《Project Japan》是一本由Rem Koolhaas / Hans Ulrich Obris著作，Taschen出版的Paperback图书，本书定价：USD 59.99，页数：684，特精心从网络上整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。

　　《Project Japan》精选点评：

　　●喜欢排版。被我拿来垫显示器垫了很久。需要写essay的时候拿出来还可以随时找到自己想要的资料。多么有用的一本书。

　　●强烈建议科幻作家，电影游戏场景设计关注一下上世纪战后建筑界的一批先锋派思潮，保证灵感源源不断

　　●看了大半才明白这本书该怎么看……严格来说更像本放在案头的书，没事拿起来随便翻开一章看。对新陈代谢不了解的人先看非访谈部分会容易理解好多。

　　●库哈斯的洞察力和时代的力量

　　●安腾书屋是用生命在做盗版，翻译没有想象中的烂，且认认真真排了版。看完中国特色版双语盗版，打算买本正版支持一下，此书值得收藏并一读再读。

　　●只是翻过，对新陈代谢真得提不起兴趣，即便是库哈斯写的。

　　●库哈斯重回自己作为记者新闻工作者的身份，已丹下为中心，大量史料，记录“现代主义最后的先锋运动”，60年代新陈代谢运动。 全书一半采访，一半史料，间隔排版。 丹下一代从战争中走来，一心想在他国建立建筑理想，最终在战争失败后发现日本才是一个tabula rasa。 从广岛纪念公园，mit教学实践，代代木，格罗皮乌斯的介绍下获得了世界范围身誉。

　　●作为资料书来看不错……排版不错……想揉进去的东西太多了，根本不止新陈代谢。不如改名叫《丹下和他的弟子们》好了。库哈斯对媒体的关注未减，更全书内容更加可以验证一句话叫做时势造英雄，我们读着这些国家蓬勃发展时的信心膨胀的光荣，到底有多少实际的借鉴意义呢。中国即使再照着日本的脚步发展，那个科技进步全民乐观的时代也已经一去不回了。当然，更加关注实际的、技艺的、人文的，其实应该是一件好事。从这个角度来看，藤本真的算是今天东大系硕果仅存的一个空想家了。先锋会招致先锋的非议。而理论家们的口味筛选出来的历史，是只保留一个美丽的标本的。

　　●Dense history

　　●不能说读过内容，但确实读过设计，大牛

　　《Project Japan》读后感(一)：值得关注

　　这本书Koolhass花了很长时间才完成，有可能是阵线拉得太长，好像至今为止尚未得到太多的关注，我关注了，因为他是是这么研究历史和亚洲文化的，很有趣，有启发。

　　另外，新陈代谢运动和这些日本建筑师在建筑学发展中的地位如何，而又做出了什么贡献，都值得关注一下，当然这事个人有个人的判断，七嘴八舌的也挺好

　　《Project Japan》读后感(二)：日本计划----此书淘宝小店“设计书乡”有售 限时特价 支持团购

　　者: Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist

　　副标题: An Oral History Of Metabolism

　　isbn: 3836525089

　　书名: Project Japan... by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist

　　页数: 684

　　定价: USD 59.99

　　出版社: Taschen

　　装帧: Hardcover

　　出版年: 2019-03-01

　　库哈斯的有一经典之作

　　图书热线：http://item.taobao.com/item.htm？spm=686.1000925.1000774.5.udxVjG&id=21035376720

　　支持豆友们团购 团购优惠更大哦

　　《Project Japan》读后感(三)：新陈代谢者

　　新陈代谢时代是被一群可怕的野心家驾驭的。丹下健三，槙文彦，菊竹清训等等等等，这些名字想一想甚至会让人有种高不可攀的感觉。建筑在他们的手中时如机械驱动着城市，时如止水安抚人心。不朽的结构经过精巧的设计就像被给与了生命一样，可以增长和萎缩。

　　在这群执着的家伙中，那个最瘦小的身体却散发出了最闪耀的光芒：黑川纪章， 一个瘦得和竹子一样的家伙。在读过project japan后最大的印象就是了解到了这群工作狂私下的生活，即便凌乱不堪也仍旧对大部分人有了新的崇拜感。唯独对黑川的感觉不一样，竟然有种交了个朋友一样的感觉。这是一个可以经常让我骄傲的朋友，但是他也经常让我心疼。从他的身上我学到了很多，可是我有时也想劝劝他不要这么偏执。

　　这个家伙年轻的时候35kg，一天只吃一顿饭。

　　根本没有假期，一天365天都在工作。工作中也基本跑遍了全世界。

　　下了班后累得半死要去原宿泡吧，坐在角落里侃大山，享受深夜的嘈杂。

　　基本不睡觉。

　　穿衣服品位很好，不好好穿衣服会死。

　　老了后还要竞选东京市长，落选不久后就过世了。

　　老婆是大明星大美女（虽然根本从来不看），自己也是大明星。

　　其实黑川曾经是我最崇拜的人，他的那堆概念理念让我着迷得要死。银座胶囊塔可以自我更新（虽然实际根本行不通）的想法彻底影响了我一直以来的设计观。但是在知道了他生活中点点滴滴后，我发现他也只不过是一个普通人----只不过有着一般人无法比拟的，对建筑偏执。

　　读建筑以来牺牲了很多，很多以前的伙伴越走越远，画图画到女朋友分手，工作挣的钱天天吃肉都够呛。但是认识黑川后，这种偏执却更让我着魔。或许他就是我想成为的人吧。为了Architecture燃烧自己的青春，或许这是我们所能做的最浪漫的事了，然后就是在世界的某个角落找到一个可以喜欢偏执的人一起偏执。

　　好朋友，希望你的这一切可以一直激励着我。

　　《Project Japan》读后感(四)：新陈代谢

　　

这本书并没有全部读完。之前只因课程读过Metabolism那一章，但还是很受震撼。

总的来说，这是一本设计非常精妙的一本书。我个人尤其喜欢这本书历史时间轴那一部分。他不但列出了建筑史上各个日本建筑师重要的里程碑，还在平行的两栏中列举了日本的流行文化（比如马里奥的诞生）和经济历史事件。他不断地给我们对这些建筑中凝结的思想提供更全面的立体的描绘，也给我们带来新的创意和思考。

