Rem Koolhaas

Each
cheap
already

person,
times.

building has to be beautiful, but

and fast, but it lasts forever. That is
an incredible battery of seemingly
contradictory demands. So yes, I'm
definitely
perhaps
contradictory
but I operate in very contradictory

Rem Koolhaas

Biography
Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944. By the time he was eight years old,
his father who was a writer, theatre critic and director of a film school, was invited
by the government of Indonesia to become their cultural director, so Rem spent four
years growing up in an exotic environment, before moving back to the Netherlands.
He began his career as a journalist with Haagse Post in The Hague, and later tried
his hand at screen writing both in the Netherlands and Hollywood. He had a script
produced by Dutch director Rene Daalder, which he describes as an allegory using
images from B movies as a commentary on contemporary Europe.
By 1968, he attended the Architecture Association School in London. In 1972, he
received a Harkness Fellowship for research in the United States. He studied with
O.M. Ungers at Cornell University for a year, and then became a visiting Fellow at
the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. It was while in New
York that he wrote Delirious New York self-described as a retroactive manifesto for
Manhattan. It was published in 1978 and was hailed by critics as a classic text on
modern architecture and society. It made him famous even before he had realized
any buildings. He has described the book as an exploration of the culture of
congestion. The activities and conditions that coexist in the city, Koolhaas looks
upon as density with choice and potential. The book was re-released in 1994
coinciding with an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
titled Rem Koolhaas and the Place of Public Architecture.
That same year, he published, in collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer
Bruce Mau, a second book, S,M,L,XL. Described as a novel about architecture, the
book combines photos, plans, fiction, cartoons, essays and random thoughts with
work produced by Koolhaas Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The books title is
also its frame work, projects and essays are arranged according to scale.
Since 1995, Koolhaas has been a professor at Harvard University. He is leading a
student-based research group that is studying different issues affecting the urban
condition. The projects include a study of five cities in the Pearl River Delta in China;
a study called The Roman System, focusing on the ancient Roman city; Shopping,
an analysis of the role of retail consumption in the contemporary city; and a study
of the African city, focusing specifically on Lagos, Nigeria.
The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is the name of the company which
Koolhaas founded in London in 1975 with Madelon Vriesendorp and Elia and Zoe
Zenghelis. The stated purpose was to address contemporary society and build
contemporary architecture. Three years later, they won the competition for an

