REM KOOLHAAS, CHRIS DERCON, AND HANS ULRICH OBRIST, CO-DIRECTOR OF LONDON’S SERPENTINE GALLERY, SAT DOWN AT DUBAI’S EMIRATE TOWER HOTEL THIS SPRING TO DISCUSS THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT OF 032C’S HAUS DER KUNST COVER THEME – ONLY MOMENTS BEFORE KOOLHAAS BOARDED A PLANE FOR A DAY TRIP TO NEW DELHI.

DERCON: Whoever you talk to in the Gulf, like German ex-pat Michael Schindhelm, the commissioner of the Dubai Council for Arts and Culture, they will tell you that the Monarch, and only the Monarch, is making decisions. And there is this whole thing about waiting, everybody is waiting for some decision to be made – it’s like you are in the pipeline all the time, and I find that fascinating.

KOOLHAAS: It is a kind of randomness.

DERCON: What I would like to know is what these decisions, once they are made, are based on. I’m starting to think that the decision-making process is not only based on money, but on some politics we are not aware of or we are not yet able to understand. It must be some sort of politics of time.

OBRIST: Yes, what is exciting is that all these cultural institutions and dimensions that we have been working on and discussing over the past years will at some point all be realized. Rem, yesterday you announced this prompt approach about recycling what is already here or what has just been built: you will adapt an existing amphitheater into another cultural infrastructure. Yet we are used to always projecting cultural institutions into the far-fetched future.

KOOLHAAS: It was Schindhelm’s idea that there’s only so much talking you can do, and that one therefore needs to practice things and needs to have an immediacy so that something doesn’t always remain just a future plan. That also means talking to the government to establish hard facts on the ground.

DERCON: It is something we can learn from. We are also practicing this tactic with the critical reconstruction of the Haus der Kunst. It’s amazing that Schindhelm initiated that idea because it’s not glamorous – it is so radically modest, so un-Gulf. And it can only work when it’s incredibly precise, thus it can only work when it’s loaded with content, both retrospectively and prospectively. In general we have lost the capacity to reflect on what the recent past has achieved – and that is especially the case in the Gulf. And this is a real challenge for issues related to preservation: how interesting was the recent past, in terms of preservation? This fits into my obsession with the notion of a politics of time.

KOOLHAAS: The recent past is an important challenge. It’s not totally invisible but not entirely visible either.

DERCON: Yes, which makes the project involving the amphitheater so interesting – and at the same time so misplaced here.

KOOLHAAS: I think that the interesting thing is that Michael Schindhelm is from East Germany, which is of course a very good kind of memory bank.

OBRIST: And he basically came up with the idea that there needed to be an instantaneous institution – that it couldn’t wait. I am really curious as to how it’s going to work.

KOOLHAAS: The amphitheater was built in the ’70s, and the whole of Dubai is full of these stunning buildings.

DERCON: It’s so hard to figure out a chronology here.

KOOLHAAS: It’s actually even comical: Schindhelm’s mission was to make something iconic but the amphitheatre is something temporary.

DERCON: That also goes for your new Prada Museum: it was announced that Prada would give it a try for ten to fifteen years.

KOOLHAAS: Well it is also a combination of old and new buildings within the same complex. What is exciting is that we have convinced them to keep the Prada archive of clothes there, too. And that storage space for art works, as an essential component of the project – we are literally showing off and building with crates. So a graspable kind of memory-structure is at the core of the project.

DERCON: This is a new, savvy approach, to not build or project cultural infrastructure for a pretentious and uncontrollable eternity.

OBRIST: That is exactly one of the things we discussed in London when Julia Peyton-Jones and I were working on Rem’s pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery. The pavilion was designed as a dialogue of a “content machine” – which led to the London interview marathon. Very often with these longer-term buildings, such as museums, the architect gets completely disconnected from the content. For example, at the Kunsthalle in Rotterdam, from the outset there has been no link between the building and the content. So I was wondering if you are also going to be involved in the programming at the amphitheater?

