Other architects have designed airports on man-made islands. Other architects have long since explored the notion of the airport as a city in its own right. But Koolhaas choses to present his plans for a new island Schipol airport at the ICA as an art installation, a cross between a conventional model and a junk collage. There appears to be nothing original about it but for its mode of display. It looks great.

And yet, despite all such suspect window-dressing, and the acres of graphics-led flummery surrounding Koolhaas, there are the buildings. No, they are not "beautiful". He gets positively animated when the question of beauty comes up. "We have developed a lazy definition of what beauty is. We are addicted to comfort, and usually only accept a comfortable definition - one which means 'elegant'. I am trying to explore many kinds of beauty, beauty that refuses to be caged by a single definition." At times, indeed, he shies away from it. The extraordinary house in Bordeaux, designed like much of his work with the help of the brilliant engineer Cecil Balmond, seems to hover impossibly, defying gravity. Its form and proportions certainly verge on the elegant. In other hands, it might turn out slick. So Koolhaas ensures that its concrete details are rough and tough enough to make it difficult: harder work to appreciate.

Now, he is going in a new direction. He designed a house for (and fell out with) a Dutch client which looked like a hunk of chiselled rock, mounted on a big turntable to follow the sun. The spaces inside this angular lump were as un room-like as possible. Without turning a hair, Koolhaas then scaled up this rejected concept (sans turntable) to accommodate a concert hall, entered a competition with it, and won: the concert hall is to be built in Oporto. From S to L in one bound, the house's living room becoming the auditorium. That is architectural chutzpah worthy of Frank Lloyd Wright. But its author is not remotely bothered by the thought that what works on the small, personal scale might not be right for the big urban realm. The house, he explains, just happened to be the vehicle for uncovering a new approach: an approach ideal for absorbing the dull acoustic shoebox of your average concert auditorium.