Entering the world of Koolhaas

When the new Prada Epicentre in Beverly Hills opens for trade in the mornings, it does so literally. The store on Rodeo Drive, the world’s most luxurious shopping street, has no outer doors but is closed off by a full-width aluminium sliding wall which disappears into the ground at the start of the day’s business.There is no visible barrier between the shop and the street. A conventional store entrance has become superfluous – but on the other hand, you could say that the whole store has itself become an entrance hall.

The place where people enter a building was once the high point of architectural interest. The famous sixteenth-century architect Palladio designed such overwhelming entrance porticos that you could practically lose the church or villa concerned inside one of them. The whole facade seemed subservient to the entrance. Broad staircases swept up to magnificently framed doors, flanked left and right by colonnades. Rem Koolhaas is not of course the first architect to query the classic, ceremonial entrance, as he does with his Prada design. Modern architecture relinquished its traditional symbolism way back in the twentieth century, the entrance perhaps being its most notable sacrifice. Functionalism, closely allied to the modern movement, approached entrances to houses and other buildings from a pragmatic angle; the placing and appearance of the entrance were considered primarily a practical question. This outlook left no room for monumental porticos that expressed the symbolic act of entering the building.

CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS

Koolhaas has in turn moved on from modernism. He has been the most celebrated of architects for years now, precisely because he constantly manages to reinvent himself with insights and concepts that are hard to match in their surprise, intelligence and originality. He has dispensed with some of the doctrines not only of modernism, but in certain respects of architecture itself. His relation to the metier has moreover always been an equivocal one. He nurtures a fundamental suspicion of architecture’s presumption that it is capable of making the world a more beautiful, better place. Because he intermittently positions himself outside architecture – he considers himself as much an author as an architect – Koolhaas has had more success than anyone else at challenging architecture’s cherished assumptions. One such assumption is the unambiguous distinction between inside and outside. The entrance is by definition the place where the indoor world and the outdoor world meet. In a magazine such as this, it is therefore interesting to examine the fate met by the entrance in Koolhaas’s designs.

WHERE THE CITY ENDS AND THE BUILDING BEGINS

Let’s not exaggerate, though. Aside from exceptions such as Prada, the buildings designed by Koolhaas’s firm, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture or OMA, have doors by which people can go in and out. In a recent project that has attracted worldwide attention, the Public Library in Seattle, Royal Boon Edam has been privileged to supply the entrance systems. In an earlier design by Koolhaas, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the entire building could be interpreted as an entrance. A ramp runs right through it providing a public route to the park at the rear. The same ramp (but on the other side of a glass wall) forms a corridor for the exhibition hall. Koolhaas thereby puts the distinction between inside and outside to a not inconsiderable test. The actual entrance to the exhibition hall is placed along the ramp, but by the time you reach it you have actually been inside the building for some while. The question of where the city ends and the building itself begins hence becomes hard to answer with certainty. This is even more true in the case of a building designed for the University of Utrecht, the Educatorium. As in many other OMA buildings, the interior spaces are linked by a continuous route in which sloping and horizontal sections alternate. The placing of the entrance along this route is practically arbitrary. By the time you reach the actual entry doors, you have already penetrated a long way into the building.

ENTERING WHERE THE BUILDING LOOKS MOST IMPENETRABLE

In the Dutch embassy building in Berlin, the more than 200 metres long route which leads all the way up to the roof terrace indeed plays a leading part in the design. With its alternating ramps, staircases and horizontal sections, the route functions as the backbone of the building both in structural and spatial respects. Here Koolhaas is playing a different game with the relationship between inside and outside: some sections of the route are so strongly oriented towards the surrounding city that they give the feeling of being temporarily detached from the building. Here too the entrance is not immediately at the beginning of the route but is in an elevated courtyard located at the rear (as seen from the street). To reach it, visitors to the embassy must first ascend a ramp between the embassy proper and an L-shaped section of the building containing apartments. The entrance itself has a paradoxical character: you enter at the very point where the building looks most impenetrable. The otherwise transparent outer wall is here sealed off by two tall panels of sheet steel. The narrower right-hand panel proves to be the door, which is suspended from a rail and is smoothly opened and closed by a motordriven mechanism.

“WHERE’S THE DOOR?”

Seattle Public Library, which like the Dutch Embassy opened in the spring of 2004, is probably the most widely discussed building of the past year. “In more than 30 years of writing about architecture, this is the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review,” wrote the New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. At first sight bizarre, the form of the building is reminiscent of, if anything, an irregularly cut diamond. On closer consideration however it is based on a completely logical concept. The designers started by assigning a number of major functions of the library to separate containing volumes. These ‘containers’, each with its own shape and dimensions, were then stacked one on top of another. Finally, a taut ‘skin’ of glass framed in a netlike steel grid was stretched over the entire assembly. Exciting spaces have resulted around and between the opaque ‘containers’. One such space is a lobby reminiscent of a dance hall in a crystal palace. Another, right at the top, is a reading room which presents a splendid vista of the city and, in the distance, of Elliot Bay. As in the embassy building in Berlin, the circulation route offers surprising visual contacts with the surroundings. The city invades the library so that the boundary between the inside and the outside is here too no longer an absolute one. The same applies, although conversely, for the ‘facade’ on Fifth Avenue. The diagonal meshes of the steel grid continue right down to the ground, but where it meets the sidewalk the glass filling is absent. The space under and behind the open meshes of the grid is thus continuous with the public domain of the street. In effect, part of the street is sucked into the building. This facade is also the location of the main entrance, although the latter is perhaps hard to identify. (“Where’s the door?” wondered the Seattle Times.) In relation to the formidable presence of the building, the entrance is so modest it could almost pass for an afterthought. An opening at the left corner of the steel grid, of unexceptional height and surrounded by a simple frame, offers access to the space under the grid which still forms part of the public domain. The visitor walks some way through this space to reach the revolving doors, supplied by Royal Boon Edam, through which he can enter the library proper. This unassuming entrance makes the magnificent space of the Living Room behind it, with its huge, sloping glass roof, all the more astonishing – just as the impact of a Gothic cathedral is at its greatest when you enter it through a modest wooden side door.

BEIJING BOOKS BUILDING

It would seem that these self-effacing entrances have brought us as far away from the Palladian portico as we can imaginably go. But Koolhaas has put us on the wrong track once again. A few months ago, the first pictures appeared of OMA’s design for the Beijing Books Building, a bookstore in the Chinese capital whose floor space of 100,000 square metres will make it the biggest in the world. It is once again a design that defies the imagination. An existing bookstore has effectively been packaged in bookcases. It looks from outside like a huge box which is transparent or opaque according to the angle from which it is viewed. The most attention-grabbing feature, however, is the building-high openings in the elevations. These resemble enormous gateways, and contain wide staircases that rise to a vast crucifix-shaped void from which the whole of the building can be accessed. Awe-inspiring entrances such as these would have pleased even Palladio. So we can’t forget him after all.