Rem, Rem, Rem. Vroom vroom. It more or less starts with the name.

Whether or not it's a real name is not a graceful question. If he didn't start out as Rem Koolhaas that's what he's become. 'Rem Koolhaas' is the perfect improbable name for the designer of the Congrexpo, the H-Project, and the Educatorium.

Credentials:

Rem Koolhaas is remarkable because he appointed himself a star architect. He's slipped into architecture through the servants' entrance, as the author of a provocative and entertaining book called Delirious New York in 1978, later as the head of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, or OMA, which is a sleek euronym but also Dutch for 'grandmother'.

(You might pause and ask, so, is Rem an architect, really? Yes, he's a trained architect. But even if he hadn't been, there's no law that top architects have to draw, or contribute to their name-brand office in any way. Not much separates them from con men or fashion designers or CEO's. The things you remember about Psycho were the work of Saul Bass, not Hitchcock, and the things you remember about the Auditorium Building were the work of Kristian Schneider, not Louis Sullivan.)

So anyway. Either way, it's Rem's signature on such culinary delights as the Seattle Public Library (under construction here in April 2003), the McCormick Tribune Campus Center at the famously user-hostile IIT campus in Chicago, and the Dutch Embassy in Berlin. Koolhaus is equally famous for not building the LACMA canopy, and for not building an entire airport/shopping city-state island off the Dutch coast. How exhausting it must be, not building so much.

After a full investigation into the buildings and the not-buildings, even an energetic prosecutor has to finally give up and admit that Koolhaas is a good citizen, a perfectly competent architect, occasionally brilliant, with an unusual interest for attending to users and architectural context. Koolhaas cares about programming and he does his research. In mad reams and volumes the research spews out of OMA and Harvard. It's impossible to be angry at Koolhaas when you read that he went to the trouble of doing anthropometric measurements on his clients for private houses (specifically, measuring the eye height of the wife of the Bordeaux house, calculating her site lines from the bathtub and the bed, and placing the portholes exactly in line).

Crimes:

When he talks he gives me a headache, that's the main problem.

The books - especially S M L XL - give me a headache because I always get a headache looking at collages and collisions and other McLuhanesque graphic strategies for making it appear that there's more information than there really is. This technique suggests many, many things and in the end says nothing in particular, or close to nothing, or maybe less than nothing, but says one thing over all: "I can't communicate very well." (Or it says, "I took acid and ate a stack of Wired magazines.")

The Harvard Design School books (the shopping books and Great Leap Forward) are irritating precisely because there is valuable, diligently compiled research presented in the form of a three-ring kit, a satanic experiment in interactive publishing. Of course in S M L XL there's lots of talk about those OMA projects that never got built, and a great deal of theoretical unclarification. Hey, that's show biz.

He's had his share of bad ideas, like his proposed EU flag. So what. The worst thing you can say about his buildings is that they're too much about ambiguity and disorder to exhibit much serenity.

Is Rem doing the right thing, doing a back-breaking amount of original research for every project, investigating the pace of building in the Pearl River Delta, goading architects about their relevance, trying to refine the profession and keep OMA in business at the same time? Yes, your honor, he is. He's actually doing a marvelous job.

Case dismissed.

Rem Koolhaas was awarded the Pritzker for the year 2000.