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All children want to kill their parents, psychologists tell us, but no current architect has picked apart the experiments of an earlier generation more obsessively than Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Since publishing his first book, "Delirious New York," in 1978, Koolhaas has reworked--mostly on paper--the history of 20th century Modernism, from the solitary building to the entire metropolis. In the process he has made Modernism's sweeping idealism relevant again.
With his recently completed schematic design for the McCormick Tribune Campus Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology, however, Koolhaas takes his atavistic experimentation one step further. The building will stand alongside one of Chicago's great Modernist landmarks. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1940, the school is a model of the best modern planning, with its collection of low, Euclidean forms loosely arranged across a vast carpet of green lawns. Crown Hall--the home of IIT's architecture school--ranks among Mies' great masterpieces.
Koolhaas' design represents both a radical departure from history and an acceptance of history's continued relevance. He notes that since the '50s, the campus has grown from 57 acres to 120, while its population has decreased from 7,000 to 3,000. To Koolhaas, 54, a child of the 1968 uprisings in Paris, the goal in Chicago is to generate density, to create an urban environment of spontaneity and play. Where Mies sought academic tranquillity, Koolhaas seeks an architecture of congestion. In place of Mies' isolated Utopia, he envisions a campus woven into the fabric of the surrounding community. Koolhaas' design turns Mies' logic on its head. In...