KOOLHAAS: Well, yes, and also as an advisor to Michael Schindhelm. But I think the real beauty is that it’s a model of exacerbated difference. Everyone will define themselves in relation to what we realize, and then differentiate. And you get that kind of paradox in every domain. You get it in education, and in museums.

DERCON: In comparing the ideas for the Amphitheater with your ideas for the Hermitage and the Haus der Kunst, we must clearly state that we do not claim any kind of restoration or renovation principles as we know them, but rather pure reactivation.

KOOLHAAS: Remobilizing memory.

DERCON: Yes, reactivating and remobilizing memory. But how will it be perceived by the users?

KOOLHAAS: Well, it’s true that you probably have to design your own users as well, more and more. Because I think that the range of expectation is so narrow now. And the cynicism is unbelievable. If you compare what people expected from buildings twenty years ago with what they expect now, it’s like – it’s incredible.

DERCON: Yeah, but that applies to everything – to cars, to cups of coffee, and even to sex toys.

KOOLHAAS: I guess it’s a double-edged situation because there is no perception of those things anymore, in a very literal sense of the word. You can get away with a lot, and then to the extent that you need perception, you have to generate it yourself and provide an educational model to perceive.

DERCON: That is what the double-bind – almost a kind of entropy today when you look at glossy magazines – of architecture and design with media and publicity tries to achieve. I guess that is only a temporary situation, though; it only works up to a certain point. But that means that Hans Ulrich is completely right – you have to be incredibly aware as well as in control of the software, and thus the content, that a given design should generate. You can no longer afford to say, “I did this and now I am going to leave you working with it on your own.”

KOOLHAAS: No, no.

OBRIST: No, it’s an engagement! Now, yesterday during your presentation you described the project involving the amphitheater as “ridiculously modest.” How would you translate the concept of “ridiculously modest” into Arabic? How would you say that? Is there an Arab word for it?

KOOLHAAS: A pity you didn’t ask yesterday … Of course there is an Arab word for everything, but so far all the Arabs have connected it to their tradition anyway. Because they used to live in ridiculously modest environments …

DERCON: I’m sure that in the Koran you can find a lot of analogies for modesty, but can we find the Arab words for “ridiculously modest”?

OBRIST: Again, in relation to the Haus der Kunst, we can talk further about the whole idea of a limited lifespan. Chris, I remember the first day that you arrived at the Haus der Kunst, you told me what you wanted to test was this idea of Halbwertszeit.

DERCON: A what-Zeit?

OBRIST: Halbwertszeit. I don’t know how you call this in English. Halbwertszeit is when radioactive things –

KOOLHAAS: – the charge becomes half.

OBRIST: I thought it was very interesting that at one moment you were talking about how the Haus der Kunst might have to disappear as an act of iconoclasm or as an expression of a limited lifespan. But now, on the contrary, the Haus der Kunst is more present then ever.

KOOLHAAS: I think that the interesting thing about the Haus der Kunst is that the Halbwert doesn’t work, because it not only continues to be radioactive, but actually gets even more fallout as time progresses.

DERCON: There is an amazing animation film, a cartoon, evoking an idea that Stephan Braunfels had, when he was still an architectural student, to have the Haus der Kunst imploded. And thank God it did not happen because it is one of the most valuable monuments to iconoclasm of the 20^th century. Rem even talks about the current use of the Haus der Kunst as a form of “delayed nostalgia.” The Haus der Kunst is also proof that in general we ought to reflect more deeply about cultural infrastructure and the notion of a politics of time. I mean, how do you use a new motion of cultural memory? The amazing thing is that Abu Dhabi is having these museum buildings and gigantic accumulations of art objects shipped, delivered, and installed within astonishingly short amounts of time – which in the Gulf is absolutely feasible and acceptable. And it’s exciting, but – there is a but – these collections as critical masses of cultural goods are of course true expressions of a literal and figurative politics of time, and over time. So the question is: are we going to miss out on something essential in terms of culture? What effect will such a congested and compressed displacement of cultural fragments have on the viewer’s perception? For instance, in terms of memory structure, will it be necessary and feasible to create artificial delays in delivering and installing these objects? Would that make sense?

