Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas (born 1944 in Rotterdam) is the strangest possible guide to artificial intelligence and the most exact. A journalist turned screenwriter turned architect, he built his reputation on a refusal to moralize about the forces reshaping the modern world — and on an insistence that honest description, clinically sustained, is more useful than condemnation. His first book, Delirious New York (1978), was a retroactive manifesto for a Manhattan that had built itself without a theory, a culture of congestion no master planner authored and that worked better for being unplanned. His later theoretical essays — Bigness, Junkspace, the Generic City — named things polite architecture would not look at: the scale at which a building stops being architecture and becomes its own city, the placeless accreted residue that modernization leaves behind, the interchangeable metropolis liberated from identity and therefore from meaning. He did not condemn these things. He looked at them without flinching and reported