addition to the Parliament in The Hague. Appreciation for the Parliament design
resulted in the opening of an office in Rotterdam and a major commission to
develop a master plan for a housing quarter in Amsterdam which was completed in
1986 and is known as IJ-Plein.
Another early commission was the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague,
completed in 1987. The plan is composed of three zones: the stage and a thousandseat auditorium; the rehearsal studio; and the smallest containing offices, dressing
rooms, and dancers common rooms. In the March issue of Art & Antiques
magazine, Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the Canadian Centre for
Architecture in Montreal, named the Netherlands Dance Theatre as one of nine top
buildings of the 20th century.
Koolhaas has designed a number of residences, including the Dutch House in the
Netherlands and the Villa DallAva in Paris. The client for the latter wanted a glass
house with a swimming pool on the roof, and two separate apartmentsone for the
parents and one for the daughter. They also wanted a panoramic view of Paris and
the Tour Eiffel from the pool. Koolhaas conceived the house as a glass pavilion
containing living and dining areas with two hovering, perpendicular apartments,
shifted in opposite directions to exploit the view.
The Dutch House, built in a pine forest on fine sand is a program consisting of
facilities for two permanent residents, the parents; and for three adult daughters,
who are visitors at most. A floating deck supports the glass-walled parents
quarters. At ground level, a wall wraps around quarters and a patio for the visiting
daughters.
Koolhaas was one of five architects invited to design for Nexus Housing in Fukuoka,
Japan. The project consists of 24 individual houses, each three stories high, packed
together for two blocks. Each house has a private vertical courtyard providing light
and space in the center. A white pebbled patio is just inside each door. Individual
rooms are on the second floor. The third floor is a suite of living, dining, open air and
Japanese rooms where screens and curtains generate different configurations.
The Kunsthal is a building primarily for displaying travelling exhibitions in
Rotterdam. The program demanded three major exhibition spaces which could be
used jointly or separately; an independently accessible restaurant; and an
auditorium all spiraling around a pedestrian ramp crossing the building.
Educatorium is a name alluding to a factory of learning. The building is a facility to
be shared by all of the faculties and research institutes of the Utrecht University. It
marks the first phase of the universitys modernization based on an OMA master
plan. The Educatorium contains two auditoria with seating for 500 and 400; three
examination halls; a cafeteria accommodating 1000; and parking space for 1100
bicycles.
One of the largest urban planning projects of the nineties in Europe was the OMA
plan for Euralille, the major high speed train hub in the north of France that is the
interchange between the Chunnel and the continental railway system. This is
certainly his largest realized urban planning project, a business and civic center
containing individual buildings by Nouvel, Shinohara, and the 1994 Pritzker
Laureate, Christian de Portzamparc, as well as the Lille Grand Palais, designed by
Koolhaas: a convention center, described as a hybrid building with a mixture of
uses: congress, exhibition hall, and concert hall, all combined under an oval shaped
roof.
Another of Koolhaas designs in France, the Maison Bordeaux was hailed by Time
magazine as the Best Design of 1998. The house was the result of the needs of a
couple whose old house had become a prison to the husband who is confined to a
wheelchair following an automobile accident. The couple bought a mountain that
overlooked the city, and the husband told Koolhaas, I want a complex house
because it will define my world. Koolhaas proposed a house of three levels. The
lowest part he describes as cave-like, a series of caverns carved out from the hill
for the most intimate life of the family. The top part is divided into spaces for the

couple, and spaces for their children. Sandwiched in between is an almost invisible
glass room, half inside, half outside, where the client has his own room for living. An
elevator, 3 x 3.5 meters (10 x 10.75 feet), allows the man access to all levels. One
wall of the elevator is a continuous surface of shelves providing access to books for
his work.
Recently Koolhaas released the design of a new 750,000 square foot OMA-designed
headquarter for the Universal Studios, in Los Angeles, part of the master plan. The
building is a generic office block, corresponding to a fast changing, energetic
company. The volume is lifted up by four towers with specific facilities that promote
interaction. They provide spaces for research, communication, distribution and
privacy.
In a major competition in the United States, Koolhaas was selected to design a new
Campus Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The building will be
the first new structure in many years on the campus where 20 of its 50 buildings
were designed by Mies van der Rohe. The IIT campus is one of the countrys most
significant architectural sites and draws thousands of visitors every year. When the
commission was announced, the chairman of the jury said, Koolhaas recognizes
that a primary imperative facing the IIT campus is to create an urban intensity with
a relatively low density of population. His innovative design creates an urban
condition within the campus itself. It brings the students together not only
physically, but spiritually.
Just a year ago, the Seattle Library Board of Trustees awarded Koolhaas the
commission to design a new $156 million main library. Koolhaas was selected in a
competition over 29 other firms. When asked what the library might look like,
Koolhaas replied, We pride ourselves in having no preconceptions, but we relish the
opportunity to work on such a stable symbol of collective life.
The main activities in Europe at the start of the new century are a planning study on
the possible relocation of the Netherlands main airport to an island in the North
Sea, and what positive impact such an operation could have on the identity of the
country. Also in the Netherlands, the OMA is working on a new city centre for
Almere, near Amsterdam. In Portugal, he has designed a new concert hall for Porto,
European Capital of Culture in 2001. In Berlin, Koolhaas has designed the new
embassy for the Netherlands, in September 2000 the queen of the Netherlands will
lay the ground brick. Today, Koolhaas Rotterdam office is the creative workplace for
some 85 architects and designers, housed on the top floor of a seven story building
overlooking the city center.

