Koolhaas and cultural contradiction.

Speaking in London at the Royal Society of Arts last month, Rem Koolhaas gave an excoriating analysis of the condition of architects in a consumerist global economy, citing his own description of it as a 'poisonous mixture of megalomania and impotence'. He suggested it had become increasingly difficult for architects to generate their own agenda, instead operating as passive recipients of private sector demands in cities shaped by random and chaotic forces. Even the idea of the public good, or the public realm, had now become something more akin to 'private good', as a result of the rise and rise of the private economic sector. As for 'urbanism' and the new niche designers who claim the spaces between buildings as their province, they were engaged in what Koolhaas described as 'authoritarian scripting'. This bucket of cold water on a new orthodoxy was as refreshing as it was provocative.

Having offered us his condition of architecture, Koolhaas turned to heritage and the museum, noting that preservation policies began in France in 1790; perhaps the idea of post-revolutionary destruction of aristocratic culture had triggered the thought that some of it was rather good. Britain came next, in the 1840s, with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; since then, the gap between heritage available to be saved and the present had narrowed to such a degree that the past might soon overtake us, requiring deification of certain buildings as they complete. Perhaps that is what the icon debate is really about: instant heritage. As for museums and their building programmes, these were mapped against stock market activity in a most convincing way. Cultural activity is not necessarily about architecture.

Cue the Hermitage in St Petersburg, where Koolhaas is striving to combine heritage, content and expansion, working with the world's biggest collection of art and sculpture, but in an institution with (relatively speaking) low visitor numbers (good). He suggested a programme based on non-intervention, for example by declining to upgrade rooms which had a distinctive patina of history and occasional misuse. Why substitute predictable white space orthodoxy? (One of art's dirty little secrets, said Koolhaas, was that it doesn't like competition.) Why not display the building's history rather than create yet another iconic venue? Why not show wonderful objects in scruffy spaces, and if a Guggenheim-style motorbike exhibition is required, put single machines into poky corners?

Of course Koolhaas and OMA have, for many years, undermined the message about architecture being a hopeless case by producing one brilliant piece after another; designing 'non-iconic' buildings--the Dutch embassy in Berlin or the Casa da Musica in Porto, for example (p40)--producing results (neo-icons) published across the world. It is as though the practice and its muse have become the exception to their own analysis; in the process, Koolhaas has become the frustrated romantic hero of architecture, incapable of designing down to the world-weary scepticism that plays so well to his lecture audience.