{"id":58996,"date":"2016-04-04T10:08:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T10:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metropolismag.com\/projects\/amid-zero-protest-oma-netherlands-dance-theater-meets-end\/"},"modified":"2022-03-11T20:37:18","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T20:37:18","slug":"amid-zero-protest-oma-netherlands-dance-theater-meets-end","status":"publish","type":"metro_viewpoint","link":"https:\/\/metropolismag.com\/viewpoints\/amid-zero-protest-oma-netherlands-dance-theater-meets-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Amid Zero Protest, OMA’s Netherlands Dance Theater Meets Its End"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Netherlands Dance Theater, the first major project built by Rem Koolhaas, was demolished earlier this year to very little note in the architectural press. It was a strangely hushed finale for a building that had drawn immediate praise when it opened in September 1987 and earned the esteem of dance audiences, performers, and architects during its relatively short existence. At the behest of The Hague municipal authorities, who plan to build a much larger performing arts center on its former site, bulldozers reduced the theater<\/a> (known locally as the NDT) to debris between October 2015 and January 2016.<\/p>\n Koolhaas learned conclusively that the building was being demolished only after the process was already under way last fall, but he had heard the first rumors a decade ago. He\u2019d been prepared for such news, he says, and his firm, OMA in Rotterdam, quickly commissioned the photographer Hans Werlemann to make regular documentary visits to the NDT site and photograph the demolition process until the building was razed. (Werlemann had shot the NDT\u2019s construction some three decades prior.)<\/p>\n What Koolhaas did not expect was the indifference that followed. \u201cThere was almost nothing, almost zero,\u201d he reflects about the public response to the NDT\u2019s fate. The few enraged calls for a cessation to the demolition or tearful eulogies have mostly come from OMA employees or the firm\u2019s close associates. \u201cIt has been very surprising,\u201d he says, that the destruction of the NDT was not a more contested issue. \u201cThat element of surprise has in a way preempted a feeling of tragedy or loss.\u201d<\/p>\n Preservationist advocacy is often waged at a fever pitch, but Koolhaas has emerged as the discipline\u2019s most insightful commentator and unorthodox practitioner, in part by striking a less histrionic tone\u2014even as the NDT was being bulldozed. The architect has lectured and written on preservation for over a decade, and his office produced an exhibition on the topic, Cronocaos<\/em><\/a>, for the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, documenting the impulse to landmark increasingly newer buildings. (It later traveled to the New Museum in New York.) In 2014, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University published Preservation Is Overtaking Us<\/em><\/a>, a collection of Koolhaas\u2019s lectures on the subject at the school, complete with a preservationist \u201cretroactive manifesto\u201d written by associate professor Jorge Otero-Pailos, in the vein of Koolhaas\u2019s 1978 Delirious New York<\/em>. The text sought to establish preservation as a radical function of architectural design, not, as so many architects had previously claimed, its stultifying opposite. \u201cThe hegemonic paradigm is that architecture is about new construction,\u201d explains Otero-Pailos. Yet in his lectures, Koolhaas insisted that new forms were not necessarily more relevant than what had already been built; moreover, preservation could be architecture\u2019s salvation\u2014an alternative to the expressive form-making that had become derided as starchitecture. \u201cRem made a huge pivot,\u201d notes Otero-Pailos, nearly two years after the slim volume was published, \u201cwhich was in a way totally unexpected and almost baffling to most people because the person who had for so long represented the idea of the signature building, the new construction, the large development\u2014all of a sudden, he was able to grasp the need for a conceptual change.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is some irony in the fact that OMA completed its two most preservation-oriented projects yet\u2014the Fondazione Prada in Milan<\/a> and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a> in Moscow\u2014mere months before the\u00a0firm was unable to save a significant early building of its own. Both projects capitalize on the fundamentally generic nature of the existing architecture that they supplement and expand upon, creating new buildings by reframing extant elements into something altogether more exceptional. The NDT was never a banal or standard structure, and this same approach would hardly have sufficed in The Hague. Yet preservationist work readied Koolhaas for the destructive alternative. \u201cI\u2019ve been intellectually prepared for something like that to happen,\u201d he explained two months into the demolition process. His rhetoric is far removed from the pained pique expressed by many architects faced with a similar undoing of their work\u2014for instance, the distraught pathos of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien at MoMA\u2019s sensational destruction of the American Folk Art Museum<\/a> in 2014. \u201cIf I would invest in regret,\u201d Koolhaas remarked during a public conversation about the first decade of his practice in November 2015, \u201cI think it [would be] a very conservative position. I definitely don\u2019t see myself as a victim of this development.\u201d<\/p>\nFor a decade the building was threatened with razing, which was finally initiated in October 2015. OMA commissioned photographer Hans Werlemann to document the demolition site.<\/h4>\n
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