More about Dutch architecture

What do Koolhaas’s OMA buildings actually look like? The design phase says a great deal about the work. As the starting point is always a list of requirements, designs are always based on reality, no matter how messy, trite, incomprehensible or just plain boring this may be. Does a client want a transparent building? Then that will be almost hysterically exaggerated. This was the case in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, for example, where the commission was to create a large area of exhibition space with a logical route through the building, while at the same time bridging the height difference between Museum Park and Westzeedijk. In the design all these points were carried to the extreme and then rigorously set against each other in a building with an ‘impossible’ facade in which marble floats above glass, the facade is smeared with asphalt and a camel walks over a large steel beam. The centuries-old architectonic logic of using light on top of heavy material has been turned on its head in the case of this building.