Rem Before Koolhaas

Rem Before Koolhaas. Journalism by an Architect is the first book to uncover Rem Koolhaas’s early work as a journalist in the 1960s. During his time working for Haagse Post between 1963 and 1967, Koolhaas interviewed Le Corbusier, Constant and Federico Fellini, among others, and covered key cultural phenomena of the time, such as the Provos and Amsterdam hippies.

Offering a fresh look at this period and including a new interview with Koolhaas, Antonio Cantero explores how Koolhaas’s interviews often became essayistic pieces that register power dynamics, social realities and cultural shifts within a specific media ecology.

Featuring original Haagse Post layouts and first-time English translations, Cantero’s book reveals Koolhaas as both an observer of his time and an interviewer for whom writing became a space for learning. Rather than treating journalism as a biographical precursor to his architectural career, Rem Before Koolhaas presents it not as a professional identity but as a retrospective position from which this body of work can be read on its own terms.

Dr. Antonio Cantero is an architect and assistant professor of architecture at TU Delft.