Kamin: Koolhaas Could Have Done Better

“Five years ago, when the celebrated Rotterdam architect Rem Koolhaas won a much-hyped design competition for a campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology, there was breathless talk about the sexy new building, and how it would devise a new architecture for the 21st Century… Now the future has arrived, complete with a sensuous, 530-foot-long, stainless steel tube that wraps around the elevated tracks and swallows Chicago Transit Authority trains. It’s a wild, often wonderful vision of urban life, a bit like entering an oversize pinball machine. It is, as advertised, full of brilliant concepts. But it is not a brilliant work of architecture.”