KOOLHAAS: Well I think that both the Louvre and the Guggenheim are going to have to confront the end of the Western period. And I think that will be their drama.

DERCON: That also means that we will have to confront the end of the Western notion of a politics of time.

KOOLHAAS: Yes, which also puts us squarely at the center. And I’m sure it’s not going to be forever interesting to see that interpretation.

OBRIST: Which is very much a Braudelian argument – when he describes so beautifully how the center of gravity shifted in previous centuries. And to some extent this is a similar process now. It’s a “seismic shift.”

KOOLHAAS: But I do think it will make it – I guess in the end there will also be kind of a flattening. Like the depth of a culture becomes wallpaper: it will be the Western wallpaper.

DERCON: It would have been interesting to come up with a completely different conception of a museum in Abu Dhabi – which you already tried to achieve with LACMA. It indeed has to do with the museum being an unstable medium, like a spider’s web of various chronologies, different from the usual ones, laid out from room to room. It is important to say now, being an architect, “I’m not just going to make it look good from the outside; I’m also going to take care of things on the inside.”

OBRIST: That is what was so strong about the LACMA design. Indeed, the museum of the future is an archipelago, not a continent. I think Edouard Glissant is key to approaching such challenges when he speaks about the polyphony of the archipelago. And I think that’s what Rem wants to do with the Hermitage – which is unbelievably fascinating because architects are seemingly not supposed to think about the inside, let alone about the possible contents.

DERCON: But curators don’t have alternatives, either.

KOOLHAAS: No, it’s always the light discussion.

DERCON: The funny thing is that the first designs for the Louvre, which gardens and ruins painter Hubert Robert worked on, immediately provoked a discussion about light. Robert’s proposal consisted in creating a kind of ruin, which of course would let brightness in and create a sublime, natural atmosphere. And even the revolutionaries considered the idea unsustainable.

KOOLHAAS: So that’s interesting: light is a substitute for a whole world of other discussions.

DERCON: “Let there be light!”

KOOLHAAS: Yeah, or let there not be light. But anyway it’s kind of ersatz discussion.

DERCON: After all, the very notion of “curating” stems from the duties of the cleric who oversaw relics, who had to count all the bones on a saint’s remains every morning and every evening to be sure they were all still there, lighting and putting out the candles.

OBRIST: And there is the challenge of the private museum.

DERCON: Or is it a threat? There is currently this glorification, beatification of the private museum. It is turning into a real hysteria. But nobody seems to worry who, other than the tax payer, will have to pay for these operations in the future, when they come into public domain – either on purpose or by default.

KOOLHAAS: Why don’t you describe the hysteria? The unsustainable aspect of it – I think it’s a funny projection that we’ll have to pay for it sooner or later.

OBRIST: But there are sustainable private museums – the great example of a sustainable private museum is the Menil collection in Houston. Even if you don’t believe in temples anymore, the idea that Dominique de Menil believed in art is important.

KOOLHAAS: No museum has changed in my perception so much over time as the De Menil. When I first went there I definitely had that …

OBRIST: It was spiritual?

KOOLHAAS: Yes, and I felt it very strongly. Let’s say it was “uplifting.” And now that feeling has completely disappeared. So it is also a matter of time and especially of greater numbers of visitors.

DERCON: I do think there will be exceptions to the rule, just like with the example of the Menil collection. But the thing is that private museums are becoming so widely spread, and their sheer number is getting so huge, that these exceptions are really becoming just a few footnotes underneath a vast text. And architecturally speaking, they are mostly beginning to look identical, just like the architecture of art galleries. Is there a way to conceive of museums or galleries differently, though, architecturally speaking?

