It is warm, but Rem Koolhaas wants to sit in the sun, so we walk past the palm tree shadows and into Stanford’s quad. The architect is as tall and slim as a palm-tree trunk, almost too slender; his shoulder blades press sharp against a navy-blue sweater. 

“So, what are you disrupting?” Koolhaas asks me. He is 70, with a reputation for brusqueness, but when he smiles, he looks like a child. He’s just returned from a meeting with a tech mega firm, another stop on his Silicon Valley tour. Eventually, the moguls may know him. For now, I’d hazard that few do. Silicon Valley is not known for its architecture or architecture lovers.

Elsewhere, of course, Koolhaas is known. He may be the most important architect of his generation — the Pritzker Prize is the least of it — and a prominent urban theorist, too. Much of what he builds looks improbable. The China Central Television building, which opened in 2012 in Beijing, looks like a steel-and-glass Möbius strip. Renderings for the Taipei Performing Arts Center show a giant metal sphere growing out of a boxy building, a suspended sculpture to sit in. Under his direction, New York’s Prada store became an auditorium, too, a place to play and display.......Continue Reading

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