Who needs a seat anyway
Rem Koolhaas at the Salone
While other programme items on the fair's Wednesday at the Salone could afford empty seat rows in the Drafting Futures Arena, by 3 pm nothing was moving anymore. Standing room at the back, standing room along the sides, standing room between the green velvet seats. Rem Koolhaas, 81, OMA co-founder, Pritzker laureate, had been given his slot, and it was confirmed once more: anyone with Koolhaas on the programme needs no Plan B.
The formal occasion is known. Koolhaas and his OMA partner David Gianotten authored the Curatorial Masterplan on which the new Salone Contract format hangs. What was remarkable, however, was what Koolhaas did in the 45 minutes before that. Instead of masterplan marketing or an OMA portfolio show, he delivered a short lecture on a term that architects and designers usually regard with suspicion: contract.
In the conventional reading, the contract is the corset that constrains creativity. Koolhaas turns this around. For him, the contract is the framework that makes complexity manageable in the first place. He institutionalised this insight long ago in his own practice: in 1999, OMA founded AMO as a research and consulting arm, precisely in order to handle the growing layered complexity of large projects. Anyone following the three examples presented in the lecture is, in effect, hearing Koolhaas speak about his own business model.
First case: Rockefeller Center, New York, 1929.
In the middle of the Wall Street Crash, John D. Rockefeller launches the most ambitious real-estate project of his time. His proxy is John R. Todd, who enforces an iron structure: all participating architects – heavyweights like Wallace Harrison included – work side by side for five years, day after day, in a single building, with no parallel life. Sounds like coercion, but for Koolhaas it is the actual secret formula: density. That he picks Rockefeller Center of all things is no coincidence – it is one of the central objects of his 1978 classic Delirious New York. An anecdote that audibly amused the room: on a study trip to late-1920s Soviet Russia, the Rockefeller architects encountered Konstantin Melnikov's never-realised Sonata of Sleep – a sleeping facility for exhausted workers with sloped floors, ambient soundscapes and control booths regulating temperature, humidity and a "cocktail" of oxygen, ozone and laughing gas. Transplanted straight to Manhattan, the same air mixtures landed shortly afterwards in the auditorium of Radio City Music Hall. From Soviet wellness concept to capitalist entertainment in two years. Without the pressure of the Rockefeller contract, Koolhaas argued, this transfer would have been "barely conceivable."
Second case: Lagos, Nigeria, 1970s.
Architects from what was then Yugoslavia, representatives of the Non-Aligned Movement, build large projects in West Africa under turnkey contracts. A contract form frowned upon in the Western architecture world because it hands the general contractor all the power. But the Belgrade colleagues used precisely this structure to their advantage: once the lump sum was set, the client had no further leverage. The result is the Lagos Trade Fair – 350 hectares, hexagonal pavilions, designed by the Serbian architect Zoran Bojović for Energoprojekt between 1973 and 1977. The hexagonal geometry, and this is the fascinating part, traced back, according to Bojović, to maps he had asked schoolchildren in Kano to draw for him, plus research into local vernacular architecture. Modernism on an African foundation. That Koolhaas cites this building of all things has biographical depth: his own Lagos research project from the early 2000s, carried out within the Harvard Project on the City series, was what first brought Bojović's work back into Western architectural discourse. By their own self-understanding, Koolhaas added with a fine smile, the Belgrade colleagues were no longer communists after their African experience but had become "real socialists."
Third case: Miami, 2026.
A villa on one of the artificial islands between the city and Miami Beach. Sounds simple, isn't. The plot: one of dozens of near-identical lots, each with pool, lagoon and ocean access. The rising sea level, which calls the entire island into question on a visible horizon: no official topic of conversation. And then there is the contract with reality. Iranian marble: unobtainable due to sanctions. Polycarbonate from Israel: politically blocked. Wood from Ukraine: war. Plywood for formwork: scarce. Workers who are regularly taken away at night by ICE. Add the Red Sea crisis, the Panama Canal drought, US punitive tariffs. Koolhaas laid out the construction schedule like a geopolitical weather map. Every morning, he said, begins with "a series of drastic surprises that have to be improvised." A villa as a stress test for the world system.
The end of the lecture was not a summary but a forecast. Koolhaas sketched a map: America would withdraw into an "autonomous situation," Asia – China, Japan, Korea – would increasingly cooperate among themselves, with a "complicated zone" in between.
And then the line that stayed: Europe and Africa would work together more closely – and Africa could, "in an ultimate irony," become the zone of stability. A punchline that gained additional resonance the next day: on the same stage, Tosin Oshinowo, Nigerian architect and curator of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023, spoke about contemporary African architecture and urbanism. The Salone curators did not schedule that by accident.
Three contracts, three eras – and the shared finding that contracts are by no means merely economic instruments but social and political ones. They force different actors into rooms in which something third can emerge, something none of them could have thought up alone. For the manufacturers, specifiers and operators who, in the subsequent panel discussion, spoke about their own friction zones, this was more than art-historical preamble. It was a reminder that what is currently being negotiated in concrete terms in the contract business – alliances, specification routines, general-contractor structures, lifecycle responsibility – has its own long history. And its own politics.
When Porro and Gianotten subsequently presented the masterplan, the rows had already noticeably thinned. Koolhaas had filled the room. And he had emptied it again.