KOOLHAAS: Well one problem of expecting that kind of invention from architecture is of course that architecture’s dirty secret is that in an improvised space, you can often do better than you would in a space that has actually been designed for the purpose you are building towards. It’s another undermining aspect that roughly half of all art spaces have been converted from some other kind of space, and work pretty well without noticeable difference. Yet the conversion model profoundly undercuts every ambition. I remember when we received the instructions for the Tate Modern, we got a bizarre message from Nicholas Serota saying, “It has been proven by interviewing a number of artists that they prefer neutral industrial spaces.” So maybe the role of the artist in the kind of dumbing-down of the museum would also be an interesting question. Because most are interested in the aura to such a point that it is necessary to ask, which artist can support a real experiment in display? Nobody that I know.

OBRIST: But whenever I have worked in such industrial buildings or industrial ruins, the most interesting experiences happen when the spaces are actually completely untouched. When there is no conversion, when they’re just readymades – or as Peter Smithson told me, “as found” – they work perfectly well. And I think the idea of “as found” versus “conversion” is kind of interesting as well, no? This leads us to the Hermitage project. It has about 1,000 rooms and each room must, in Rem’s opinion, reflect its own different museum typology – almost like a polyphony of different museums.

KOOLHAAS: The issue is whether the Hermitage should also have a Kunsthalle – whether a museum can have its own Kunsthalle, or whether that is too ambiguous.

DERCON: A Kunsthalle in the sense of how MoMA deals with PS1 in far away Queens? Glenn Lowry described MoMA’s content-relationship towards PS1 as a disruption of the chronology of time, and a congestion of the present.

OBRIST: It’s more interesting if you don’t separate them. That was basically the experience we had in Paris with Suzanne Page when I worked at ARC, with contemporary art embedded within the context of a functioning 20^th-century museum, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville. And the results were spectacular in the sense that you could have an exhibition of Munch and Strindberg, and then “Nuit Blanche,” our Nordic art show, with Olafur Eliasson, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Björk, and many others on the top floor. Or when Manfred Pernice came in and made an exhibition, you knew the artist would also always visit the museum and get really lost in the collection. Pernice would see a de Chirico, take the painting out of storage, and start to build its elements in three dimensions. It would become a sculpture, and then it would be exhibited in the museum for a couple of months – at a certain moment he even decided to move it outside where it became a skateboard ramp.

KOOLHAAS: The issue would be, exactly to what degree do you allow the separation? Another interesting thing about the Hermitage – which I am beginning to understand, just like the Haus der Kunst and partly for the same reasons – is that it has a kind of inexhaustible charisma. All that needs to happen is you take someone on a tour and they are somehow “hooked,” not necessarily because they understand what happens right at first sight, but on the contrary because there is something going on there that they don’t understand. And it has to do with opulence and authoritarianism and the bizarre habits of dictators. That’s what I think these spaces have in common: the authoritarian is still an unbelievable attraction.

DERCON: You even said that the fact that Thorak and Breker worked so well in the Haus der Kunst is akin to the fact that Anish Kapoor and Paul McCarthy do so well there. It has nothing to do with a charisma of iconoclasm –

KOOLHAAS: – but of reinforcement. And we’re doing a number of things in the Hermitage to see to what extent we can use the current qualities of the collection and the building. And now that they have two buildings, it means that they also own Palace Square in a way. For the first time they have a huge chunk of public space as part of their territory, and it really becomes an urban quarter. So it’s also about programming that urban quarter. We’re starting with the Islamic collection, as the director is a specialist in that field – there’s an unbelievable tradition of directors at the Hermitage. In fact the beauty of the Hermitage is that everything goes back so far; but it’s not an area of memory loss because everything is recorded.

DERCON: Yes, a museum should really be about memory systems – the storage of memory. Because memory in the first place has not so much to do with a capacity to reflect as with a capacity to move. Memory, says Ernst Pöppel, works like an elevator moving between different floors at different paces.

OBRIST: That’s why it’s not static – it’s dynamic.

DERCON: That is also very important for preservation: we know it as a dynamic process, a process of going back and forth.

KOOLHAAS: So the first exhibition we have proposed is an exhibition on the history of vitrines in the Hermitage, because that history starts in 1650 and ends with the more flexible vitrines of the Soviet system.

DERCON: Vitrines are a good way to introduce content-based architecture. I adore vitrines.