An interviewer-architect: Rem Koolhaas’s artistic journalism

Abstract

Rem Koolhaas practices another way of being an architect: interviewing. His beginnings as an interviewer took place between 1963 and 1968 in the New Dutch Journalism movement: the Haagse Post and the team around the artist Armando, with a form of artistic journalism in which the purpose of the interview is not to report the news but to represent it. Beyond the biographical, this newspaper assumes his formative base as an architect whose practice interviews constitute one of his most frequent work formats. Taking Koolhaas as an example, this paper proposes the role of the interview as a body of knowledge and critical thinking. The goal is to create a chronogram of the interviews Koolhaas has conducted since the 1960s, to show how he uses them practically and theoretically, and to contribute to an understanding of the essayistic, instrumental, and speculative value of oral transmission in architecture.

The structure of this investigation consists of an introduction that contextualizes the journalistic genre and oral history, a state of the art that notes the limited existing contributions on the subject, a methodology of documentary analysis that allows providing quotes from a part of the interviews that illustrate the proposal of an interviewer-architect, and a discussion to suggest that Koolhaas seeks to unravel the keys to power relations in the interviews. Some of the results are evident in the interview marathons he conducts in different cities, and the conclusion is that his beginnings at the Haagse Post define his way of working as an architect: the art journalism of literary interviews in his theoretical writings, and the news journalism of direct interviews in his research practice. All the interviewees together form a huge portrait of Koolhaas and the architect he wants to be (and definitely is).