The Koolhaas oral archives The epistemological role of the interview marathon

Abstract

Rem Koolhaas is, above all, an interviewer. His interview marathons contribute to his architectural production as a way of working, thinking and speculating. He proposes these formats as archives to expand the notion of the interview as a significant form of knowledge. They are oral archives that form part of the oral history of architecture, a discipline with very little theorization and with hardly any conceptualization of the architectural interview. Koolhaas's marathon interviewing work is a vehicle for the production of critical thought where he uses his interviews with a practical, theoretical and critical function; and with this he contributes to the understanding of the essayistic, instrumental and speculative value of oral transmission as a design strategy in itself. Koolhaas understands the pulse of change through his interviewees and makes a great effort to find out what architecture can be like if the conditions created by neoliberalism make it irrelevant. This question is crucial at the present time: the mixture of trying to revisit through interviews what has happened by recoding it and what is happening read without prejudice, intellectualizing it as an epistemological form and making it a tool to be able to work with pressing problems that allow us to face the future with a critical position.