OMA (1975), triptych, Boompjes Tower Slab, 1982. Colour silkscreen print, 716 × 1216 mm. Silkscreener: Bernard Ruygrok. Source: Drawing Matter

‘It was OMA’s first retroactive concept.’ ¹ Rem Koolhaas / Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (Rotterdam: 010 publishers, 1995), 543 In S,M,L,XL Rem Koolhaas presents the design study for a high-rise structure at Boompjes in Rotterdam as key project of his early years as a professional architect. Obviously, the key to this key project is the term ‘retroactive’ which links it with Delirious New York published just one year before the Boombjes study. ² Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) It is well known that the book has worked (and probably still works) as a kind of stone quarry of creative ideas, methods and techniques for Koolhaas and his office team; the ‘grid’, the ‘skyscraper theorem’, ‘Bigness’ or the Paranoic-Critical-Method are introduced and adopted as design concepts, and so is ‘retroactive’ – which even directly refers to the book’s subtitle, A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. However, if we look at the term’s common meaning (‘to take effect at a date in the past’ ³ Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1995), 871 ) it seems to be clear what a ‘Retroactive Manifesto’ might be: rewriting the history of a city in order to unveil certain (unconscious) desires, ideas, theories. ⁴ It does not necessarily mean: inventing the history of a city anew. But this is already one of the troubling theoretical questions. But how does an architectural design take effect at a date in the past? And why should Koolhaas be interested in the past rather than in the future?

There are technical and theoretical answers to it. Rem Koolhaas – the former scriptwriter – uses writing as a crucial technique within the design process. ⁵ Rem Koolhaas’ writings are characterised as ‘unique quality’ of his work. See as substitute for many others: Véronique Patteeuw (ed.), Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. What is OMA?, (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2003) In order to ‘subvert any narrow definition of architecture’ it is supposed to be a ‘critical discipline’ and a ‘literary activity’ too. ⁶ Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Franziska Bollerey, ‘…immer wieder eine Mischung von Verführung und Ungenießbarkeit ins Spiel bringen’, Bauwelt 17/18 (1987), 628, 633  For almost all design projects he creates plots – dramas, fairy tales, diary notes et cetera – which interweave contextual facts and myths that often go beyond architecture. They involve imaginary processes of all kinds as well as activities and desires of real persons, among them also the architect himself. These carefully knotted stories make no distinction between the narrative material of architecture and that of people – both are presented as equal ‘actors’ – so that the design at the same time provides a new interpretation of context and past and appears to be the logical ‘happy ending’ of the tale. In Koolhaas’ words: ‘The words liberate the design. Our best and most inventive projects are emerged from a rather literary conception, from which the whole program is derived.’ ⁷ Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Nikolaus Kuhnert, Philipp Oswalt and Alejandro Zaera Polo, ‘Die Entfaltung der Architektur’, 117 ARCH+ (June 1993), 33 Hence, it seems to be necessary to learn the story in order to understand the ‘retroactive concept’ of the architecture.

The Design and Its Story

But the story is not simply about the (hi)story of architecture. When the Boompjes design was shown at the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the MoMA in 1988, the two curators, Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, focused on the story of formal language. For them, the design consists of a row of five towers with different angles in section ‘distorted by a slab’. ⁸ Philip Johnson / Mark Wigley (eds.), Deconstructivist Architecture, catalog, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 46  Towers and slab are references to Rotterdam’s modernist post-war period but the way they deviate to and from each other seems to ridicule modernist architecture at the same time. On the other hand this ‘struggle’ creates unexpected gaps – narrow or wide views of the river Maas – and irregular floor layouts for the apartments and the various public facilities such as kindergarten, school, hotel, health center, swimming pool on the top. The design’s formal instability apparently represents the office’s critical position towards modernism, but where is the ‘retroactive concept’?

Approaching retroactivity asks for a careful reading of the accompanying text. ⁹ We refer here to the version which was published in S,M,L,XL. Rem Koolhaas / Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, op. cit., 518-543 It consists of 14 scenes that explicate the violent and ambivalent history of Rotterdam’s city centre since 1940 (the German destruction of the centre during the Second World War and the following see-saw of approval and disapproval of modernist architecture that filled the centre afterwards). It also introduces the architect himself who was invited in 1979 by a city councillor to choose a site and to develop a study based on his insights from Delirious New York. However, the 14 scenes are not chronologically ordered. They even jump constantly between the tenses (simple present, simple past, present perfect) and accordingly switch the narrative perspectives. Obviously, this temporal back and forth seems to have a secret relationship with the spatial ‘zig-zag’ organisation of OMA’s high-rise design proposal, and it leads us towards a better understanding of retroactivity.