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While other programme items on the fair's Wednesday at the Salone could afford empty seat rows in the Drafting Futures Arena, by 3 pm nothing was moving anymore. Standing room at the back, standing room along the sides, standing room between the green velvet seats. Rem Koolhaas, 81, OMA co-founder, Pritzker laureate, had been given his slot, and it was confirmed once more: anyone with Koolhaas on the programme needs no Plan B.
The formal occasion is known. Koolhaas and his OMA partner David Gianotten authored the Curatorial Masterplan on which the new Salone Contract format hangs. What was remarkable, however, was what Koolhaas did in the 45 minutes before that. Instead of masterplan marketing or an OMA portfolio show, he delivered a short lecture on a term that architects and designers usually regard with suspicion: contract.
In the conventional reading, the contract is the corset that constrains creativity. Koolhaas turns this around. For him, the contract is the framework that makes complexity manageable in the first place. He institutionalised this insight long ago in his own practice: in 1999, OMA founded AMO as a research and consulting arm, precisely in order to handle the growing layered complexity of large projects. Anyone following the three examples presented in the lecture is, in effect, hearing Koolhaas speak about his own business model.
First case: Rockefeller Center, New York, 1929.
In the middle of the Wall Street Crash, John D. Rockefeller launches the most ambitious real-estate project of his time. His proxy is John R. Todd, who enforces an iron structure: all participating architects – heavyweights like Wallace Harrison included – work side by side for five years, day after day, in a single building, with no parallel life. Sounds like coercion, but for Koolhaas it is the actual secret formula: density. That he picks Rockefeller Center of all things is no coincidence – it is one of the central objects of his 1978 classic Delirious New York. An anecdote that audibly amused the room: on a study trip to late-1920s Soviet Russia, the Rockefeller architects encountered Konstantin Melnikov's never-realised Sonata of Sleep – a sleeping facility for exhausted workers with sloped floors, ambient soundscapes and control booths regulating temperature, humidity and a "cocktail" of oxygen, ozone and laughing gas. Transplanted straight to Manhattan, the same air mixtures landed shortly afterwards in the auditorium of Radio City Music Hall. From Soviet wellness concept to capitalist entertainment in two years. Without the pressure of the Rockefeller contract, Koolhaas argued, this transfer would have been "barely conceivable."
Second case: Lagos, Nigeria, 1970s.
Architects from what was then Yugoslavia, representatives of the Non-Aligned Movement, build large projects in West Africa under turnkey contracts. A contract form frowned upon in the Western architecture world because it hands the general contractor all the power. But the Belgrade colleagues used precisely this structure to their advantage: once the lump sum was set, the client had no further leverage. The result is the Lagos Trade Fair – 350 hectares, hexagonal pavilions, designed by the Serbian architect Zoran Bojović for Energoprojekt between 1973 and 1977. The hexagonal geometry, and this is the fascinating part, traced back, according to Bojović, to maps he had asked schoolchildren in Kano to draw for him, plus research into local vernacular architecture. Modernism on an African foundation. That Koolhaas cites this building of all things has biographical depth: his own Lagos research project from the early 2000s, carried out within the Harvard Project on the City series, was what first brought Bojović's work back into Western architectural discourse. By their own self-understanding, Koolhaas added with a fine smile, the Belgrade colleagues were no longer communists after their African experience but had become "real socialists."
Third case: Miami, 2026.
A villa on one of the artificial islands between the city and Miami Beach. Sounds simple, isn't. The plot: one of dozens of near-identical lots, each with pool, lagoon and ocean access. The rising sea level, which calls the entire island into question on a visible horizon: no official topic of conversation. And then there is the contract with reality. Iranian marble: unobtainable due to sanctions. Polycarbonate from Israel: politically blocked. Wood from Ukraine: war. Plywood for formwork: scarce. Workers who are regularly taken away at night by ICE. Add the Red Sea crisis, the Panama Canal drought, US punitive tariffs. Koolhaas laid out the construction schedule like a geopolitical weather map. Every morning, he said, begins with "a series of drastic surprises that have to be improvised." A villa as a stress test for the world system.
The end of the lecture was not a summary but a forecast. Koolhaas sketched a map: America would withdraw into an "autonomous situation," Asia – China, Japan, Korea – would increasingly cooperate among themselves, with a "complicated zone" in between.
And then the line that stayed: Europe and Africa would work together more closely – and Africa could, "in an ultimate irony," become the zone of stability. A punchline that gained additional resonance the next day: on the same stage, Tosin Oshinowo, Nigerian architect and curator of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023, spoke about contemporary African architecture and urbanism. The Salone curators did not schedule that by accident.
Three contracts, three eras – and the shared finding that contracts are by no means merely economic instruments but social and political ones. They force different actors into rooms in which something third can emerge, something none of them could have thought up alone. For the manufacturers, specifiers and operators who, in the subsequent panel discussion, spoke about their own friction zones, this was more than art-historical preamble. It was a reminder that what is currently being negotiated in concrete terms in the contract business – alliances, specification routines, general-contractor structures, lifecycle responsibility – has its own long history. And its own politics.
When Porro and Gianotten subsequently presented the masterplan, the rows had already noticeably thinned. Koolhaas had filled the room. And he had emptied it again.