IT IS EARLY FEBRUARY. A European man in a baseball cap, overdressed in a warm jacket, walks through Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: the historical port to Mecca. Reinier de Graaf, a partner at superstar architecture firm OMA, comes to Saudi Arabia often these days—though not for any religious pilgrimage. He’s here to work on a biennale, jury an award for mosque architecture, and mop up any other opportunities to be found here.
“The Middle East is the region in the world where modernization currently runs its most unfettered course,” De Graaf says to me. De Graaf, who joined OMA in the 1990s and founded its research arm, AMO, is telling me about the diminished role that Europe plays on the world stage. I agree with him; so do Chinese friends who tell me that Saudi Arabia reminds them of China in 2008. Many Saudis I speak to, including women and minorities, refer to a palpable sense of progress that stands in contrast to the grim political outlooks of countries like Germany, the Netherlands, or the United States.
Europe, for its part, seems to have been decentered in a world where its leaders are not invited to meetings where Americans and Russians decide Europe’s future—in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, in the US—the superpower that underpinned it all and shaped a now-crumbling postwar world order—a staid, conservative establishment has gone haywire and is turning inward. It’s obvious that time is running out for a business model built on exporting Western visions. The world just doesn’t seem to need European auteurs as it once did. The old world lies in ruins, a new one still to be constructed. What’s a builder to do?
As the promise of globalization—or, at least, the centrality of Westerners within it—is called into question, the artists, designers, and architects who once chased interesting gigs worldwide are left wondering what’s next. Nativist politicians in mind, it would be tempting to call this deglobalization, but that’s not quite accurate. China is expanding its reach globally, opening for visa-free travel, and Saudi Arabia is gaining a new centrality. New York is still a world capital, but for all the wrong reasons: Donald Trump and finance. Globalization isn’t over; it’s just that the West may no longer be its protagonist.
For fifty years, the architects and thinkers of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture passed through the world’s different cities, planting the seeds that would, years later, germinate into the disjointed world we live in today. During the defining period of globalization—say, between China’s entry into the WTO and the first election of Trump—OMA managed to do what nearly every creative firm wanted to do: bring innovative ideas to the world, from Seattle to Beijing to Moscow, and make good money without compromising on a bold, auteuristic vision.
It was, after all, the “delirious New York” of the ’70s that inspired Rem Koolhaas to cofound the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975—the same Manhattan that sits at the genesis of Trump’s career. The playful lines of the CCTV (China Central Television) Headquarters, built by OMA in Beijing in 2008, are emblematic of that era in China (as the joke goes, that was Weimar-era Beijing, and we all know what came after Weimar). It’s from there that China’s state media apparatus beams messages out through China, Africa, and the world today.
In the mid-2000s, OMA had to make a choice: The firm could pitch either the new World Trade Center in New York or the CCTV Headquarters. By opting for Beijing, though, they opened themselves up to criticism from anxious American exceptionalists. In retrospect, the choice to make CCTV was historic—one of the seeds planted by OMA that may engender new ideas still. Koolhaas had written that China could easily “use its dominant position, the force of its numbers, its economic power, and its central government to lead the world into a digital future,” adding that “in communism, engineering has a high status, its laws resonating with Marxian wheels of history.” In 2014, Xi Jinping condemned its weird architecture; he probably dislikes the CCTV tower as much as its Western critics do. And for the same reason. The integrative project of an architecture that brought Chinese communism to the global conversation was seen as disruptive both for Chinese communists and liberals sitting in New York or Washington. It was the sort of compromise between communism and capitalism that made both sides uneasy.
In 2017, OMA began building Qatar’s National Library. Just consider: The emir of Qatar asked the firm for ideas about how to define and represent the country’s national identity. It was an echo of the globe-trotting proposals of years past. In books like Content (2004), OMA collected wild ideas of a culturally cross-pollinated future in which Europeans couldn’t compete, the built environment descended into “junkspace,” and Beijing was a superior revision of Manhattan’s cityscape. Shopping malls would become the public space of the future, and the social order of Dubai and Lagos would become regnant. The fiction of the architect as a solitary genius would go, and utopia as an idea would end. The book’s ideas are all the more remarkable in retrospect, because ChatGPT didn’t help come up with any of them; as a contemporary critic wrote, that book was “an attempt to illustrate the architect’s ambiguous relations with the forces of globalization, an account of seven years spent scouring the earth—not as business traveller or backpacker but as a vagabond.”
