Los archivos orales de Koolhaas. El papel epistemológico del maratón de entrevistas

Abstract

Koolhaas is, above all, an interviewer. His interviews contribute to his architectural production as a way of working, thinking and speculating. He approaches these formats as archives to expand the notion of the interview as a meaningful form of knowledge. They are oral archives that are part of the oral history of architecture, a discipline very little theorized and with hardly any conceptualization of the architectural interview. Koolhaas' 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 projectual strategy in itself. Koolhaas understands the pulse of change through his interviewees and makes a great effort to find out what architecture will be like if the conditions fabricated by neoliberalism make it irrelevant. This question is crucial in the present moment: the mixture of trying to revisit through interviews what has happened by recoding it and what is happening read unprejudiced, intellectualizing it as an epistemological form and as a tool to be able to work with pressing problems that allow us to face the future with a critical position.

Keywords

• oral history
• interview marathon
• archive
• koolhaas-obrist
• epistemologic
• project tool