The text focuses on the specific context of the chosen site – a no-man’s land wedged between the river Maas, a canal and Boompjes, a major road – where the architectural and the political past have been inseparately interwoven and have created a complicated ‘psychic volume’. The German bombs left a ‘three-kilometer crater’ in the city that according to Koolhaas was the precondition to rebuild the centre with modernist architecture. He does not use the word ‘trauma’ but he makes clear that from the planners’ perspective the memory of the deadly bombardment needed to be repressed. As a reflex the city’s planning strategies since then have oscillated between visionary power and small-minded ‘humanist’ approaches. One of these undertakings was the replacement of the 19th century Willemsbrug (a bridge across the Maas nearby the chosen site) by a new one (built in 1981). Instead of crossing the Maas and entering the city straightforward the new bridge makes several ‘inexplicable’ 90°-turns which for Koolhaas proved the powerless politics of the Eighties: ‘politics, no longer able simply impose its will, surrenders to real and imagined resistance…’ ¹⁰ Rem Koolhaas / Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, op. cit., 521 However, since OMA’s final design for Boompjes also included a sixth tower – a steel box girder of the old Willemsbrug that should be erected upright as ‘utilitarian’ monument – for Koolhaas ‘suddenly’ the just criticised impotence of Rotterdam’s politics turned into ‘genius’: ‘Unintentionally, the politicians had designed a major urban experience: … The absurd trajectory created a predictable sequence of perception – an early unfolding, an accordion movement that made the composition of “towerslab” infinitely dynamic.’ ¹¹ Ibid., 540  Now we are able to understand what a retroactive design concept might be since here the story reaches its paradoxical summit: The reason for the earlier event – the city planners’ decision to create a ‘zig-zag’ course of the new bridge – was the later event – OMA’s design scheme – that finally recognises it. The cause was produced in the aftermath of its effects, or shortly: A comes after B. There is an axonometric view of the whole area which visualises that magical moment. We only see the relevant buildings – the new Willemsbrug, the erected box girder of the old bridge and OMA’s ‘towerslab’ – and above them the ‘unintentionally’ created ‘sequence of perception’ (obviously from a car driver’s perspective) which floats like a choreographed swarm of birds in the sky. But oddly enough and as if they liked to point out that there is something almost illegitimate going on: the buildings’ shadows drop in the wrong direction (towards South).

Nachträglichkeit

Despite the drawing’s surreal atmosphere the retroactive story has a temporal logic. It is created in the Future Perfect: something will have been! Koolhaas’ literary design technique not only takes effect at the past, it also might be understood as ‘return from the future’. In a late review of Delirious New York Frances Hsu realised that Koolhaas’ use of the term ‘retroactive’ might be linked to Sigmund Freud’s trauma concept of Nachträglichkeit which in short means that a traumatic event will be registered only through a later event that gives meaning to it. ¹² Frances Hsu, Review of Delirious New York, Journal of Architectural Education 64, Issue 2 (March 2011), 69-70 Hsu refers to Hal Foster who has broadened Freud’s concept and has introduced it into art history. ¹³ Hal Foster, The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass/London: MIT Press, 1996) Even though the English standard edition of Freud’s oeuvre translates Nachträglichkeit with ‘deferred action’ instead of ‘retroactivity’ or ‘afterwardsness’ the argument seems plausible. ¹⁴ James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966) Nachträglichkeit explains the specific temporality of retroaction since it can be seen ‘as consisting of two inseparable phases, of anticipation and retrospection’. ¹⁵ Haydée Faimberg, ‘Après-coup’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86 (2005), 2

However, Nachträglichkeit is a concept that has provoked many debates. ¹⁶ The far-reaching consequences cannot be discussed here. Since in 1953 Jacques Lacan (later Jean Laplanche and Jacques Derrida) revealed its radicality it has become controversially discussed among psychoanalysists, philosophers and also historians who argued in favour of its complex temporality to overcome traditional historicist methods. (It is also popular in film theories.) One of the key issues is the question whether Nachträglichkeit is a ‘determinstic’ or a ‘hermeneutic’ model as Laplanche has put it. The deterministic model supposes that the retroactively constructed material ‘is causally and directly related to the factual reality of a past event […]. The hermeneutic model supposes that the material […] is only a subjective construction from the present which [becomes] projected back in time.’ ¹⁷ Nicholas Ray, Tragedy and Otherness. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis (Bern: Peter Lang 2009), 35-36 The problem has been brought up by Freud himself who discovered that it was the memory that caused the trauma and not the original event: ‘We invariably find that memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action.’ ¹⁸ Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, in: James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition, op. cit., 356 Hence, the meaning of events does not lie in themselves, but is rather dependent on the contextual systems that confer meaning to them.

