A few months ago I ran into a Swiss university professor, he was teaching architecture and speaking, more and less as you do when you unload our best weapons, it turns out that you don’t know Rem Koolhaas you are nobody. And I admit it: a few months ago I didn’t know Rem Koolhaas.
Who is he? What does he do? Why is it so important? These are the questions we ask ourselves when someone tells us that a character really made history.
Rem Koolhaas is an architect. This is the first thing you need to know if you talk about him. Architect. In 2000 he won one of the most significant prizes that exist for architecture, the Pritzker Prize: a Nobel I would say, if the parallelism helps us to understand its value.
But in reality it is the activity of writing that I think makes Koolhaas what he is: not only someone who knows how to do something, activity if that is rare but not very rare, but someone who in addition to knowing how to do, is able to explain himself to the world the world as he sees it. It is an almost unique gift if you stop for two minutes to think about it: maybe someone is very good at having a special way of living life inside, the space around them, fashion or music but they are unable to say it, with words, to no one, not even to his mother.
So the second thing you need to know about him is that he is a brilliant journalist and, an even more magnificent, essayist. His most famous books are Junkspace and Delirious New York and the reading of the first is able to open the mind on the modalities of interaction with space, with buildings and the most absurd concepts even to those who have never been around architecture and space. interested in his life. Rem Koolhaas, in his writing style, takes the difficult ones and writes them in black and white, as if nothing and, all of a sudden, things seem clear to you that until a moment before you knew you were thinking but were not able to express. He is a ‘theorist of contemporary architecture’, a three hundred and sixty degrees.
But urban planning is his field: everything that involves dynamism, people, space and the continuous and non-stop movement of one within the other.
Since 2011 he has been collaborating with Miuccia Prada on the staging of his fashion shows: is fashion, like space, a space in which people move and move the appearances of the self as they please? Thus, behind the scenes of fantastic scenarios and emotional installations, Rem Koolhaas, together with the OMA studio (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the studio of which Koolhaas is a partner, together with eight other very important architects, including the famous Zaha Hadid), he studies and thinks how the designer’s clothes will be “staged” in the show called Fashion Week.
In 2011, on the occasion of SS 2012, she created a metropolitan space for Prada, fully in its strings: a street that the models walked like women masters of the city, immersed in an environment that recalled the gigantic and busy avenues of Las Vegas, full of neon signs and brightly painted cars, such as the beloved vintage Bentleys, Cadillacs and Ford Coupes.
In the Spring – Summer 2015 fashion show, the space is different and literally seems to trap the public, motionless, forced to a single vision: the fashion and the fast heel of the models, who are parading in a square catwalk that surrounds them. The murals come to life on the walls, giving an urban, contemporary and street appeal to the show.
While, to give another useful example, in the Fall/Winter 2015-2016 fashion show, in the “Il Palazzo Infinito” fashion show, Koolhaas hides the hall inside a series of rooms, taking up the concept of place-in-place that we have also seen this year, on the occasion of the Possible Feelings Fall – Winter 20212022 fashion show.
Continuously moving the models into a new space, different from the previous one, is often also approached by a different dimension of the environments: as we proceed, the fashion show also evolves, transporting us to smaller and more intimate spaces, or more spacious and impersonal .
The materials, the dimensions, the colors all contribute to achieving a specific goal: the place where you are has power over you. It changes you, it influences you, it almost decides where you will go shortly.
So let’s ask ourselves if the strongest emotion is not felt by the models who, almost without their knowledge, are part of a huge, absolutely experimental experiment that Koolhaas stages to excite us, sitting outside. But who is inside? And does he walk and experience that absurd matryoshka of rooms in the room firsthand? Full and empty, large and small.
For once in my life, more than looking at those dresses that make you dream so much, I would like to be one of the models that run in that timeless space and feel what it feels like to walk in a world imagined by Rem Koolhaas.
You could be also interested to:
Prada Possible Feelings FW 21/22: what are the feelings you can make possible?
Moschino: Hollywood cinema meets post-impressionism
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