At various points, OMA suggested building a Berlin-style wall in London (1972, before the firm was officially founded); an infinitely unfolding, translucent library in Paris (1989); a vertical city, or “hyperbuilding,” for 120,000 people in Bangkok (1996); and a master plan for the disputed Spratly Islands (2006) in the South China Sea. These provocations were considered absurd at the time. The architects were in the vanguard, moving faster than capitalism itself. As artist Xu Bing told the New York Times in 2008, “now artists and the government are basically the same . . . both running with development.” OMA captured the zeitgeist. But now the season has shifted.
There’s a certain moment when a culture turns from aesthetic visions to political ruptures. Consider China in the ’30s, when an assistant librarian at Peking University turned into the warlord who became Chairman Mao. It feels like the current moment is one in which certain intellectuals could turn into warlords overnight. Today, the US government wants to annex Greenland, China is building a weird futuristic capital in a polluted prairie—the Xiong’an New Area—and the remaining source of great commissions for OMA, Saudi Arabia, is constructing NEOM to the tune of nine trillion dollars. Now our governments are more radical than our artists, who tag along behind asking the government to be careful, to consider unintended consequences. Only the worst go in for passionate collusion, like the architects who once proposed installing a hot-plate-like earthwork that would burn the feet of migrants as they attempted to cross Trump’s border wall.
No wonder the avant-garde is turning in on itself. As De Graaf told me: “I feel that the world is getting ahead of itself to such a degree that it is impossible to be ahead of anything. Radical, or ‘out of the box,’ thinking has become mainstream politics. In that context, maybe the only way for the architect to retain relevance is by being a radical voice of reason.” OMA—which tried (and failed) to bid on the construction of Tesla factories—was once architecture for Nietzscheans, beyond good and evil. It was perhaps easier to take that position when our governments were dedicated to good, even if they were hypocritical in that pursuit. Nowadays, it feels less like edgy rebellion to be beyond morality. What if we want to be virtuous and build something useful? That would be the real vanguard position in a world of nasty, opportunistic jerks.
Go East, young man, Koolhaas said, I read in some magazine or other. Reader: I listened. I was bored and annoyed by life in London and New York a generation ago. There, I would need to spend a lifetime’s salary on rent, making coffee for some self-important creative, pretending to keep up with circuitous debates—all while the world around us got more and more unequal. Middle-class life in the US wasn’t where the action was. Impatient in an arid time where everything seemed to be done already, I read about OMA’s adventures in Lagos and Asia and everywhere else with the voracious interest that, as a child, had led me to devour Tintin. And indeed, there is something analogous about the boy adventurer from Belgium who goes around the world solving mysteries and the intrepid Dutch architects who showed up in scary places like post-Soviet Moscow and, using little more than their intelligence, ended up meeting world leaders. So I applied to Strelka, the OMA-built research institute (2009) in Moscow that allowed Western urbanists to cosplay as Soviet technocrats, going around Maga-dan and imagining what we might build there. I was admitted—then the Russian winters gave me second thoughts. Soon, off I was to Shanghai.
In the modernist paradigm, it was the vanguards of culture—the artists, architects, musicians, and designers—who culled from the bleeding edges of the global economy and reimagined it as content for the middle classes to digest and understand. The shock of the new that great works gave us was a culmination of that process. Quite recently, however, that dynamic has been reversed. As capitalism has just effected a regime change within the United States, I wonder: Can culture really pave the way forward, or will it be structurally reactionary these next years, in the sense of being forced to react, rather than act? Are the arts still exciting, or are they just a refuge for those unable to intervene meaningfully in the face of war, cryptocurrency, and climate change? The question of OMA’s future seems tied to the broader uncertainty surrounding the future of a left-leaning, New York–to-Europe intellectual sphere in a world descending into tribal rivalries. For what is my ummah if not that vagabond consciousness produced for many generations in what we hesitate to call the West, and which OMA captured so brilliantly?
Architecture might have been a search for adventure, but we always told ourselves that we were pursuing utopia. When we spoke in Jeddah, I asked De Graaf about the moment in the Qur’an when paradise is regained. He answered that, despite our nostalgia about utopias, we don’t know what that is anymore. “I fear that the twenty-first century is yet to teach us the dangers of an absence of utopian thinking.” Perhaps the new task, then, is not to predict the future, but to intervene in the present. Not as prophets, but as strategists, pragmatists, and subversives within the system. And at the same time, read books, mind our gardens, raise our children, and wait for destruction to end—and build a new world.
Jacob Dreyer is an editor and writer focusing on the intersection of the Chinese political economy and science. He lives in Shanghai.