新陈代谢，让一群有创意、有野心、甚至有怨念的日本建筑青年聚在一起，与其说这是一个组织，倒不如说是一次思想的狂欢。他们来自不同的背景，有着不同的信仰，甚至三观还有些互相矛盾。“新陈代谢”这个概念是川添登（かわぞえ のぼる）提出的。作为一个马克思主义者，他从恩格斯的作品中汲取灵感，借用生物的新陈代谢来表达出建筑也该有的、生物般的再生活力。然而这一观念在日本则自古有之，他与他亦师亦友的丹下健三先生一起合著的有关伊势神宫的书中，反复赞扬伊势神宫与自然、时空共同变化代谢的精神，并在那个最需要民族认同的时代认为这便是日本的建筑民族特征（二战末期到战后初期）。同时，他们的团体中，也有地地道道的地主阶级，比如菊竹清训（きくたけ　きよのり）。他的著名的“海洋之城”便是他作为地主阶级后代对麦克阿瑟为代表的GHQ（驻日盟军总司令部）暴力但不彻底的土地政策的强烈不满。虽然西方观察员曾以为他这种脱离土地的建筑设想是一种对民主自由的向往——他们太自信了。恰恰相反，菊竹清训这一设想来自他对土地没收再分配政策所带来的基层建设混乱的抗议。在这种新的建筑关系中，建筑的所有者重新获得了对水中“土地”、空中“土地”的所有权，同时也肩负起来千年以来日本封建般的主仆间的责任与义务。团体中更有槇文彦（まきふみひこ）这种受到美国文化强烈影响的年轻一代。这种将马克思主义者、民族主义、封建残余还有西方文化结合起来的组织，确实难以想象。

或许有人会说，难怪他们只是昙花一现，他们的设想也大都停留在蓝图中，即使建成的黑川纪章设计的中银胶囊大厦也难免沦为历史的符号。但我想说的是，他们所畅想的未来，从来都不是“现在的将来形态”，换言之，他们的未来不是同一个精心设计的远大计划，而是一种基于现在的文学体裁。在他们狂野的蓝图中，他们描绘的不是一个可以共存的未来世界，而是一个同样经受着历史包袱、民族烙印、社会经济困境和不知所措的日本当时的“再现”。如矶崎新看重的“未建成的”建筑，建筑就是建筑师笔下的文章，是建筑师的表达，建成的建筑会受到科技经济的约束，如一本为了卖的叫做而被改的面目全非的剧本，而未建成的建筑，才凝结着建筑师最狂野的梦。

“建筑”“建筑”，读着这个词，映在脑中的只是冰冷的钢筋水泥，或是优雅的竹木隼牟，何不把它想做动词化的“建筑”。人人都在建筑着内心中的未来，而作为动词的“建筑”，需要的就是不断破坏作为名词的既有的“建筑“——不断破坏，建筑，新陈代谢。也许这样才能更接近他们所想象的那个metabolism。

2020.7.3

多伦多

　　《Project Japan》读后感(五)：译：纽约时报书评 Project Japan: Metabolism Talks…

　　The Master of Bigness

　　“大”之大师

　　y Martin Filler

　　1.

　　With his prodigious gift for invention, shrewd understanding of communication techniques, and contagiously optimistic conviction that modern architecture and urban design still possess enormous untapped potential for the transformation of modern life, no master builder since Le Corbusier has offered a more impressive vision for a brighter future than the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. To be sure, there are other present-day architects also at the very apex of the profession who do certain things better than he does. Robert Venturi is a finer draftsman and a more elegant writer; Denise Scott Brown has a more empathetic feel for the social interactions that inform good planning; and Frank Gehry displays a sharper eye for sculptural assemblage and a keener instinct for popular taste. But when it comes to sheer conceptual audacity and original thinking about the latent possibilities of the building art, Koolhaas today stands unrivaled.

　　凭借超凡的创作天赋、精悍的交际能力，和对于现代建筑和城市设计改造现代生活的巨大潜力的强烈乐观确信，荷兰建筑师Rem Koolhaas 成为继Le Corbusier 之后，又一位构筑出光明远景的伟大建筑师。 在当代建筑界，顶级大师们固然在某些方面胜过 Rem Koolhaas，比如，Robert Venturi 的草图和绘画技巧更佳；Denise Scott Brown 对透露出良好规划的社会互动形式产生更多共鸣；Frank Gehry 对雕塑群更能敏锐鉴赏、更能体察大众口味。但一涉及建筑艺术的潜在可能性，在大胆的概念和原创性思维方面，Koolhaas 令当代同仁难以望其项背。

　　Through his Rotterdam-based practice, the Office for Metropolitan Archi- tecture—OMA—and its research-and- development division, AMO, Koolhaas has conceived some of the most daring schemes of the past four decades, ranging in scale from mammoth undertakings like Euralille of 1987–1994 (the reconfiguration of the northern French city of Lille with a new high-speed railway hub, commercial center, and convention hall) and De Rotterdam of 1997–2019 (three interconnected mixed-use towers that will be the biggest building in Holland) to exquisite smaller structures including the Casa da Música of 2001–2005 in Porto, Portugal (an ark-like concert hall), and the Netherlands Embassy of 1997–2003 in Berlin (the finest work to rise in the German capital since reunification).

　　在总部位于鹿特丹的大都会建筑事务所（OMA）和研发机构（AMO）里，Koolhaas 捧出不少过去四十年间最大胆的设计方案，大项目如Euralille （1987–1994）——将法国北部城市里尔城区改造成为高速铁路枢纽、商业中心和会议中心，De Rotterdam（1997–2019）——未来荷兰最大建筑：三座互联多用塔，小项目如葡萄牙港口城市波尔图的音乐之家（2001–2005）——方舟状音乐厅，柏林的尼德兰大使馆（1997–2003）——德国统一后最出色的建筑。

　　The full range of Koolhaas’s building career was on view at London’s Barbican Art Gallery this year in a sprawling and exhilarating exhibition entitled “OMA/Progress.” Designed by the Brussels firm Rotor, the installation conveyed the messy vitality of the OMA aesthetic through staccato text and vibrantly overloaded visual effects. The retrospective featured a nonstop, random projection of all 3.5 million images stored in OMA’s database, which made it impossible for any one person to see its contents in toto, a characteristically Koolhaasian conundrum.

　　今年在伦敦巴比肯美术馆举办了一场不规则伸展形状的展览，名为“OMA / 进程”，全景呈现Koolhaas 的设计生涯，震撼人心。布鲁塞尔Rotor 公司设计的这场展览，用电报文本和活力奔流的视觉效果展现 OMA 散乱而充满生机的审美取向。回顾展将 3500 万张 OMA 数据库里的图片用不间断、无次序的方式投影出来，没有人能将图片全部看完，这也是Koolhaasian 之谜的特点之一。

　　The Barbican show—which included colored printouts casually pinned to wallboards or taped to the floor, huge unframed floorplans suspended from the ceiling, and rough-looking models strewn about—had the pleasantly disheveled air of an architectural office the morning after an all-night charrette to meet a competition deadline. Unlike some firms of its stature, OMA continues to participate in such contests, which many architectural stars avoid as beneath them and a waste of time and money.

