An architect of ideas

In the league of architectural celebrity Rem Koolhaas is at the top. He has been a cult figure among students for a quarter-century, and is a latter-day Renaissance man.

He is architect, seer, writer, media magician, image guru and digital visionary. Miuccia Prada asked him to reinvent her famous shops, Condé Nast to help make over some of its magazines. He has designed a new flag for the European Union (although it has yet to replace the existing one). In Beijing, he is proposing a new conservation policy for the city.

Last week it was announced that Koolhaas is to be awarded the prestigious 2004 Royal Gold Medal for architecture. In theory this award is given by the Queen - although, given the recent distractions of facial growths and butlers, I doubt if the decision is based on Her Majesty's close study of his work. The award also coincides with a global explosion of Koolhaasiana that includes Content, an extravagant and encyclopaedic exhibition in Berlin of his work.

To the uninitiated, it may not be clear why Koolhaas should win such a venerable prize for architecture. True, he has designed some extraordinary buildings that vividly display his ability to assemble the elements of construction in previously unknown ways. These include private houses in Paris and Bordeaux and an art museum in Rotterdam. Yet the world still awaits the definitive Koolhaas building, the single large statement of his many ideas.

The appeal of Dutch-born Koolhaas, who turns 60 next year, comes rather from the fertile and distinctive imagination of the man himself, which expresses itself in books and unbuilt designs as much as in buildings. He is fascinated by the messy, ugly things that other architects ignore, such as advertising, congestion, sleaze and even people, but which make up the chaotic cities that most of us know. Given that architects can be a pious breed, this is immensely refreshing.

As a student at the Architectural Association in London, he studied the Berlin Wall. Now, working with students at Harvard, he is publishing a succession of fat tomes, each dedicated to unavoidable but possibly monstrous facts of city life: the vast and ruthless scale on which Chinese cities are now being built; the equally vast and ruthless expansion of retail space; the seemingly nightmarish city of Lagos in Nigeria. He wants to challenge the idea, he says, that " architecture is only lived from the neck up".

There is something biblical about these big books, and in another life he might have been a hellfire preacher, of the kind who ends up being burned for heresy. Hence his apocalyptic sayings about what he calls "Junkspace", the "fuzzy empire of blur" that you find in shopping malls, "the residue mankind leaves on the planet". It is, he claims "the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids". Yet Koolhaas refuses to take a moral position about Junkspace, or Chinese megastructures. Are they good or bad, exhilarating or horrific? He won't say. He just wants to point out that they are there.

Now, however, Koolhaas is finally becoming a prolific builder as well as a prolific writer. A succession of new works by him have just opened or are about to open: a Campus Centre for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, Seattle Public Library and Casa de Música, and a concert hall in Oporto.

He is also designing CCTV, a monumental headquarters for China's national TV station that will be an icon of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, its volume six or seven times that of the Canary Wharf Tower.

These buildings present Koolhaas with a challenge. It makes it harder for him to remain the aloof commentator; now he must be someone who has to do deals with clients, including the Chinese authorities. CCTV poses a particular problem. Is it, as Koolhaas hopes, a symbol of a new, more progressive China, or does its assertive geometry make it into a symbol of oppressive power, like an exotic version of the Pentagon?