ABSTRACT
The success of the work of Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA rests strongly on the
implicit or explicit claim to be an architecture of emancipation. Koolhaas can be
interpreted as resuscitating the early modernist imperative to develop an architec-
ture of social relevance through a mix of programmatic and formal change. He
seeks to challenge practices of social reproduction as they are embedded in archi-
tectural ideology and spatial programme. Programmatic innovations include the
production of fields of social encounter, new functional juxtapositions and forms
of spatial segmentation designed to resist social reproduction and enable certain
‘freedoms’ (Zaera and Koolhaas 1992). This chapter is an examination of such
claims through a critique of three well-known buildings.1 The primary lens for this
critique is an adapted method of spatial syntax analysis filtered through a Deleuz-
ian framework of assemblage theory (see Chapter 2). Spatial syntax ana lysis, as
developed by Hillier and others (Hillier 1996; Hillier and Hanson 1984), is a largely
structuralist critique of spatial structure that would surely be anathema to Kool-
haas. Despite a positivist and reductionist bias, spatial syntax analysis has a signi-
ficant linkage to conceptions of place as assemblage and as habitus, particularly
in its interrogation of the ‘genotypes’ or ‘diagrams’ embodied in buildings as
forms of social reproduction. While Koolhaas rarely mentions or cites Deleuze,
the influence is clear (Rajchman and Koolhaas 1994: 99; Kwinter 1996; Speaks
1994). It is at least an interesting congruence that both Hillier and Koolhaas
deploy the ‘machine’ as a primary metaphor in their approach to architecture and
space. For both this is a critical response to the Corbusian notion of architecture
as a ‘machine for living’. Hillier’s major book is entitled Space is the Machine and
Koolhaas’ work often deploys machines both literally and metaphorically. Both
approaches privilege the idea of buildings being produced systemically through
generic (in the case of Koolhaas) or genetic (Hillier) codes or structures; both treat
buildings as forms of infrastructure that variously accommodate or constrain flows
of life. The loose adaptation of spatial syntax methods here is unlikely to be accepta-
ble to either Koolhaas or Hillier; it is not intended to be reductionist but is intended
to bring a more rigorous critique to some of the claims for programmatic innovation
in Koolhaas’ designs. To do this I will first set aside the formalist aesthetic critique of
Koolhaas’ work except as it informs this task. This does not suggest that form and
programme can be easily separated – I argued in Chapter 4 that such a presumed
separation is one of the deepest complicities of architecture with power. It is also not
because the aesthetic dimension of his work is less interesting or innovative, Kool-
haas is a master form-maker and major producer of symbolic capital (see Chapter 3).
