Koolhaas and His Omnipotent Masters

According
to Rem Koolhaas, there are three seminal events in the history of
architecture: Samson tearing down the house of the Philistines in 1100
BC, the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 AD, and his
design in 2006 AD of the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing. Obviously, this
is a reductionist view of history — and the kind of hyperbole one
expects from a manifesto in Wired Magazine.
But this is no manifesto: instead, as Koolhaas himself recounts the
story, he chose between working on NYC's Ground Zero and the Beijing
project based on a fortune cookie he was given at a Chinese restaurant
— in it, the goofy prognostication "Stunningly Omnipresent Masters Make
Minced Meat of Memory."

The
story of a single cookie presaging the most important building in China
is, quite simply, bizarre. It may be a romantic notion, but most of us
still want to believe that great architecture is made on a napkin,
the source of inspiration being anything except hard work. (According
to Paul Goldberger, the design of Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library can
be traced to a single diagram.)