　　钉在墙纸上、贴在地面上的彩色打印图片，从天花板垂落的无边框平面图，四处散落的粗糙的模型，为芭比肯展览现场营造了一个在大赛最后期限前夜通宵鏖战之后的工作室氛围，凌乱却温馨。OMA 坚持参加各类比赛，这一点和许多同规模的明星建筑设计公司不同，它们大多觉得这些比赛水准太低，参赛只是耗时耗财。

　　As Le Corbusier did, Koolhaas knows that the power of presentation, verbal as well as visual, is a crucial (and perhaps the decisive) element in the realization of the building art. Following the great Swiss-French master’s profitable example, Koolhaas has produced several hugely popular books, including two perennial touchstones among the young: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978) and S, M, L, XL (1995).

　　Koolhaas 和Le Corbusier 一样洞悉展现的力量——不管是文字的还是视觉的展现——都是建筑艺术得以再现的重要（也可能是决定性的）因素。循着伟大的瑞士-法国大师的生财之路，Koolhaas 写成了几本畅销作品，其中有两本成为经典的门槛读物：《错乱纽约：曼哈顿的追溯宣言》（1978）和《小号、中号、大号、特大号》（1995）。

　　Koolhaas’s latest volume, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks… (written with Hans Ulrich Obrist), pays tribute to the Metabolists, the mid-twentieth-century Japanese architects at the forefront of that country’s rebuilding after the devastation of World War II, led by the elder statesman of non-Western modernism, Kenzo Tange. This heavily illustrated and engagingly discursive oral history was undertaken in 2005 (the year of Tange’s death at the age of ninety-one) to record the testimony of the surviving Metabolists, and it is destined to become a definitive reference.

　　Koolhaas 的最新作品《投射日本：新陈代谢如是说…》（与Hans Ulrich Obrist 合著），热烈褒奖新陈代谢主义者——二十世纪中期奋战在战后日本重建第一线的日本建筑师，核心人物是年长的政治家丹下健三，这是一位非西方派现代主义者。这段被反复引证、口口相传的历史终于在 2005 年成书，为仍健在的新陈代谢主义者们做一次见证，也必将成为一本权威性的参考书。

　　In common with all of Koolhaas’s publications, one can readily detect that Project Japan actually concerns the author and his own interests as much as its ostensible subject. In this case, the Metabolists’ obsessive fixation on futuristic megastructures—stupendous agglomerations of superscaled buildings and integrated urban transport and other infrastructure meant to extend over many square miles, sometimes atop shallow bodies of water like Tokyo Bay, none of which were fully executed—has long been shared by the Dutch architect, who like his older Japanese counterparts in the Metabolists group has sought ingenious ways to overcome the severe geographic constraints of his tiny, sea-bound, and populous homeland.

　　和Koolhaas 的出版物一样，《投射日本》书写了书本本身的主题，亦传达了作者和他本人的兴趣。在本书中，新陈代谢主义者对于未来派超级建筑的执着迷恋——庞大的超级规模的建筑群，城市交通和其他基础设施相互整合、延展数百平方公里，还有像东京湾那样的水上建筑，虽然并非全部投入使用——这些理念都为荷兰建筑师们所共有，他们像日本新陈代谢派同行们一样，探索着各种新奇的方式克服本国狭小、临海、人口稠密的地理局限。

　　2.

　　Artists of genius generally wish to appear as though they emerged fully formed, and Koolhaas is no exception. A scion of the Dutch avant-garde cultural elite, Remment Lucas Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944, at the onset of the Hongerwinter (hunger winter), that final ordeal of the five-year Nazi occupation of Holland. His polymathic father, Anton Koolhaas, was an esteemed journalist, author of beloved fables about anthropomorphic animals in the manner of Kenneth Grahame and George Orwell, and the scenarist for two Academy Award–nominated documentaries.

　　天才艺术家通常都希望自己看起来身世赫赫，Koolhaas 也不例外。这位荷兰先锋派文化精英的后裔 1944 年出生于鹿特丹，当时“饥饿的冬天”刚开始，荷兰在纳粹铁蹄下已饱受五年蹂躏。其父Anton Koolhaas 学识渊博，是位知名记者。Anton Koolhaas用拟人的手法写的几本动物故事集广受欢迎，写作风格类似Kenneth Grahame 和 George Orwell。Anton Koolhaas 还创作了两部奥斯卡提名的纪录片。

　　The elder Koolhaas was also an ardent advocate of independence for the Dutch East Indies. In 1949 the Netherlands granted autonomy to Indonesia, and three years later Sukarno, the new country’s first president, invited him to run a cultural program there, whereupon the writer moved his family to Jakarta. That four-year immersion in a third-world society—“I really lived as an Asian,” the architect has reminisced—was a central factor in fostering his uncommonly broad worldview, which gave him a distinct advantage when the globalization of architectural practice began to accelerate as he hit his professional stride decades later.

　　Anton Koolhaas 还是荷属东印度群岛独立的积极倡导者。1949年，印尼获得自治，三年后，印尼首位总统Sukarno 邀请Anton Koolhaas 去印尼主办一场文化活动，借此机会，Koolhaas 举家迁至雅加达。回忆起在第三世界社会生活的四年，建筑师Koolhaas 说“我简直就成了亚洲人”，奠定了他非凡宽广的世界视域；在几十年后建筑业全球化加速发展中，那四年对他取得的大跨步超越也功不可没。

　　Following his father’s example, the young Koolhaas initially turned to journalism and screenwriting. In 1963, when he was eighteen, he began working for De Haagse Post, a right-liberal weekly published in The Hague, where he designed layouts and wrote on a wide range of political, social, and cultural topics. He then studied at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam (which his father headed from 1968 to 1978), and later cowrote an ultimately unproduced movie ｓｃｒｉｐｔ, Hollywood Tower, for the soft-porn director Russ Meyer, auteur of such camp classics as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965).