Bio + Philo
Being a journalist at his younger days, Rem Koolhas has different perspective
on things. He has a wider imagination and a stronger will to make things that are
impossible to be possible. He said that designs must be beautiful, cheap, and fast
but lasts forever. It may seem like a challenge for most architects but Rem had
followed this philosophy in his works. He may be contradicting himself but thats his
way of finding innovation in his works.

Oscar Niemeyer

My architecture followed the old

examplesbeauty prevailing over the
limitations of the constructive logic. My
work proceeded, indifferent to the
unavoidable criticism set forth by those
who take the trouble to examine the
minimum details, so very true of what
mediocrity is capable of. It was enough
to think of Le Corbusier saying to me
once while standing on the ramp of the
Congress:

'There

is

invention

here.

Oscar Niemeyer

Biography
Architect Oscar Niemeyer was born on December 15, 1907, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Niemeyer landed his first major project in 1941, planning buildings for the Pampulha
Architectural Complex. His designs were noted for their free-flowing forms. Other
projects included working on the United Nations building and designing the
Contemporary Art Museum in Niteri and major buildings in the capital city of
Braslia. Niemeyer died in Rio de Janeiro on December 5, 2012, at age 104.
Oscar Niemeyer was born Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho on
December 15, 1907, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He grew up in a wealthy family without
any aspirations toward being an architect, though he started drawing at an early
age. "When I was very little," he later recalled, "my mother said I used to draw in
the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every
day since." After graduating from Barnabitas College in 1923, Niemeyer wed a

woman named Annita Baldo, to whom he would remain married until her death in
2004.
As a young man, Niemeyer worked for his father at a typography house for a short
while before entering the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, from which he graduated
in 1934. Shortly before graduation, he joined the offices of Lcio Costa, an architect
from the Modernist school. Niemeyer worked with Costa on many major buildings
between 1936 and 1943, including the design for Brazil's Ministry of Education and
Health building, which was part of a collaboration with Swiss-French architect Le
Corbusier. Costa and Niemeyer also worked together on Brazil's iconic pavilion in
the 1939 New York World's Fair; legendary Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was so
impressed with Niemeyer's design that he declared him an honorary citizen of New
York.
In 1941, Niemeyer launched his solo career by designing a series of buildings called
the Pampulha Architectural Complex in the city of Belo Horizonte. Here, Niemeyer
started developing some of his design trademarks, including the heavy use of
concrete and a propensity toward curves. "I consciously ignored the highly praised
right angle and the rational architecture of T-squares and triangles," he said, "in
order to wholeheartedly enter the world of curves and new shapes made possible
by the introduction of concrete into the building process."
Niemeyer's status as a rising star in the architectural world was confirmed when he
was chosen to represent Brazil as part of the team to design the new headquarters
of the United Nations in New York City; the final building was based primarily on
Niemeyer's design, with significant elements also taken from his old collaborator,
Corbusier. Following the completion of the United Nations building in 1953,
Niemeyer won an appointment as dean of Harvard University's Graduate School of
Design, but he was refused an American work visa by the United States government
due to his membership in Brazil's Communist Party.
In 1956, Juscelino Kubitschek, the president of Brazil and a close friend of Niemeyer,
came to the architect with a proposal, asking Niemeyer to become the new chief
architect of public buildings in the country's new capital, Brasilia, a Modernist civic
metropolis being built from scratch in the interior of the country. Niemeyer eagerly
accepted, designing buildings that went along with his utopian vision of
government. "This was a liberating time," he said. "It seemed as if a new society
was being born, with all the traditional barriers cast aside .... when planning the
government buildings for Brasilia I decided they should be characterized by their
own structures within the prescribed shapes ... I tried to push the potential of
concrete to its limits, especially at the load-bearing points, which I wanted to be as
delicate as possible so that it would seem as if the palaces barely touched the
ground."
Niemeyer designed several buildings in Brasilia, including the presidential palace,
the Braslia Palace Hotel, the Ministry of Justice building, the presidential chapel and
the cathedral. After the inauguration of the new capital city in 1960, Niemeyer
resigned from his position as the government's chief architect and returned to
private practice.
Niemeyer had become interested in Communist ideology as a youth and joined the
Brazilian Communist Party in 1945. This became a serious problem in 1964, when
the Brazilian military overthrew the government in a coup; Niemeyer, viewed by the
army as an individual with dangerously left-wing sympathies, had his office
ransacked. Spooked, the architect left the country of his birth a year later, in 1965,
resettling in France and mainly designing buildings in Europe and northern Africa.
He also turned to designing furniture, which also included his trademark use of
sinuous curves. Niemeyer did not return to Brazil until the end of the military
dictatorship in 1985.

