Gabion: Onwards and upwards for Rem Koolhaas: another prize, and building big in China 1/3

ŠHugh Pearman. First published in The Sunday Times, London, December 21, 2003, as "Looping the loop, defying the ground". Photo of Netherlands Embassy, Berlin, by Christian Richters.

A handful of architects in the world receive rock-star levels of adulation. Jacques "Tate Modern" Herzog is one. Frank Gehry is another, along with Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster. If any of these give a lecture, swooning crowds descend. But the biggest crowd-puller of them all, a tall, angular man who seldom smiles and does not so much talk as utter gnomic riddles, is Dutchman Rem Koolhaas. It comes as no surprise to learn that he has just won British architecture's highest award - the Royal Gold Medal, approved by the Queen, awarded in February 2004. After winning the Pritzker Prize in 2000 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2003, that makes the hat-trick of the world's most prestigious encomiums.

There are two sides to Koolhaas. One is the mystic seer, the one-time scriptwriter turned academic who writes about the condition of the built environment in an elliptical and ultimately inconclusive manner that leaves his disciples panting for more. This is architecture as a branch of philosophy: unfortunately French philosophy of the most pretentious kind. You have only to read Koolhaas on "bigness", for instance, to start to lose the will to live ("Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building," he helpfully explains. It is one of his clearer texts).