The Architecture Foundation’s headline lecture and trans-disciplinary meeting of minds this year sees architect Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota.

The AF’s headline lecture and trans-disciplinary meeting of minds this year sees Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota. An exciting opportunity to witness two of the most influential figures in contemporary culture meet to discuss architecture, art, the creative city, and more. The conversation will be chaired by Mark Rappolt, Editor, Art Review.

After a brief presentation of twenty minutes each, Rem Koolhaas, intelligent and bright, discusses about excess museums found throughout the world, including the Guggenheim effect, and Nicholas Serota explains how to be a museum, in his view, how to expose a art work and its different typologies from John Soane to the Tate Modern, and explains why the project by Herzog & de Meuron was the winner.

Following the presentation they went on to develop their ideas in an interesting dialogue for nearly fifty minutes, not without some tensions and mutual criticism, where you can see Koolhaas little less relaxed than usual and Nicholas Serota theatrical and stereotyped. The exciting match ended with audience participation (do not understand why in these interventions there is always someone in the audience that seeks to give a lecture) to complete the hour and a half that it lasted the event.

With building projects underway at both Tate Britain and Tate Modern, this is a time of architectural innovation for Nicholas Serota and the organisation as a whole. Tate’s plans will provide world-leading new spaces for art, performance and learning, beginning with the opening of the Oil Tanks in summer 2012. These developments respond directly to the changing position of the museum in a globally and technologically connected world.

“The forces that are changing the world are challenging the role of museums. Our world is different, even compared with 20 years ago: the advance of globalization, increasing cultural diversity, technological and personal mobility has had an impact on the world we address.”

Sir Nicholas Serota, The Art Newspaper, 2010

With an aim to make Tate Modern an ever more dynamic arena for new ideas and thought, interdisciplinary collaborations and international perspectives, Serota will no doubt have much to discuss with Koolhaas, who has based his long and successful career engaging and giving form to these issues himself – through built projects and a prodigious published output.

“Maybe, architecture doesn't have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything - a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything.”

Rem Koolhaas, Content, 2004

Sir Nicholas Andrew Serota (born 27 April 1946) is a British art curator. Serota was director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, before becoming director of the Tate, the United Kingdom's national gallery of modern and British art in 1988. He was awarded a knighthood in 1999. He has been the chairman of the Turner Prize jury. He was the driving force behind the creation of Tate Modern, which opened in 2000.

Mr. Rem Koolhaas. Biography below.

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Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944. He began his career as a journalist, working for the Haagse Post, and as a set-designer in the Netherlands and Hollywood. He beganHe frequented the Architectural Association School in London and studied with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University. In 1978, he wrote Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, which has become a classic of contemporary architectural theory. In 1975 – together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp – he founded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture).

The most important works by Koolhaas and OMA, from its foundation until the mid-1990s, include the Netherlands Dance Theatre at The Hague, the Nexus Housing at Fukuoka in Japan, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais of Euralille and Lille, the Villa dall’Ava, the Très Grande Bibliothèque, the Jussieu library in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Seattle Public Library.

Together with Koolhaas’s reflections on contemporary society, these buildings appear in his second book, S,M,L,XL (1995), a volume of 1376 pages written as though it were a “novel about architecture”. Published in collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer, Bruce Mau, the book contains essays, manifestos, cartoons and travel diaries.

In 2005, with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman, he was the founder to the prestigious Volume magazine, the result of a collaboration with Archis (Amsterdam), AMO and C-lab (Columbia University NY).

His built work includes the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Foundation Headquarters (2018), Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris (2018), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015/2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003). Current projects include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester.

Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and is a professor at Harvard University, where he directs The Project on the City, a research programme on changes in urban conditions around the world. This programme has conducted research on the delta of the Pearl River in China (entitled Great Leap Forward) and on consumer society (The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Taschen Verlag has published the results. Now is preparing a major exhibition for the Guggenheim museum to open in 2019 entitled Countryside: Future of the World.

Among the awards he has won in recent years, we mention here the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000), the Praemium Imperiale (2003), the Royal Gold Medal (2004) and the Mies Van Der Rohe prize (2005). In 2008, Time mentioned him among the 100 most influential people of the planet.

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