Rem Kolhass

Ng, Jeffrey Cheuk Hai
1000966074
Erica Kim
10th February 2016
ARC239 H1 S
Article Review

In this essay, we will review “Bigness or the problem of Large” in Rem Koolhass and Bruce Mau book of “ Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large”. This essay explores how “bigness” in architecture be affected in the modern development of architecture, how it changes the formation of a good building and how its performance will affect architecture itself. This book is one of the most influential books in the architecture field, beside bigness, this book also record most of the projects in Rem Koolhass’s career. Also this book also includes a lot of different innovative plans to architecture, and also urban planning. “Bigness” in this part of the book were presented
While writing this book Rem Koolhass just completed a “8.5 million square foot development of shopping, offices, parking, hotels, housing, and a train station, for which the firm served as master planners.” (Koolhaas critiques bigness., P. 81)I think this project triggers he thought of “Bigness” and how will it affects the future generation of architecture. But “Bigness” is not that straight forward. It does not only mean height, width, mass and volume. “Bigness” is a term that only works in a comparison, it can be interpreted as the impact towards the area while comparable with other buildings of the city. “Bigness” can also be the height of the building such as the CN tower in Toronto.Ontario, while other buildings are not as tall as it, even while the shorter one has a larger site than the taller one but most people where attracted by the taller building. I think “Bigness” in this case is meaning when a building become a landmark to the place. In other case, like projects that connects different parts of the city or it expanded into pieces that combines with the urban forms, and connected with pedestrian bridges, it can also be “big”, this project is “big” not because of how big does the structure occupies, but the scale of the entire network of
Rem Koolhass brings a new explanation of it to guide the new architecture. Scale is still a very important topic in architecture and where architects get inspired from, there are projects which architects used a lot of different approaches to achieve “bigness” in their projects. In the next essay, I would like to use the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, Korea by Zaha Hadid Architects; Learning Hub (The Hive) in Singapore by Heatherwick Studio and also Yokohama International Passenger Terminal by Foreign Office Architects (FOA). All these projects presents “Bigness” in a very different way which not only big in size but also concern about the expansion of projects. In the first project, Zaha used the contrasts in the shapes of the city fabric of Seoul to contrast with shapes of her project. And in the second project, Heatherwick repeated circles to build up the Leaning Hub, this forms the circulation of pedestrians inside the building while letting users to enjoy a half indoor and half outdoor experience. And in the last projects, the FOA created a continues surface for the project to make users experience the scale difference of architecture and human. All these projects represents a new approach to modern architecture which makes it different to the older ones and further develop the idea of