　　Koolhaas 也曾追随父亲走上新闻和剧本创作之路。1963年，十八岁的曾效力于De Haagse Post ，这是一份在海牙出版的右倾自由主义周刊，他设计版面，写作涉及政治、社会和文化等各个领域。之后他进入荷兰电影电视学院学习（1968 年到 1978 年Koolhaas 父亲曾是院长），之后与他人合写Hollywood Tower，这个电影剧本最终没能上演。

　　There were other family influences as well. Koolhaas’s maternal grandfather was Dirk Roosenburg (1887–1962), a Jewish vanguard architect in whose studio the boy made some of his earliest architectural drawings. Roosenburg’s best-known work was the Philips electronics company’s Lichttoren (light tower) of 1920–1928 in Eindhoven, a concrete-and-glass Art Deco office-and-laboratory building internally illuminated throughout the night like some twentieth-century Pharos—just the sort of romantic Modernism that Koolhaas evokes in his most imaginative speculations.

　　还有其他家庭影响。Koolhaas 的外祖母Dirk Roosenburg （1887-1962）是位犹太先锋建筑师，在她的工作室里，幼年Koolhaas 画了早期建筑草图。Roosenburg 最著名的作品是飞利浦电气公司位于艾恩德霍文的灯塔，一座装饰派艺术作品，混凝土和玻璃构成的办公兼实验室建筑，夜间内部发光，似一尊二十世纪的灯塔——这正是Koolhaas 凭借超凡想象唤起的浪漫派现代主义风格。

　　After studying at the experimentally oriented Architectural Association in London and later at Cornell (where he sought out the influential theorist O.M. Ungers), Koolhaas became the prime mover behind the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, which he founded in 1975 with the Greek architect Elia Zenghelis (under whom he had studied at the AA) and their respective spouses, the artists Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis. Koolhaas has a domestic life not unlike that portrayed in Anthony Kimmins’s film comedy The Captain’s Paradise (1953) by Alec Guinness, who plays a ferryboat skipper who shuttles between a wife and a mistress in separate ports. Vriesendorp makes her home in London, but since the mid-1980s her husband has lived in Holland with the Dutch designer Petra Blaisse, who has collaborated on several OMA projects, including the interiors of the Seattle Central Library of 1999–2004. (The Koolhaases’ daughter, Charlie, is a photographer who did the principal illustrations for Project Japan, and their son, Tomas, is a cinematographer who is making a documentary film on the architect titled Rem.)

　　在实验派倾向的伦敦和康奈尔的建筑协会（在那里找到有影响的理论家O.M. Ungers）学习之后，Koolhaas 成为OMA 的发起者，1975年，Koolhaas与希腊建筑师Elia Zenghelis （在建筑协会期间Koolhaas 曾拜师于他）及各自的妻子——艺术家Madelon Vriesendorp 和 Zoe Zenghelis，共同创立OMA。Koolhaas 的家庭生活跟Anthony Kimmins 的喜剧电影The Captain’s Paradise (1953) 描述的差不多，Alec Guinness 在这部电影里饰演摆渡于妻子和情妇之间的船长。Koolhaas 的妻子 Vriesendorp 定居伦敦，Koolhaas 从八十年代中期开始和荷兰设计师Petra Blaisse 在荷兰同居，Petra Blaisse 与 OMA 有项目合作，如西雅图图书馆的内部装饰项目（1999-2004）。（Koolhaas 的女儿Charlie 是摄影师，为《投影日本》拍摄了主要图片，儿子Tomas 是电影摄像师，正在为建筑拍摄一部名为Rem 的纪录片。）

　　Vriesendorp created the most celebrated image in Delirious New York, which first brought her husband to international attention. The painter’s architectural fantasy Apres l’amour depicts an apparently postcoital Empire State Building and Chrysler Building lying side by side on a rumpled bed. In between them is what looks like a discarded condom but turns out to be a deflated Goodyear blimp—a sly reminder that the Empire State’s spire was originally intended as a dirigible mooring mast (an idea abandoned as too dangerous.)

　　Vriesendorp 为 《错乱纽约》设计的绘图很著名，为丈夫吸引来首度国际关注。她还创作了建筑幻想作品Apres l’amour ，描述国大厦和克莱斯勒大厦并排躺在皱巴巴的床上，像是刚做完性事。两座大厦之间有个东西像是用过的安全套，定睛一看才知是个瘪了的固特异软式小型飞船——这是个狡猾的提醒，当年帝国大厦尖顶原本要造个可以飞的停泊桅杆（后来这一创意因太危险遭弃。）

　　eyond such provocative erotic metaphors—the antithesis of the coolly technocratic renderings that typified postwar corporate modernism—what makes Delirious New York so unforgettable is its author’s deep insights into the psychohistory of urbanism: the ways in which the often unacknowledged or unexpressed ethos of a city is embodied in its architecture. Koolhaas’s almost cinematic exploration of Manhattan’s subconscious architectural mystique had an especially tonic effect on the collective civic consciousness when it first appeared, just three years after the fiscal crisis of 1975 brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy. Even at Gotham’s lowest ebb, Koolhaas never lost sight of the imaginative heights this greatest of metropolises could yet again attain.

　　除却这些挑逗性的色情比喻——刚好与战后共同体现代派的技术统治论形成强烈对比——《错乱纽约》令人难忘的还有作者对城市化心理历史的深刻洞见：蕴含在建筑中的一般不被意识或不被表达的城市气质。Koolhaas 对曼哈顿建筑的潜意识奥秘进行了一场类似拍电影式的探索，作品一问世就振奋了集体市民意识，那是在1975年财政危机至破产边缘过去三年之后。即使在纽约的最低潮期，Koolhaas从未停止预见这座最伟大都市将要再度达到的想象高度。

　　3.

　　An entire book could (and in due course undoubtedly will) be written about Koolhaas’s spectacular trio of failed American museum proposals immediately before and after the millennium: an expansion of the Museum of Modern Art (1997) and an addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001–2003), both in New York City, and a reconfiguration of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2002). (In 2001, he completed the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian casino-hotel in Las Vegas, but that small branch gallery, a consortium between the eponymous art institutions in New York and St. Petersburg, closed in 2008 after it lost too much money.) Koolhaas’s inability to either win or complete these three high-profile assignments in the most conspicuous architectural category of the past several decades says much about the frequently confrontational nature of his vision.

