Rem Koolhaas

By the end of the 1980's a new architectural sensibility challenged the prevailing post-Modern attitude and brought forth new and daring designs. Driven by the philosophy and theory of Jacques Derrida, the architects of Deconstructivism are rooted in a movement that urges us to examine the space we move through. Deconstructivist Architects documents explosive and seemingly chaotic structures from Vienna to L.A., and interviews those who pursue its aesthetic issues. Filmed on location with the architects and at the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, which was curated by Philip Johnson.

An iconoclastic first film from the headstrong teenagers of the 1,2,3 Group, who took turns to write, direct, and star in a series of irreverent skits.

This project has been developed by documentary filmmaker Bretje van der Haak and designer Silke Wawro in close collaboration with architect Rem Koolhaas, photographer Edgar Cleine, and the Harvard Project on the City. The concept and scenario for Lagos Wide & Close was developed by Van der Haak and Wawro during a masterclass of the Sandberg Institute and Dutch Cultural Media Fund in 2003 and produced by Submarine. The interactive film presents a selection of video and audio of Lagos recorded in 2001. It separates the distant - wide - and the intimate - close - views of the city enabling the viewer to switch between these perspectives interactively. Rather than following a dramatic storyline, it aims to bring the viewer close to the reality of what it means to live and work in Lagos, to move alongside bus driver Olawole Busayo and other Lagosians, and to delve into the city's layered fabric, slowly making sense of the rules, the possibilities, and lifestyles of Lagos.

Architecture is often seen from the outside, as an inanimate object represented in still imagery. ‘REM’ exposes the human experience of architecture through dynamic film.

A man visits his girlfriend in Amsterdam after the war. He soon finds himself, for inexplicable reasons, in a country house where two women as 'white slaves' have to learn all kinds of erotic skills, and where a private detective, who has sold his own wife to an Arab in Tangier, comes to investigate.

An international tech entrepreneur with a fondness for architecture asks Rem Koolhaas to build a house on an impossibly small piece of mountainside in Zell am See in Austria. The architect of the celebrated book S,M,L,XL seizes the challenge: how to draw light into a house less than four metres wide that is mostly underground? Photographer and filmmaker Frans Parthesius followed the building process and offers insight into Koolhaas’s way of working and the special relationship with his client.

Rarely has an architect caused as much sensation outside of the architecture community as Rem Koolhaas. His outstanding creations such as the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the Seattle Library, the Casa da Musica concert hall in Porto, and the Guggenheim Heritage Museum in Las Vegas are working examples of the Dutchman's visionary theories about architecture and urban society. "Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect" is an engaging portrait of a visionary man, which takes us to the heart of his ideas. The filmmakers have made a visually inventive thought provoking portrait of the architect, prompting Rem Koolhaas to state "it's the only film about me that I have liked."

A successful young writer is in search of his true destiny. Is it the life with his wife and typewriter in Amsterdam or the offers to go to the dreamworld of the Italian film city Cinecittà which is luring him? Trying to find this out he goes into retreat in the house of a befriended gay couple in the south of France.