On Pedagogy: Rem Koolhaas in Conversation with Mohsen Mostafavi

I would like to begin by asking about your teaching at the GSD and how it has gone through a number of phases over the years. At the beginning you were teaching options studios, and then you developed a thesis studio model. It would be good to know some of the themes that you covered in those early studios, and what were the reasons for the shift to the thesis studio model.
MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI: REM KOOlHAAS: In the mid-1990s there were three main observations I made in relation to teaching. One was that architects were working in an incredible variety of places, and that it was therefore urgent to develop global knowledge. Second, I became aware that something important was changing through globalization within the School itself. One could no longer have the sense of a central, relevant core of knowledge-in other words, a Western knowledge that would be applicable or relevant for all different cultures. I remember very clearly how this became honed by a large number of projects and studio trips that grappled with these monolithic presuppositions by default. This very moment was an obvious fork in the road and an opportunity to be taken, not to be abandoned. Third, one was really aware of this in the composition of the student body itself, which like virtually all things touched by globalization, was fundamentally changing. That the student body was becoming much more international demonstrated a global need for education, rather than an education that was global. The very variety of people this allowed and the attendant competencies were clearly very useful for research. That is why I started to do kind of research and emphasized these kind of research skills, to not only to generate knowledge but also to demonstrate how our knowledge as a School with this very diverse student body could benefit studio work efficiently and quickly. I harnessed their expertise-for example, students who spoke Chinese, or in the case of a Romanian student, in recognizing and decoding communist aesthetics, for the benefit of the studio.

MM: It would be good to know more about the way in which, given these global shifts, you tried to organize the structure of that research, in terms of the thesis studio. How did you actually-on any kind of pragmatic register-organize this research?

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RK: Harvard, as an institution, has always been extremely supportive in funding travel, and so the studio was typically organized around travel and all of the preparation that comes with it. In the case of China, we prepared ajourneyto the Pearl River delta, where we encountered in every city a relevant intelligence, where particular aspects of the environment surfaced as particularly relevant subjects of study for individual students. Before we went, we had some kind of blueprint of the different subjects, and then we tried to match both the journey and the students through that blueprint. In the case of Lagos, there was another configuration. We matched every Harvard student with a student from Lagos University, so that they could be paired up and have access to all of the intricacies of the city. In the case of shopping, the travel was more individual and geared more toward the specific tastes of the students' research. We worked in very close collaboration with Jeffery Inaba, with whom we regularly visited, and with whom the focus of each student's project developed from nebulous initial assumptions in the first three months to something far more specific in the latter half of the thesis.

How did you choose the specific topics? You've explained the bigger context, but for example, going from shopping to Lagos, what were your strategies in developing these particular subjects?
MM:
RK: They are not quite as disparate as they may first appear. The all-encompassing theme of the work was to study areas of the most intense globalization, with an emphasis on non-Western areas, as I had began to realize that globalization was taking place faster in the non-West than in the West. I was particularly interested in seeing whether that would generate different kinds of knowledge. Frederic Jameson had been the first to speak to me about the staggering change taking hold. After our work with Prada and shopping, which were both connected to getting rich or to consumerism, Lagos became very interesting because it allowed us to see how this phenomenon could grow and defeat poverty or perpetuate it. They were all interconnected subjects that were part oflogical continuum.

I know that, in your own life, the whole experience of travel connected to your office was very much part of what you were living and what you were experiencing. I'm wondering how then this research on the city fit in the broader context of the work that you were involved with at the time in the office. Can you speak about what was pedagogically specific and what was an extension of your own practicebased inquiry.
MM:

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The concept of Professor in Practice is unique and incredibly fertile. It generates a creative and mutually intensive situation that always suggests different and new ways of working in the office. It has been a very beautiful model, without which the nature of the office would have been a lot less developed and a lot less creative. It facilitates a beautiful interaction between the two. And this is why we are now resuming this kind of collaboration, having experienced how these two layers are incredibly useful in terms of mutual inspiration.
RK:

There exists then research within practice and research within the academy. This is something that I think you started quite early in your own very deliberate decision to activate architecture through research by, for example, working with Unge.rs. Was there a specific moment when you became aware and patently enthusiastic or committed to this issue of research?
MM:
RK: I have actually felt recently that this kind of research is maybe a bit overambitious and thus drew perhaps a little too much attention. I think that the basic foundation for research being important started with Delirious New York. I wanted

The Harvard Guide to Shopping, 2002. The Great Leap Forward: The Harvard Design School Project on the City, 2002.

