoliberalizm döneminde ise çığır açan mimarlar olarak tanınan Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas gibi mimarlar aslında Rus Avangartlarının kesintiye uğramış mirasının üzerine doğmuşlardır. Bu etki zaten hem kendilerince hem de mimarlık tarihçilerince kabul edilmiş bir gerçektir. Ama eksik olan iki akımın da devrimci ve avangart tutumlarıyla ortaklaştıklarının birbirlerini takip ettikleri iddiasıdır. Rus Avangardı ile dekonstrüktivistler arasında önemli bir fark vardır: ilki gerçekten anlamı parçalayıp, hayatı değiştirmeyi denerken diğerleri formu parçalamaktan öteye gidememiştir. Metinde Rus avangardı ve eserlerinin anlamı ve pratiği Hegelyan ve Marksist okuma temelli değerlendirilecek sonrasında ise dekonstrüktivistler üzerinden kısa bir karşılaştırma yapılacaktır.

Much has been written on the impact of digital technology and its translation into architectural practice and education. This paper reconsiders this process of integration to question current trends in research and pedagogy. Recent efforts to expand architectural research in schools tend to focus on broadening its spectrum while reinforcing design as research. We argue that the relevance of digital technology to these discussions, and its role in expanding fields of research, depends on different 'research cultures' and their differing institutional contexts. Our interest is in 'cultures' that, as 'lines of thought', broaden the field of architectural research and make it heterodox, thickening a line of research with multiple interpretations. Tracing early experiences in the ‘paperless’ studios of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, this paper questions how architectural pedagogies are developing in response to the current normalisation of digital design, with a focus on the Architecture Association's Design Research Lab (DRL) and the Strelka Institute in Moscow. Ultimately, the main question is addressed: in what ways can the digital be political? By referring to the DRL and Strelka research programmes, two distinct approaches have been critically explored. On the one hand, DRL has been pushing to the limit the idea of research by design, considering autonomous form as the materialisation of change in the design process, while Strelka has been practicing research as the information for design. If digital technology contributes to form generation at DRL, at Strelka it potentiates opinion generation, and the research product is information, rather than form itself. The triangulation of both approaches could eventually suggest a more thorough political expression by means of a 'digital redux'.

¿Existen condiciones de posibilidad estética dentro del marco de lo que entendemos como arquitectura contemporánea? Para el filósofo francés Jacques Rancière, la arquitectura de hoy día no es mas que una herramienta de los regimenes de consenso, utilizada para remendar las fracturas en el tejido social de las cuales ellos mismos son directamente responsables. El trabajo presente abre una investigación doctoral que pretende buscar las condiciones –si es que existen- que permitirían la constitución de espacios que propicien experiencias estéticas alternas a las especificadas por el consenso, es decir, la constitución de espacios políticos.
Palabras clave: Arquitectura, política, estética, Rancière, Kant.

Abstract.
Does the framing of what we know as “contemporary architecture” offer any conditions of aesthetic possibility?  For the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, today’s architecture is nothing more than a tool used by consensual regimes, used to mend the tears in the social fabric that the regime itself is directly responsible for. The present article opens a line of research that looks to find the conditions –if any exist- that would permit the constitution of spaces that would promote aesthetic experiences outside of those specified and embodied by the consensus, i.e., the constitution of political spaces.
Keywords:  Architecture, politics, aesthetics, Ranciere, Kant.

Traducción libre del inglés por Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero (realizada en 2002), alftecumseh@gmail.com cuyas explicaciones entre paréntesis aparecen seguidas de la abreviatura “N. del T.” (Por “Nota del Traductor”), conforme al original del famoso arquitecto holandés Rem Koolhaas, publicado en el “Project on the city 2: Harvard design school guide to shopping” editorial Taschen 2001, y a la versión electrónica del mismo texto disponible en INTERNET en los siguientes enlaces:
http://www.johnstuartarchitecture.com/Spring_2009_Video_Readings_files/Koolhaas%20Junkspace.pdf
http://www.cavvia.net/junkspace/
Conozco, al menos dos traducciones diferentes al español: En ambas se habla de Espacio Basura, yo preferí en la mía generar la palabra española “Basuraespacio”,
Tales son:
1. La incluida en el capítulo 5 del libro Distorsiones Urbanas (2006), elaborada por el colectivo Basurama:  http://basurama.org/b06_distorsiones_urbanas_koolhaas.htm (esta es de: Natalie Gómez Handford y Ana Fernandez-Caparrós Turin)
y. 2. http://citywiki.ugr.es/wk/images/c/c0/Koolhaas_Espaciobasura.pdf de Jorge Sainz. Espacio Basura. Barcelona. Editorial Gustavo Gili, SL. «Colección GGmínima». 2008). 62 pp. , la cual fue retomada en: KOOLHAAS, Rem. El espacio basura. [en línea] Estridentópolis, La vieja. AL FIN LIEBRE EDICIONES DIGITALES. 2012. 22 pp. [octubre 18 de 2015]. Disponible en Web: www.alfinliebre.blogspot.com

En la Casa-Patio de Kralingenen, Koolhaas propone que el patio funcione como una “caja vacía”, en torno al cual se ordenan los espacios de la casa, estos a su vez, están contenidos en otra caja de planta cuadrada y en 2 niveles. Según relata Rem, se trata de una especie de “juego de embalaje de cajas”, que genera un punto focal, una situación de interés, una variación en la regularidad de los espacios habitables de la casa. En el caso de la Casa-Patio la “Formula Koolhaas”, ‒es decir el momento clave para entender el proyecto‒ se origina (tal como el arquitecto holandés especula), al plantear la situación de “una caja dentro de otra caja”.

“Studia il latino che ti insegna a ragionare”, “studiate Rem Koolhaas che vi insegnerà a ragionare”. Andate oltre la forma finita per comprenderne l’attualità del ragionamento, studiatene la struttura logica, dal concept al progetto finito, per comprendere i processi da lui messi in atto. Il latino e Rem Koolhaas, l’antico ed il nuovo, si confrontano indagando la struttura delle cose un concetto più vecchio della lingua parlata e che va oltre la contemporaneità: fuori dal tempo e assoluta organizza i fenomeni.