　　2000年前后，Koolhaas的三个美国博物馆提案三度落选，这一传奇经历可以也将在合适的时候写成书。这三个提案分别是现代艺术博物馆扩大项目（1997），惠特尼美国艺术博物馆增建项目（2001-2003），这两个博物馆都在纽约，还有洛杉矶郡艺术博物馆重组项目（2002）。（2001年，Koolhaas 在拉斯维加斯的威尼斯赌城酒店完成了古根海姆隐居博物馆的设计工作，但那只是个小分支美术馆，是纽约和圣彼得堡的两座同名艺术宫的联合机构，2008年由于耗资巨大被迫关闭。）在过去几十年间，Koolhaas 在地标式建筑项目中或不能中标，或不能最终完成，这也反映出他的审美眼光总存在一种矛盾性。

　　In the limited competition for the MoMA job, ten invited participants (among whom Koolhaas was by far the best-known) were asked to present broadly conceptual ideas. His irreverent scheme included two elements that irreparably offended the search committee’s amour propre: he proposed transforming Philip Johnson and James Fanning’s sacrosanct Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden of 1953 into a sunken plaza not unlike the Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink. Even more insolently, he would have surmounted a seven-story addition atop Johnson’s 1964 wing with a billboard emblazoned “MoMA, Inc.”

　　在现代艺术博物馆这个项目的竞争只在受组委会的十名选手之间进行（Koolhaas 知名度最高）。选手们被要求大致表明自己的理念。Koolhaas 不恭敬的方案里有两处对组委会造成不可挽回的冒犯：他提出将Philip Johnson 和 James Fanning 建于1953年的神圣不可侵犯的Abby Aldrich Rockefeller 雕塑园改造成跟Rockefeller中心溜冰场差不多的下沉式广场。更可怕的是，他还想在Johnson 建于1964年的边房上加建一个七层结构，上面树一个写着 “MoMA, Inc.” 的巨型广告牌。

　　Had the nonagenarian Johnson, a big fan of Koolhaas’s, not been in his dotage and thus out of the selection process, he likely would have defended such bad-boy tactics as precisely the reinvigorating shock MoMA needed to jolt it back to its revolutionary roots. But absent the crafty old power broker, the merits of Koolhaas’s scheme were overlooked and the job—which had been assumed to be his for the asking—passed instead to Yoshio Taniguchi. His decorous but chilly design, which combines the dismal immensity of an airport terminal with the disorienting placelessness of a convention center, fulfilled the Dutchman’s sardonic prophecy about the once-pathbreaking museum’s increasingly corporate character. Though Koolhaas’s impudence could be interpreted as professional suicide, one still cannot help but marvel at his critical bravery.

　　九十多岁高龄的 Johnson 是Koolhaas 的超级粉丝，若不是因为老糊涂了退出了选拔，他还真有可能顶这个坏男孩的想法。 的确啊，现代艺术博物馆要想重获创办初期革新精神，还真需要Koolhaas这记重拳。但没了狡诈的老政治掮客，Koolhaas 想法的价值就得不到正视，这份本应给Koolhaas 的项目最终落入Yoshio Taniguchi 囊中。他高雅冷峻的设计风格，将机场航站楼的阴沉的一望无垠与会议中心让人失去方位感的无边无际结合起来，让Koolhaas带着冷笑的预见变成现实——这座昔日引领建筑新风的博物馆终于堕入烂俗。

　　Four years after the MoMA debacle, the Whitney turned to Koolhaas in another attempt to add to Marcel Breuer’s stubbornly unexpandable Brutalist monolith of 1963–1966. During the 1980s, Michael Graves had produced three increasingly unsatisfactory versions of a pompous Postmodern enlargement that would have engulfed the original building in a welter of fussy classicizing polychromy, which was dropped after strenuous community opposition. Koolhaas’s far more radical plan called for a curved superstructure to be inserted behind the landmarked brownstones adjacent to the museum, an appendage that would have risen up and hovered over the Breuer building like a monstrous cobra. The Whitney abandoned that nonstarter after two years of even more vocal neighborhood protest.

　　在现代艺术博物馆项目上惨败四年之后，惠特尼美国艺术博物馆找到Koolhaas，请他为Marcel Breuer 的野兽派整体雕塑品（1963–1966）加点东西，这件作品可是出了名的“独”。早在上世纪八十年代，Michael Graves 就提出三个华丽的后现代扩建版本，本想冲淡原作错乱不堪、过度装饰、山寨古典的多彩装饰风格，却遭遇了公众的强烈反对。Koolhaas 的计划要理性的多，他提出给雕塑加一个弯曲的上部结构，嵌在博物馆旁地标式赤褐色砂石建筑后面，这一附属结构抬升并悬置在雕塑智商，像一只恐怖的眼镜蛇。可是，在公众更激烈的反对了两年之后，惠特尼美国艺术博物馆放弃了Koolhaas 的设计。

　　The best of Koolhaas’s three lost museum schemes was for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which asked him to bring coherence to its jumble of dated 1960s Space Age–style pavilions. He immediately envisioned a drastic but brilliant solution: he called for the architectural equivalent of cutting the entire complex off at the ankles, leaving the footprints of the existing galleries and circulation routes intact, and then covering everything inside the oblong periphery of the multi-acre site with a gigantic bubble roof that suggested an inflatable tennis court shelter.

　　在这三个落马的博物馆项目中，最棒的是洛杉矶郡艺术博物馆项目——将六十年代太空时代风格的一堆凌乱的展馆改造成一个统一体。Koolhaas一下就想出一剂绝顶聪明的猛药：他要将整个建筑群自类似人体脚踝的位置向上完全切除，只留下展馆和道路的印迹，然后为这个长方形区域覆盖一个巨大的泡沫屋顶，看起来就像一个可充气的网球场顶。

　　In one bold stroke, LACMA would have gained the unified and monumental civic presence it has always lacked. Instead, like the Whitney, the LA museum turned to Renzo Piano, the default-mode master of predictably safe and supposedly timeless institutional modernism. Alas, Piano’s incremental boxes (the compromised Broad Contemporary Art Museum of 2003–2008 and the warehouse-like Resnick Pavilion of 2007–2019) have only exacerbated LACMA’s organizational mess.

　　洛杉矶郡艺术博物馆一直缺乏一种统一的不朽的城市风度，这个大胆的构想本可其弥补这种缺失。可惜，洛杉矶郡艺术博物馆和惠特尼美国艺术博物馆一样选择了Renzo Piano，这位体制内的现代主义的默认模式大师，本分保守、惟愿不朽。呜呼长叹，Piano 添置的方盒子（做了妥协的布罗德当代馆和长得像仓库的雷斯尼克展览馆）让惠特尼美国艺术博物馆那一坨系统的乱堆乱放更乱了。

　　Apart from his short-lived Vegas display space, Koolhaas’s only executed art gallery remains his Kunsthal of 1987–1992 in Rotterdam, a temporary exhibition facility with flexible galleries arranged around a squared-off helix of interior ramps that lead visitors almost effortlessly from level to level, without the now-ubiquitous escalators that give so many contemporary museums (including Taniguchi’s MoMA) the air of a shopping mall. Koolhaas used this same low-tech internal circulation for his largest work in the US, the Seattle Central Library, which was enthusiastically received upon its completion in 2004.