Niemeyer received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988, the highest award in the
profession, for his Cathedral of Brasilia. In his acceptance speech, Niemeyer
explained his design philosophy: "My architecture followed the old examples
beauty prevailing over the limitations of the constructive logic. My work proceeded,
indifferent to the unavoidable criticism set forth by those who take the trouble to
examine the minimum details, so very true of what mediocrity is capable of. It was
enough to think of Le Corbusier saying to me once while standing on the ramp of
the Congress: 'There is invention here.'"
Semi-retired since the mid-1980s, at the age of 103 Oscar Niemeyer still went into
his office every day to work on designs and oversee projects. Having outlived most
of his old friends, intellectual sparring partners and his wife of 60 yearsthough he
remarried in 2006, to his longtime assistant Vera Lucia CabreiraNiemeyer
continued to press for a better world through better design. "It is important," he
once said, "that the architect think not only of architecture but of how architecture
can solve the problems of the world. The architect's role is to fight for a better
world, where he can produce an architecture that serves everyone and not just a
group of privileged people."
Niemeyer died in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on December 5, 2012. He was 104 years old.
A funeral service was held in Brasilia, at the presidential palace he designed more
than 50 years earlier.

Bio + Philo
Oscar Niemeyer was a natural born artist. His imagination is so wide that he
refuses to be limited by what he sees. Oscar follows a different logic that pushes his
ideas to their limits. He refuses to follow simple geometric plans, thus he innovated
on shaping the concrete as complex as possible. His designs contradicts the famous
dictum form follows function as in his case it is the other way around.

Santiago Calatrava
The professions of
architecture and
engineering are linked
together by the art of
construction. The goal of
putting a bridging
landscape, or putting a
cathedral in the middle of
a city is the same thing.
Santiago Calatrava

Biography
Born in Valencia, Spain, on July 28, 1951, Calatrava grew up in an established family
involved in the primary industry of that coastal metropolis: agricultural exports. The
family's hillside home was imposing, with large rooms that Calatrava later named as

