Harvard Professor Rem Koolhaas, the internationally-acclaimed architect who has won the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000 and the Riba Gold Medal in 2000 in addition to garnering critical acclaim by the New York Times and Time magazine, will be lecturing at AUB on May 17, 2010 at 6pm in Issam Fares Hall, near AUB Medical Center.
His lecture will focus on the work of the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture, which Koolhaas co-founded with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp in 1975. Right now, Koolhaas heads both OMA and AMO (Architectuur Metropolitaanse Officie) —the conceptual branch of OMA, a think tank focused on social, economic, and technological issues.
Some of the most famous works completed by OMA include the following:
the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003), a campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (2003), the Prada Epicenter in Los Angeles (2004) and the Public Library in Seattle (2004). The Seattle Library was chosen by TIME Magazine as The Best Architecture for 2004 and was
described by the New York Times as “a blazing chandelier to swing your dreams upon.” (May 16th 2004).
In April 2005 the Casa da Musica concert hall in Porto was completed and was already voted as one of the most important concert halls in the
world by the New York Times (April 10th 2005). Recent OMA projects include a study for the European Commission on the visual identity
of the EU, image restructuring for Condé Nast magazines Lucky and Wired, a study on the future of the automobile for Volkswagen, and a
study concerning preservation for the city of Beijing. By combining AMO and OMA Rem Koolhaas is seen as one of the most important thinkers of the last decades.
