Rem Koolhaas stands on the ironic horns of a dillema. The media, especially US media, treats him as a starchitect, and his practice benefits from the perquisites of being a celebrity, and on the other hand his art philosophy is built on being an anti-individualist, anti-auteur, anti-French utopian. As Rene Daalder says in A kind of Architect about his early cinematic collabs with Ren "It was all about how eveybody is an auteur."
Considering this, A kind of Architect is a good documentary when it bypasses the subject and almost too vague to understand when it directly interviews (or uses archival footage) of Rem. The interviews with Rem are the least informative, It's almost like Interviews with the people in OMA, as one interviewee points out, is like interviewing different parts in Rem's head. A better documentary would have totally ignored Rem and only interviewed the ideas in his head, with the light out.
Considering this, A kind of Architect is a good documentary when it bypasses the subject and almost too vague to understand when it directly interviews (or uses archival footage) of Rem. The interviews with Rem are the least informative, It's almost like Interviews with the people in OMA, as one interviewee points out, is like interviewing different parts in Rem's head. A better documentary would have totally ignored Rem and only interviewed the ideas in his head, with the light out.