an inspiration for his attraction to major projects and big spaces. Though Calatrava's
father was oriented toward commercial activities at work, he loved art and took his
son to see Spain's greatest museum, the Prado in Madrid. Calatrava started to show
an interest in sculpture and drawing, and by the time he was eight he had enrolled
in art classes in Valencia.
Calatrava's family had suffered during the political upheavals of the 1930s in Spain,
and they saw an international future as their son's best chance. When he was 13,
they took advantage of a liberalization of travel restrictions imposed by
dictator Francisco Franco in order to send him to Paris under a student exchange
program. He later took classes in Switzerland and learned German on his way to
eventual fluency in seven languages.
At this point Calatrava still hoped to become an artist. He made plans to attend art
school in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts), but he arrived in
mid-1968, with the student protests of that year at their height, and found that his
classes had been cancelled. Back in Valencia, he decided to attend the Escuela
Tcnica Superior de Arquitectura (Technical University of Architecture). He
challenged himself with extra work: he and a group of friends wrote two books on
the architecture of Valencia and the island of Ibiza while he was enrolled. After he
graduated he returned to Switzerland and entered a civil engineering program at
the Eidgenssische Technische Hochschule (ETH) or Federal Technology University in
Zurich.
Receiving dual Ph.D. degrees in structural engineering and technical science from
that institution in 1979 and 1981, he became one of the few architects fully trained
as an engineer. In Zurich, Calatrava met and married his wife, Robertina, a law
student and later lawyer who has played an important role in managing his far-flung
business enterprises. A glimpse of his growing architectural imagination appeared
when he and some other graduate students designed and built a swimming pool in
the rotunda of the school's main buildingtransparent, donut-shaped, and
suspended above the floor, it allowed passersby to watch swimmers from below.
Calatrava opened his own architecture firm in Zurich after finishing his degree in
1981. It did not take him long to graduate from small projects to major civic
commissions; after he won a contest, his design for Zurich's new train station was
built in the early 1980s. The station was situated on a small strip of land that left no
room for the spacious interior of a traditional train station. Calatrava responded with
a unique design: a series of individual concrete corridors that resembled the ribcage
of an animal and in fact was inspired by a dog skeleton a veterinary student in
Zurich had given him and which he later mounted on the wall of his office,
marveling to interviewers about its mechanical perfection.
In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Calatrava made his reputation as an architect by
designing more than 50 bridges, most of them in Europe. Bridges allowed Calatrava
to combine his architectural with his engineering expertise. Often made of white
concrete and steel, his bridge designs had distinctive profiles. Many were
asymmetrical. The Pont de l'Europe (Bridge of Europe) over the Loire River in
Orlans, France, featured a seemingly tense arch, leaping out of the water and
through the roadway, that some likened to a bowstring. Calatrava's Alamillo Bridge
in Seville, Spain, was supported by a single leaning pylon that looked ready to
topple over. "Being an engineer frees him to make his architecture daring," noted
Doug Stewart in Smithsonian magazine. Calatrava's bridges attracted attention in
the United States, and a show covering his work was mounted at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in 1993. Commissions for bridge projects in the United
States began to come to fruition in the early 2000s. A so-called Sundial Bridge
(Turtle Bay Bridge) in a park in Redding, California, had a single spire that served as
a sundial, and Calatrava's firm made designs for a series of five massive bridges
planned for the Dallas, Texas, area.

Calatrava's first completed U.S. building, however, was an addition to the Milwaukee
Art Museum originally designed by Eero Saarinen in 1957. The central feature of his
design was a massive two-part sunshade resembling a pair of wings that could open
and close in order to change the lighting inside the building. The design was
ambitious and difficult; Calatrava at one point was forced to come to Milwaukee and
earn state engineering certification in Wisconsin in order to keep the project on
track. Parts of the shade were eventually made in Spain and shipped to Milwaukee
by plane, and its trademark opening and closing capability was not ready for the
structure's unveiling in 2001.
Despite these problems, Calatrava's structure proved a terrific crowdpleaser. Architecture magazine critic Joseph Giovannini, even as he questioned
certain aspects of the design, noted that "it is hard to argue with the sheer joy this
exuberant museum has stirred in Milwaukee." Attendance at the museum soared,
and other cities began to make inquiries about the hot new European architect. The
organic forms of Calatrava's buildings appealed to ordinary users put off by the
severity of other modern structures, and the ascending, reach-for-the-sky feel of his
works often had a spiritual quality that was a perfect fit for American optimism.
That spiritual quality helped win Calatrava a major commission in the wake of the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in New York City.
The terminal of the PATH rail system, serving commuters in New York's western
suburbs, had been destroyed in the attacks, and in 2003 Calatrava's design was
chosen for its replacement. It too was birdlike, with the interior of the building
divided into a pair of wings, and the white building seemed to suggest a phoenix
rising from the ashes. Slated to open in 2009, the station was delayed several times
as Calatrava's design was altered due to security concerns.
Calatrava remained busy in Europe as well, designing an opera house in Tenerife, in
the Canary Islands, that evoked a giant ocean wave. His commissions in Europe in
the early 2000s included the first modern bridge allowed to be built over the Grand
Canal in Venice, Italy's historic city center, and an opera house in his hometown of
Valencia, one of a whole complex of museum buildings that he designed there. But
Calatrava's most visible European design of the 2000s was the roof of the Olympic
Sports Complex in Athens, Greece, viewed by hundreds of millions of people on
international television broadcasts. Resembling a double arch shape in distance
shots, it proved on closer inspection to consist of a series of curved white spines
that suggested the ribcage of an animal.
Little known in the United States even in the late 1990s, Calatrava was something
of an architectural star there by the mid-2000s. In 2005 he won the prestigious Gold
Medal award from the American Institute of Architects. Cities vied for his services,
and he began to attract commissions for top-dollar office and residential projects
somewhat underrep-resented in Calatrava's portfolio up to that point even though
such projects were central to the work of most architects. With the 80 South Street
Tower in New York City, Calatrava continued reshaping the skyline of Lower
Manhattan. The structure consisted of a stack of ten cubes, offset from one another
and held up by a giant scaffold. Each cube comprised one condominium, with prices
starting at $29 million. Calatrava also seemed ready to move into another area with
a commission for the new Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, California, a
replacement for a cathedral leveled in the 1989 earthquake that shook the San
Francisco Bay area. Calatrava's design featured moving vertical planes meant to
evoke a pair of praying hands.
The Oakland design, however, was never built. In 2003 Calatrava and the Diocese of
Oakland parted ways, with the scope of Calatrava's project reported as one of a
group of causes for the break. Calatrava's massive bridges in Dallas also ran into
trouble with city government officials in 2006 after the first span, with a cost initially
estimated at $57 million, attracted a low bid of a staggering $113 million from the
first round of contractors solicited for the job. With massive projects that seemed