　　除了短命的维加斯展区，鹿特丹的美术馆是 Koolhaas 唯一成形的一次美术馆设计，这是一个临时性的展区，画廊是可收缩的，设置在正方形螺旋体内，螺旋体内有活动旋梯，带着参观者轻轻松松、一层一层的欣赏画作。其他当代博物馆普遍使用的是自动扶梯（连Taniguch 设计的现代艺术博物馆也是），身居期间分不清是博物馆还是大卖场。Koolhaas 在他美国最大的项目——西雅图中心图书馆里也使用了这种低科技含量的内循环设计，2004年完工时好评如潮。

　　Koolhaas’s Seattle project perfectly demonstrates his fundamental disdain for a major preoccupation of bien-pensant architects since the 1960s—“contextualism,” or designing a building to fit in with earlier structures near it. Given the dreary array of banal 1960s and 1970s high-rises that surround the entire city block dedicated to the new library, one can second his belief that it would have been futile to make any accommodating gestures toward such a negligible setting.

　　西雅图中心图书馆完美呈现了Koolhaas 对多数派推崇的正统建筑风格的深切蔑视。这里说的正统建筑风格指六十年代起盛行的文脉主义，即设计新建筑时考虑与周围已有建筑风格一致。想想吧，六七十年代一个模子刻出来的高楼大厦排列成行，巍巍可怕，图书馆新址就在那堆楼中间，不仔细看还真看不见。这时候我们就会和 Koolhaas 一样坚信，在这里建一座同样风格的图书馆，就彻底没救了。

　　Wisely, he devised a blockbusting composition: an angular pile-up of prism-like glass layers wrapped in white-painted, diamond-patterned steel latticework that forcefully establishes itself by ignoring everything around it. In continuation of a modernist tradition that began with Joseph Paxton and Charles Fox’s Crystal Palace of 1850–1851 in London, the open, soaring, light-flooded interior of the Seattle Central Library provides a majestic public space that suggests that the activities taking place within it are of singular importance to the community—something that architectural neoconservatives have wrongly insisted lies beyond the emotional capacity of the modern design vocabulary.

　　聪明如他，Koolhaas 做了个有助房产升值的设计，棱柱型玻璃分层堆积起来，外面是钻石图案、刷了白漆的钢筋格子，整个建筑顿有鹤立鸡群之感，周围的一切均显颓势，可以忽略不计。Koolhaas 延续了 Joseph Paxton、Charles Fox 设计伦敦水晶宫（1850-1851）时开创的现代派风格，西雅图图书馆开放、高耸、明亮的内厅提供了一个庄严的公共空间，暗示此间的活动对社区意义重大——建筑新保守主义坚持错了的东西在现代设计词汇的精神空间之外。

　　4.

　　Koolhaas is inexorably drawn to the architecture of state power, and is fascinated by earlier architects attuned to power regardless of its source. None of the great twentieth-century masters was more assiduous in his willingness to work for clients of any political stripe, from Communists to Nazis and all stops in between, than Koolhaas’s idol Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But whereas Mies’s design genius might excuse much guilt by association, it is hard to fathom Koolhaas’s perverse fondness for Wallace K. Harrison, a modestly accomplished establishment Modernist known mainly as the Rockefeller family’s de facto court architect.

　　Koolhaas 深受国家权力无可救药的吸引，着迷于过去顺应权力、不问权力来源的建筑师。二十世纪的建筑大师中，Koolhaas 的偶像Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 最热衷于政治阶层客户效力，不管是共产党还是纳粹党，还有林林总总的中间派系。Mies 的设计天分之高姑且可以洗刷一些罪恶，Koolhaas 对Wallace K. Harrison 的钟爱却让人百思不得其解，这位低调而多产的著名现代派大师为人们所知的身份是Rockefeller家族的御用建筑师。

　　Harrison’s in-law relationship to the Rockefellers gave him initial entrée, and he went on to oversee several gargantuan commissions under their sponsorship, including the collaboratively designed United Nations Headquarters of 1949–1952, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts of 1959–1969 in Manhattan, and the Empire State Plaza of 1959–1976 in Albany, which he designed (at the behest of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller) with his longtime partner, Max Abramovitz. Koolhaas—who mounted a quixotic exhibition honoring the aged and démodé Harrison at New York’s avant-garde Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1979—has been particularly intrigued by the architect’s hypothetical X-City of 1946, proposed by the real estate developer William Zeckendorf for the Manhattan site later donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to the UN—a configuration resurrected by Koolhaas in Eurolille’s dated enfilade of slab-sided high-rises.

　　Harrison 与Rockefeller家族的联姻给了他最初的准入证，继而在家族的扶持下，Harrison 负责了一些庞大的工程，包括与他人合作设计的联合国总部（1949-1952），位于曼哈顿的林肯表演艺术中心（1959–1969），在州长Nelson A. Rockefeller 敦促之下，与长期合作伙伴Max Abramovitz 合作设计的位于奥尔巴尼的帝国广场（1959–1976）。在 1946年Harrison的 X-City 的启发之下， Koolhaas 1979年在建筑与城市研究学院举办了一场堂吉诃德式的展览，纪念年迈、怀旧的Harrison。 地产商William Zeckendor 是 X-City的策划者，后来John D. Rockefeller Jr. 将X-City 赠予联合国。X-City已经过时的细长、笔直的超高层形象后来在Koolhaas 的Eurolille 设计中复活。

　　As for his own relations with power, Koolhaas harbors no discernible qualms about abetting a state-controlled propaganda agency of the current Chinese dictatorship. Following the example of architects from time immemorial, he has gone where the work is, and during the past decade that means China, where his major projects include the Shenzen Stock Exchange of 2006–2019, a monolithic, Miesian tower surrounded by a projecting “base” hoisted six stories above ground level by massive diagonal struts.

　　说起 Koolhaas 本人与权力的关系，他支持中国国家宣传机构时毫无疑虑。追随建筑先哲的足迹，哪里有工程，Koolhaas 就去哪里。十年里，Koolhaas 在中国对这个理念的践行体现在几个重大建筑上，如深圳股票交易所（2006-2019），那是一栋单体、密斯式塔楼，底部被一个向外延伸、六层高的基座围绕，基座的对角线上筑有巨大的撑柱。

　　What is likely to remain Koolhaas’s most controversial commission is now nearing completion in Beijing: the 4.2-million-square-foot China Central Television Headquarters, begun in 2004 and now at least three years behind its original estimated occupancy date, with an estimated cost of more than $800 million. (A disastrous 2009 fire, which destroyed the OMA-designed hotel next to the giant structure, was largely responsible for the delay.)