When we read the last but one sentence of Koolhaas’ plot for the Boompjes study – ‘It was OMA’s first retroactive concept, the beginning of an exhausting bombardment [sic!] of idealization with which we tried to maintain a marginal advantage vis-à-vis our own increasing revulsion.’ ¹⁹ Rem Koolhaas / Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, op. cit., 543 –, we certainly might label OMA’s concept as ‘hermeneutic’. It seems as if Koolhaas even constructed an instable psychic situation in order to almost omnipotentially control the opposed temporality of the design process. Naturally, this subjective constructivism evokes criticism. For example William Saunders reproached Koolhaas for constantly ‘overreading’ reality whenever it does not match with his poetic ambitions. Despite the many references to psychological conditions Koolhaas missed the ‘otherness’. ²⁰ William Saunders, ‘Rem Koolhaas‘ Writing on Cities: Poetic Perception and Gnomic Fantasy’, Journal of Architectural Education 51 (Sep. 1997), 66-69

Obviously, this is the core of Koolhaas’ technique of ‘writing’ the design process: it treats the material reality of architecture as if it was an element of a symbolic reality. In particular modernist architecture seems to be less a material heritage but rather a sign system simply consisting of towers, slabs, boxes (signifiers) expecting manipulations. Looking again at the presentation of OMA’s Boompjes study in S,M,L,XL, in scenes 8, 9, 10 and 11 we see them as typical rough styrofoam models that successively become meaningful by a cinematographical layout that lets them perform like the Rockettes ballet in Delirious New York. Scene after scene we follow the architects in their panic search for the perfect shape, a play that demonstrates the design of architecture as endless narcissistic activity. Indeed, the other is repressed, but: the plot and the images are published in order to be read by others. The circular logic of Koolhaas’ ‘hermeneutic’ model, where the designs are the story that caused the effects in the past, includes (unconsciously or not) the criticism by transference. We – readers, spectators, analysts? – are invited to nachträglich create meaning to the blank models and their ‘enigmatic message’. We become context – and from here the story might start again.

1. Rem Koolhaas / Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (Rotterdam: 010 publishers, 1995), 543
2. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
3. Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1995), 871
4. It does not necessarily mean: inventing the history of a city anew. But this is already one of the troubling theoretical questions.
5. Rem Koolhaas’ writings are characterised as ‘unique quality’ of his work. See as substitute for many others: Véronique Patteeuw (ed.), Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. What is OMA?, (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2003)
6. Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Franziska Bollerey, ‘…immer wieder eine Mischung von Verführung und Ungenießbarkeit ins Spiel bringen’, Bauwelt 17/18 (1987), 628, 633
7. Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Nikolaus Kuhnert, Philipp Oswalt and Alejandro Zaera Polo, ‘Die Entfaltung der Architektur’, 117 ARCH+ (June 1993), 33
8. Philip Johnson / Mark Wigley (eds.), Deconstructivist Architecture, catalog, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 46
9. We refer here to the version which was published in S,M,L,XL. Rem Koolhaas / Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, op. cit., 518-543
10. Rem Koolhaas / Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, op. cit., 521
11. Ibid., 540
12. Frances Hsu, Review of Delirious New York, Journal of Architectural Education 64, Issue 2 (March 2011), 69-70
13. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass/London: MIT Press, 1996)
14. James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966)
15. Haydée Faimberg, ‘Après-coup’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86 (2005), 2
16. The far-reaching consequences cannot be discussed here.
17. Nicholas Ray, Tragedy and Otherness. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis (Bern: Peter Lang 2009), 35-36
18. Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, in: James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition, op. cit., 356
19. Rem Koolhaas / Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, op. cit., 543
20. William Saunders, ‘Rem Koolhaas‘ Writing on Cities: Poetic Perception and Gnomic Fantasy’, Journal of Architectural Education 51 (Sep. 1997), 66-69