designed to outdo his previous creations, Calatrava was in danger of pricing himself
out of some markets.
Cost issues were of paramount importance as plans for Calatrava's most ambitious
project of all took shape in Chicago. In 2005, developer Christopher Carley
announced plans for a Calatrava-designed hotel and condominium tower, the
Fordham Spire, that would rise 115 stories above a lot near Chicago's lakefront.
Each floor of Calatrava's building would make a two-degree turn from the one
below, reaching a 270-degree rotation with the narrowest top floor and giving the
building a slim, graceful corkscrew shape. If completed, the building would be the
tallest in the United States and perhaps in the world.
The building immediately stirred up public interest in Chicago, already home to two
of the world's tallest skyscrapers. It also drew criticism from, among others, rival
developer Donald Trump, who questioned its feasibility in an era where terrorism
fears had hobbled the construction of tall skyscrapers (although construction was
underway on his own 92-story Chicago tower). As of 2006 Calatrava's project had
acquired a new developer, Ireland's Garrett Kelleher, and a new name, 400 North
Lake Shore Drive. Its financing was reported to be on track, despite a ballooning of
its estimated cost from $600 million to $1.2 billion. What was certain was that
Santiago Calatrava had already reshaped the look of cities around the world with his
landmark projects.

Bio + Philo
Just like most of the famous architects, Santiago Calatrava also loved art ever
since they were little. He enrolled in different programs to enhance his skills and to
use them in profession. He became both an architect and a structural engineer so
he well knew the difference in their scope of work that he respects. In his
philosophy, he stated that there must be collaboration between architects and
engineers. He understands that design cannot stand on its own. With the two
professionals working and collaborating gracefully, any vision would come to reality.

Philosophy & Dictum

These terms are often mistaken for one another especially in the case of
philosophy. Many would think some words coming from a person would define his
philosophy, but it may only be his dictum or a quotation that only defined his
personal view about a certain topic or a subject. Philosophy and dictum may look
like synonymous with each other but actually, they are words with different
meanings and should not be interchanged.
A philosophy for an architect is his own guide or maybe a rule for him to
follow. Each one has different philosophies that he follows in order to achieve
something that he can call his own. His philosophy reflects the way he do things in
profession. A philosophy may be based on ones studies, researches, and
experiences. On the other hand, a dictum is expressed as an idea or opinion
concerning a certain topic or subject. Unlike philosophy which is a basis for design,
dictum usually is a remark.
Furthermore, philosophy gives a more theoretically inclined idea when
compared to dictum which expresses a debatable point.

POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES

COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE & FINE ARTS
NDC Compound, Sta. Mesa, Manila

Research Methods
For
Architecture

OCAMPO, Adrian A.
2012-06193-MN-0
BS Archi IV-3