ARCHITECTURE: REM KOOLHAAS: MAKING A SPLASH

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ARCHITECTS GENERALLY ARE dour people. Since they're half professionals, half artists, neither side of them is ever entirely content. But Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch-born architect-prophet whom today's young architects most want to grow up to be, is smiling. He's thinking about the deep, vision-supporting pockets of his first American client, MCA-Universal, which has appointed him to oversee plans for most of a $3 billion expansion of Universal City in California. Why choose Koolhaas? "I think it's because of his grandfather," says Koolhaas of Edgar Bronfman Jr., grandson of the man who asked Mies van der Rohe to build New York City's first modernist tower, the Seagram Building.

In many ways Bronfman's selection of Koolhaas is indeed as bold as his grandfather's choice of a modernist in 1954. After all, architects who refuse to condemn suburban mall sprawl and who favor cheap industrial materials aren't usually the beneficiaries of high-corporate patronage. Which isn't to imply that there are many--or even any--architects quite like Koolhaas. Some would label his disorienting, asymmetric buildings deconstructivist; he likes to consider himself an architect without style. For him, form not only doesn't follow function; the two are barely on speaking terms.

Perhaps because of this, it has taken a long time for Koolhaas to hit America's consciousness, but the MCA commission, which is likely to include new offices and a redesign of the company's headquarters, caps an amazing 18 months for the beakish 51-year-old. In November 1994 his exhibition at New York City's Museum of Modern Art drew big crowds and critical plaudits. He was photographed, celebrity-style, in his midnight blue Maserati by Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. His first book, Delirious New York, was rereleased and sold 28,000 copies (not bad for a theoretical treatise on the American city written in the '70s). "I would say he's the most comprehensive thinker in the profession today," says American deconstructivist Frank Gehry. "He's the hope for the cities."

In February, around the time negotiations for the MCA deal were winding up, Koolhaas released his second book, a stubby, curious tome called S,M,L,XL, after the four sizes that Koolhaas projects come in. A dense, not always coherent conglomeration of photos, plans, essays, fiction, cartoons and alphabetized ephemera, it's the ultimate coffee-table book for a generation raised on both MTV and Derrida.

For Koolhaas, the most important factor affecting contemporary architecture is globalization. "For the first time," he says, "an architect can build all over the world." He lives in London (though he spends much of the year in hotels), has an office in Rotterdam and runs an ongoing research project at Harvard that studies the Pearl River Delta, a rapidly emerging urban area in China. "It's clear," he maintains, "that you shouldn't just import; you should use the cultural potential of each country in such a way that it synthesizes with your interests. The MCA project is a beautiful project in that sense, because it's so American and ambitious and yet it interconnects with my own history."