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Hans werlemann biography

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Biography

Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944. He started his career as a screenwriter and journalist at the Haagsche Post. In 1972, he completed his studies in architecture at the Architectural Association in London and in 1975 founded OMA in London together with Madelon Vriesendorp, Elijah Zenghelis and Zoe Zenghelis. In 1980, OMA opened an office in Rotterdam, where it has been headquartered ever since.

OMA initially won fame mainly by winning competitions, such as that for the expansion of the parliament building in The Hague (1987), the Très Grande Bibliothèque (1989) and Jussieu library (1993), both in Paris. Although these projects were not built, they were innovative and excited interest among other architects. Koolhaas was known not only for his remarkable designs, but also for his role as a journalist and writer. In 1978, he published Delirious New York, about the architecture of that city. In 1995, he published S,M,L,XL a collection of the office’s projects to date with texts about the city and the development of architecture. In cooperation with the Har

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Delight beats blight

Ossip van Duivenbode was just nine years old when OMA’s Rotterdam Kunsthal opened in 1992. Then, Rem Koolhaas was busy deconstructing not only spatial conventions, but their modes of representation too, commissioning young artist/photographer Hans Werlemann to capture its spatial complexity. Ten years later, as an architectural history graduate and then photographer, he’d come to see Kunsthal as one of the Netherlands’ most important modern buildings, striking programmatic elements together until, in the ensuing friction, it sparked a whole new way of experiencing space.

Maybe that fuse glowed all the brighter in Rotterdam due to the dearth of serious programmatic analysis that followed the rushed post-war reconstruction of its city centre; exposing in the intervening years a ground plane of problematic public spaces and urban connectivity. It seems to have been topmost in van Duivenbode’s mind when he sent us his photograph of the city’s Schieblock.

An unprepossessing, derelict 1960s office block, this site exhibited all the s

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