　　Koolhaas 最富争议的一个作品可能要数即将完工的占地 420 万平方英尺的中央电视台总部大楼。该工程始于 2004 年，原计划耗资八亿美金，现在距原定交付时间晚了至少三年。（工程延期的主要原因是2009 年那场大火，烧毁了大楼旁 OMA 负责设计的酒店。）

　　The CCTV building brings to mind a twice-as-large, deconstructed version of Johann Otto van Spreckelsen’s Grande Arche de la Défense of 1982–1989 in Paris, one of the most visible, if least distinguished, of the grands projets initiated by President François Mitterrand. (Significantly, OMA lost the 1991 competition for an extension to La Défense, the office building district created just outside the city limits to spare central Paris from high-rise development.)

　　CCTV 大楼让人联想起Johann Otto van Spreckelsen 设计的新凯旋门（1982-1989），CCTV 大楼是新凯旋门大一倍的解构版再现。密特朗总统曾发起一批“重大项目”，新凯旋门是其中最卓越的一个。（值得一提的是，OMA 在 1991 年新凯旋门扩建工程中落选，写字楼地块位于城外，巴黎市中心就不会竖起太多高楼。）

　　Despite their striking disparity in size—the CCTV structure is 768 feet high, the equivalent of a seventy-story tower, while the Grande Arche is the equivalent of only thirty-five stories—both are approximate cubes that inscribe a vast void within their clearly defined outlines. But whereas Spreckelsen’s slab-sided squared-off arch is dully static, the vertiginously off-kilter CCTV headquarters is a tour de force of high-tech engineering, orchestrated by Cecil Balmond of the London-based structural consultancy Arup.

　　尽管在规模上存在巨大差异—— CCTV 大楼高达768 英尺，相当于 74 层塔楼，而凯旋门只有 35 层楼高——二者都近似立方体，清晰的轮廓内是巨大的中空结构。Spreckelsen 设计的厚方块形拱顶给人以呆滞的静态感，而 CCTV 大楼打破平衡感的结构让人觉得眩晕，彰显高科技建筑工程力学的绝妙技巧，由伦敦 Arup 工程顾问公司的Cecil Balmond 助力实现。

　　The glass-and-metal-skinned Beijing behemoth is basically a pair of slightly inward-leaning L-shaped towers on two opposing corners of a vast square, and joined at the top by a breathtaking right-angled cantilevered overhang that imbues the composition with gravity-defying bravado. The horizontal and vertical elements interconnect in a continuous series of eight segments, a snakelike circulation system quite unlike that of any other office-and-broadcasting facility.

　　这个玻璃和金属外壳的庞然大物由一对向内倾的 L 形塔楼构成，塔楼位于巨大正方形区域的对角线上，在顶部形成壮观的无支柱的直角交汇，整件作品呈现一种傲视万有引力的惊人气势。在连续的八个节段中，横向和纵向的结构彼此相连，构成蛇状连环系统，与其他办公-广播大厦迥然不同。

　　With a plethora of bizarre new architecture engulfing them, baffled Beijingers have devised a new architectural lexicon recalling the wry coinages long perfected by witty Berliners, who, for example, have dubbed the glass dome of Norman Foster’s Reichstag renovation of 1992–1999 die Käseglocke (the cheese cover). Thus the two-legged CCTV colossus has become colloquially known as da kucha (big pants crotch). In trying to preempt a sarcastic nickname of this sort, officials wanted to get locals to refer to the CCTV building as zhi chuan—knowledge window—a pretentious choice that backfired because of its close homophonic echo of zhi chuang—hemorrhoid.

　　奇异新颖的建筑风格对北京市民来说太多了，困惑的人们发明了新的建筑词汇，让人想起多年前机灵的柏林人想出的那些名字，柏林人曾叫Norman Foster 翻新的德意志国会大厦（1992–1999）的玻璃穹顶“奶酪盖”。两条腿的 CCTV 大楼被叫做“大裤衩”。为了遏制此类讽刺外号，当局提倡称呼大楼为“智窗”——可惜市民非但不买账，叫的更难听了——在汉语中“痔疮”与“智窗”同音。

　　ut whatever moniker people adopt, one can predict that they will be beguiled by the highly unusual and equally controlled tourist route that is being built through the CCTV nerve center. Visitors will be able to navigate the premises in one nonstop loop while never disturbing day-to-day activities, a sure-fire public relations coup that will confer a bogus semblance of transparency on what of course is anything but an open operation.

　　但不管怎么称呼，CCTV 大楼怪诞的设计和楼内严格受限的参观线路都让游客大呼上当。游客们只能不停步的在外圈观摩，不能近距离参观台内日常活动，这种参观设计是个打着如意算盘的公关策略，貌似透明，实则与公开无关。

　　CTV arises amid the urban free-for-all of Beijing’s Central Business District, a chaotic cityscape that makes 1980s Houston seem like Haussmann’s Paris. To counter that urban miasma, Koolhaas (and his design partner for this project, the German architect Ole Scheeren) applied a strategy explicated in Koolhaas’s 1994 manifesto, “Bigness, or the Problem of Large,” which enumerates five “theorems,” some of them evident in the Beijing scheme:

　　CCTV 大楼跻身群雄混战的北京中央商务区，城市景观混杂无序，这派混乱曾让上世纪八十年代的休斯敦看起来像是Haussmann 重建的巴黎。Koolhaas为对抗城市的污浊空气采取的策略践行了他写于1994年的宣言——“大，或大之害”，列举了五个法则，有几个在 CCTV 大楼中有所体现。

　　1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures….

　　2. …Issues of composition, scale, proportion, detail are now moot.

　　The “art” of architecture is useless in Bigness.

　　3. In Bigness, the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the façade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The humanist expectation of “honesty” is doomed….

　　Where architecture reveals, Bigness perplexes; Bigness transforms the city from a summation of certainties into an accumulation of mysteries. What you see is no longer what you get.

　　4. Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good or bad.

　　Their impact is independent of their quality.

　　5. Together, all these breaks—with scale, with architectural composition, with tradition, with transparency, with ethics—imply the final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue.

　　It exists; at most, it coexists.

　　Its subtext is fuck context.