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On Pedagogy: Rem Koolhaas in Conversation with Mohsen Mostafavi

to do a specific kind of architecture and I saw that without further argument, I would be unable to ever do that if I did not, with words, first create and describe the possibility ofit and then more indirectly create the need for it. Maybe those two actions - describing and creating - are better words than research in and of itself. The studio strategy is in that sense interconnected to a view of what architecture can do. At the same time, it can leave one frustrated, in a way, because it also highlights the limits of what architecture at any particular moment offers. Concerning Delirious New York as an articulation of this agenda, writing and publications seem to have been critical. They, in many ways, playa key role in the forming of ideas and the projects themselves. They are not just the manifestation of ideas-they become really entangled. What do you see as the logic of these publications that you produced, like the books on the city, the shopping book, etc.? The organization of the book, the way you put things together in those books, seems to become very much part of the production of content.
MM:

This is actually a hard question, because I don't know whether I would have relied so heavily on the entity of the book had I not been so deeply familiar with it. I cannot say if bookmaking is the best vehicle for generating content on the one hand, and shaping or offering content on the other. I'm not particularly sure whether it is the ideal format, or whether it is simply a format that I'm familiar with and that fits me personally. Nonetheless, recent publication efforts have somehow reassured me that it's not an entirely random outlet.
RK:

Have you considered other forms of communication? I'm asking this specifically because of your interest in film and the possibility of other modes of representing ideas?
MM:
RK: Film has always lingered on the horizon and has presented a kind of perpetual possibility. I promise myself often to make an opportunity for film, but for the moment I believe in the book as the most controllable and most comprehensive and most diverse kind of outlet that I have. The book realm is one ofproductive competition. The market tells us fascinating things about which books can be produced, what you can do with books, and what demand is. It doesn't really turn out to be the trap that you would expect.

MM:

What is happening to the Lagos research? Any plans for continuing that?
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RK: I'm definitely still working on it. There are three important things that continue from the context of this urban study. One is the Roman system. We have looked at the production of space in the Roman Empire in concert with Roman and Greek texts, where for the first time there is a description of a literary architecture and urbanism. We have produced it as a kind of computer manual. The Lagos epic, though, has been particularly misunderstood and slightly controversial. Critics have found it problematic that someone like me was conducting research in Africa, sometimes in a constrictive way, but other times in a blindly skeptical way. These reflections and reactions have given me ideas as to how I could do it again if I were to do it again now. There is still the possibility that it will happen. And if it happens, it will probably happen pretty fast.

Now more recently, your interests have come to also include a more systemic study of the existing conditions of architecture. I'm thinking about your project for the Hermitage, or the work you did on conservation with students, and even your last project at the Biennale. What accounts for this shift and the inclusion of its focus?
MM:

I think that the most important motivation has been to get access to a particular subject. I realized that I had never really thought about just how extreme conservation has been for architecture. Once I really forced myself to think on that conundrum, it became a totally fascinating subject to understand. Through this it became possible to understand conservation as an important part of modernization from the very beginning, and it thus became almost compulsive to develop a relationship to it. I think if we really succeed here, it will be a big relief to develop a position on a topic that is as yet somewhat underdeveloped and somewhat under-intellectualized.
RK:

I think one of the important aspects of focusing on conservation in a broader cultural fashion are the repercussions, both for existing buildings in terms of the way in which we don't end up turning them into museum pieces and somehow see them as living artifacts and living objects, but also, I suppose, for their relationship to the development of new buildings. I'm wondering, for example, whether doing the Rothschild bank in the context of an important site in London brought about issues that in some ways relate to this discussion of conservation, even though you were dealing with building a new building?
MM:

The interval between the present and what is preserved is getting shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, preservation is going to be not only a kind of retroactivaRK:
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On Pedagogy: Rem Koolhaas in Conversation with Mohsen Mostafavi

tion but also a prospective issue. This simply implies that in certain environments and certain conditions, you have to be much more scrupulous and mechanistic about contextual systems than you do in others. A final question. This fall a group of GSD students will be working with you in Rotterdam, and it is going to be a really important opportunity to be both close to the office and also work on specific studio projects. What are your plans for the studio? Do you have a goal for the outcome of this studio?
MM:
RK: I would like the outcome to be a much better understanding of what the permanent elements of architecture are. I am hoping for a rethinking of the fundamentals, and exploring the question of whether better fundamentals actually exist, and ifbetter fundamentals now are different from what they used to be. And of course as with all questions, we already have some intuition. In other words, we have an intuition that there are new fundamentals, and that even in the seemingly shapeless and constantly changing conditions of contemporary architecture, a fresh look at the fundamentals could be quite interesting, if only because it could detract from the myth of individual authorship-or at least draw attention away from individual authorship, which I think could be healthy. Like all of the serious questions we have asked, it will be a strange combination of instinct, intuition, and more serious observations that I trust will congeal into something more coherent.

Does this question of fundamentals link you directly to questions of the city in terms of the crossing of the fundamentals of architecture with the fundamentals of urbanization?
MM:
RK: We haven't gone there yet, but we are definitely also going to be looking at the relationship with typology. I think that one of the observations with typology is that in spite of the incredible proliferation of buildings, the catalog of typologies is constantly becoming reduced. I expect that at the end of this investigation, it will provide new ways of looking at the city, because you would have to look at the city through the prism of typologies - be they twenty-five, seven, or even five different ones. That's a drastically different city.

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