Koolhaas in Beijing

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Architecture

ISBN: 9789076936277
English edition
Jap Sam Books
Hardcover with jacket, 128 pages
12,4 x 18,6 cm
colour/black & white
September 2010
€14,15 (excl. VAT)

Koolhaas in Beijing

Edzard Mik

Architects, contrary to most artists, work by definition from the core of society. Rem Koolhaas is one of the few architects who demonstrates the ability to do so while maintaining a critical distance. Does his strategy contain a hint for artists on how to create significant art in a world where everything seems bound for insignificance?  

Writer Edzard Mik visited the CCTV building in Beijing, designed by Rem Koolhaas's OMA, and wrote a lyrical 'road essay' about Koolhaas, Beijing and on being an artist in the 21st century.   'Image overload, significance deficit, suspension of identity and nonstop transformation and adaptation: it is not only the condition of travel but also the condition into which modernity has delivered us.'  

About the author: Edzard Mik (1960) is a Dutch novelist and a regularly featured essayist on visual art, architecture and theater in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and weekly magazine Vrij Nederland.   This is the fifth publication in a series of essays commissioned by the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.