Building of the week (18 years ago)

HOTEL and CONVENTION CENTRE in AGADIR by REM KOOLHAAS
Agadir, Morocco, 1990 (Competition)

Rem Koolhaas was born in 1944. After having lived in Indonesia between 1952 and 1956, he settled in Amsterdam as a journalist for the Haagse Post and as a film screenplay writer, before leaving for London to study architecture at the Architectural Association School. Two theoretical projects come from this period: The Berlin wall as architecture(1970) and Exodus, or the voluntary prisoners of architecture(1972).

A scholarship obtained in 1972 allowed him to stay in the United States, where, fascinated by New York, he started to analyze the impact of metropolitan culture on architecture and published Delirious New York, a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan.

At this stage, Rem Koolhaas wanted to progress from theory to practical application and decided to return to Europe. In London in 1975, he created, with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture(OMA), whose objectives were the definition of new types of relations —theoretical as well as practical— between architecture and the contemporary cultural situation.