Koolhaas Finding Freedoms: Operative Critique; Obsolete Critique

Abstract

This essay examines the search for freedoms that Rem Koolhaas announced retroactively in 1992. By examining two side-notes appeared in S,M,L,X's glossary liberating and liberator, the essay extracts Koolhaas main tools to finding freedoms, and delves into their implications. Firstly, the essay reconstructs the idea of paradox of freedom by analyzing the term liberating. Insofar as it works as a relation between structure and freedom, the essay argues that Koolhaas uses this paradox as projective and operative tool that is transversal to his work. Secondly, the article reconstructs the idea of 'operative critique' as a tool for finding freedoms. By analyzing the term liberator, this operative critique appears on two levels: for architecture, which generates the possibility of normalizing contradictory architectural programs, and for the architect, who is liberated from burdensome moral convictions. Ultimately, the article questions the validity and relevance of Koolhaas's operative critique as an effective tool for individual liberation: it collects criticisms that evidence the scarce liberating potential invested in his work, and, by analyzing the behavioral strategies used at the Prada Epicenter (1999), it spatially locates the extemporaneity of such emancipatory discourses