The three-storey private residence is located on a hill overlooking the city. The lower floor, carved into the ground, houses the family’s private spaces; the ground floor, at garden level, houses the living area enclosed by a glazed shell; the upper floor, an area for the children and one for the parents. At the core of the house there is a 3x3.5 m elevating platform designed for the client, who is confined to a wheelchair after an accident: a “room” moving freely between floors which, by alternately incorporating itself into the living area and the kitchen, or transforming itself into an office, ceaselessly changes the space layout.

The three-storey private residence is located on a hill overlooking the city. The lower floor, carved into the ground, houses the family’s private spaces; the ground floor, at garden level, houses the living area enclosed by a glazed shell; the upper floor, an area for the children and one for the parents. At the core of the house there is a 3x3.5 m elevating platform designed for the client, who is confined to a wheelchair after an accident: a “room” moving freely between floors which, by alternately incorporating itself into the living area and the kitchen, or transforming itself into an office, ceaselessly changes the space layout.

Koolhaas proposes a civic space for the circulation of knowledge throughout all media without distinction and an archiving system conceived for an increasing library collection: the “Books Spiral”, a continuous ramp of shelving in which the various “formats” (digital and paper) coexist seamlessly. The library’s various programmes are intuitively organised on five platforms and four fluid “intermediate” floors, which determine the building’s characteristic multifaceted shape.

The building stands out like an white concrete meteorite in a regular neighborhood on the outskirts of Porto, creating a strong tension with the surrounding urban fabric. A central void acts as the epicenter of the composition: the elevated 1,300-seat Grand Auditorium (shaped like a “shoebox”, often sterilely vituperated by architects, as Koolhaas claims) with corrugated glass façades at either end, introjecting the city as a scenic backdrop. The building also includes a smaller, flexible performance space, ten rehearsal rooms, recording studios, an education area, a restaurant, a terrace, bars, a VIP lounge, administrative areas and an underground car park.

The De Rotterdam, located next to the Erasmus Bridge within the regeneration programme of the Wilhelminapier port district, is conceived as a vertical city: three interconnected mixed-use towers housing offices, flats, a hotel, conference spaces, shops, restaurants and cafés. Urban density and diversity, both in programme and form, are the founding principles of the project: the towers are arranged in an irregular agglomeration that refuses to be resolved in a single form and changes according to the multiple internal uses, weaving an ever-changing relationship with the context. 

For the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Koolhaas subverts the traditional building typology of the skyscraper anchored on a plinth, designing a three-storey cantilevered block embedded in the body of the tower at a height of 36 metres above the ground. The suspended volume, which houses the stock exchange’s quote room and offices, evokes the globally dominant power of the stock market. The translucent glass “skin”, enveloping the tower grid and the elevated podium, constantly changes with the light, alluding to the fluctuating character of finance.

The project consists of seven renovated buildings of an old gin distillery dating back to the early 20th century (including warehouses, fermentation silos and workshops) and three new buildings distributed around a courtyard: a space for temporary exhibitions, a multimedia auditorium and a ten-storey permanent exhibition space for the Foundation’s collection and activities.  The intervention is not conceived by Koolhaas as a conservation or new construction project but as a hybridization of heterogeneous fragments which, through a permanent interaction between past and present, coagulate to form a composite image.

The 59,000-square-metre Taipei Performing Arts Center, located in the bustling Shilin district, is the new home of Taiwan’s many arts companies, embracing a wide variety of activities (from dance, to opera, to theatre). It includes three theatres connected to a central cube, creating a space that is constantly changing and adaptable to experimental dynamics: the Globe Playhouse, a spherical 800-seat volume that looks like a planet embedded in the structure of the building, the 1,500-seat Grand Theatre with a slightly asymmetrical shape and the 800-seat Multiform Theatre (“Blue Box”). The latter two can be connected to form a 2,300-seat “Super Theatre” designed to host the most innovative performances. 

The Simone Veil Bridge rejects the recurrent conception of bridges as sophisticated and aesthetically appealing engineering works, in search of an alternative purpose for this typology. The bridge over the Garonne is a 549-metre long and 44-metre wide platform, actng as both an urban infrastructure and a linear public space. Indifferent to formal research, the work conveys different transit flows (bicycle, pedestrian and wheeled, public and private) in dedicated lanes, as well as a non-programmed “neutral” space that can be adapted and used for cultural, recreational or commercial purposes.