　　1. 建筑的体积超过一定限度之后，就成为一个“大型建筑”。此时就不再受单一建筑形态或多个联合的形态的限制…

　　2.…结构、规模、比例和细节问题都悬而未决。

　　3. 在“大型建筑”里，内核和外表的距离增大，门脸不再透露内部状况。人文主义者对“表里如一”的期望落空。

　　4. 单论体积，“大型建筑”进入道德判断的真空，无所谓好，也无所谓坏。它们的影响力与品质无关。

　　5. 总之，所有这些割裂——与规模、建筑结构、传统、透明度、伦理撇清干系——直指最终、也是最根本的割裂：“大”不再是城市组织的一部分。

　　“大”之存在，至多是一种并存。

　　“大”的潜在意义仅是创造氛围。

　　uch morally laissez-faire attitudes infuriate Koolhaas’s detractors, who see him as pandering to the basest market-driven impulses in a world that has largely abandoned the social vision of the early Modernists as either pragmatically impossible or impossibly utopian. As if to endow his free-floating Realarchitektur with legitimate parentage, he has championed a reappreciation of the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who during the full flood of socially responsive design in the 1960s and early 1970s were similarly denounced for what some saw as their all-too-willing embrace of commercialism, epitomized by their incendiary study Learning from Las Vegas (1972) and its codification of the American roadside vernacular.

　　这种道德自由主义的态度让 Koolhaas 的反对者们大为光火，在他们看来， Koolhaas 为了迎合市场需求，放弃了早期现代主义者乌托邦式的社会观。似乎是为了给无根的 Realarchitektur 正名，他领头重新审视 Robert Venturi 和 Denise Scott Brown 的作品。在上世纪六十年代和七十年代初期，在“建筑应对社会负责”的思潮甚嚣尘上之际，Robert Venturi 和 Denise Scott Brown 因过度迎合商业利益遭遇贬斥，较具代表性的一例是他们的“学习 Las Vegas”（1972）。

　　Venturi and Scott Brown’s position, however, was no unprincipled acquiescence to capitalist imperatives, but a resigned acceptance that these are conditions that all present-day practitioners—even high-style architects—must deal with, like it or not. A similar uproar greeted the 2001 publication of The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, a comprehensive analysis of retail design that emerged from a course that Koolhaas taught at the university and focused on today’s all-pervasive global consumer economy.

　　Robert Venturi 和 Denise Scott Brown 并不是无原则的向资本主义之命妥协，他们有所保留的接受一些现实，今天的建筑师们——包括高端设计风格的建筑师——不管喜不喜欢，都必须面对这些现实。2001年，当哈佛设计学院采购指南公布之后，听到了类似的反对的声音。这是一份对于零售设计的综合分析，出自 Koolhaas 在哈佛针对当今无所不包的全球性消费者经济讲授的一门课程。

　　Two other books have emerged from similar studies led by Koolhaas as part of his Project on the City at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he has been a visiting professor since 1995. Investigating what he has described as “a new type of metropolis that we have called a ‘city of exacerbated difference,’” Koolhaas and his students have focused on such immense ad hoc conurbations as five rapidly expanding cities in China’s Pearl River Delta (Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzen, and Zhuhai), subject of Great Leap Forward (2002), and Nigeria’s biggest city, analyzed in Lagos: How It Works (2008).

　　另外两本书出自 Koolhaas 从 1995 年起在该学院任访问学者期间进行的城市专题研究。Koolhaas 研究的是他称为“一种我们称为差异不断恶化的城市的新都会类型”。Koolhaas 和学生们将目光对准五个急速扩张的中国珠三角城市（广州、香港、澳门、深圳和珠海），大跃进专题（2002），和尼日利亚的最大城市 Lagos：《如何运行》（2008）。

　　These seminars are based on Scott Brown and Venturi’s now-famous 1968 Yale course that led to Learning from Las Vegas. But whereas they and their class gathered data by driving along and photographing the Strip, Koolhaas has admitted that he and his team were too scared by Lagos’s chaos to exit their vehicle, and instead rented the president of Nigeria’s helicopter to survey the city by air. “What seemed, on ground level, an accumulation of dysfunctional movements, seemed from above an impressive performance, evidence of how well Lagos might perform if it were the third largest city in the world,” he later wrote. Traffic jams became occasions for people to make sales.

　　ome critics consider both his subject matter and methodology de-haut-en-bas slumming. As George Packer wrote in The New Yorker in 2006:

　　这些研讨会在 Scott Brown 和 Venturi 1968 年在耶鲁讲授（现在知名度很高）的课程的基础上，发展为“学习 Las Vegas”。但尽管当年 Scott Brown 和 Venturi 以及学生们沿路开车拍照从而获得数据，Koolhaas 承认他和他的团队由于 Lagos 局面太过混乱而不敢下车，取而代之的是雇用尼日利亚直升飞机航拍。Koolhaas 后来写道：“在地面上看起来混乱的状况，从高空俯览就显得蔚为壮观，这也为这座城市如果成为世界上第三大城市将如何良性运行给出了答案。”交通拥堵方便人们进行交易。评论家们认为 Koolhaas 的专题和方法论都是彻头彻尾的贫民窟风格。正如 George Packer 在 1996 年写于《纽约客》里的话：

　　That impulse to look at an “apparently burning garbage heap” and see an “urban phenomenon,” and then make it the raw material of an elaborate aesthetic construct, is not so different from the more common impulse not to look at all.

　　“注视燃烧的垃圾堆、观察城市现象，作为审美结构的第一手素材，和什么也不看没什么两样。”

　　In much the same way that artists like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami have appropriated ideas put forward by Andy Warhol and taken them to extremes the originator could scarcely have imagined, so has Koolhaas proceeded from Venturi and Scott Brown’s premises and transmogrified them in ways that can seem like grotesque parodies rather than sincere homages. There can be no doubt whatever about Koolhaas’s once-in-a-generation talent. What remains in question is whether his seeming indifference to progressive values will make future observers wonder why this cultural potentate was so reluctant to confront Chinese oligarchs with the same fearlessness he once marshaled against captains of capitalism on American museum boards.

　　画家 Jeff Koons 、Damien Hirst 和 Takashi Murakami 也表达了类似的看法，他们借用 Andy Warhol 的观点，并将其发展到原作者预料不到的极端地步，Koolhaas 从 Venturi 和 Scott Brown 那里提取原始观点，并进行变形，使其更像是古怪的戏仿，而非真诚的崇敬。毋庸置疑，Koolhaas 的天分实属百年不遇。不过，Koolhaas 对革新价值看似不经意的态度或许会让他的研究者们纠结于这样一个问题——这位曾身先士卒反抗美国博物馆领域的资本主义舵手的文化领军人物，在面对中国寡头政权时，为何就鼓不起同样大无畏的勇气了呢？