All architects do exploratory diagrams of what a building might be, before they proceed to refine and embellish the concept. In Koolhaas's case, it is almost as if he stops at the diagram stage, and builds that. It can be raw, visceral stuff. Like his biggest project to date, the colossal CCTV headquarters in Beijing. This behemoth of a building for the Chinese state television network, 750 feet high, containing about 4.5 million square feet of space, costing around £420 million, can reasonably be regarded as "Big". He has taken the idea of a tall conventional skyscraper, then folded and twisted it like origami so that it rises from the ground, loops around a bit way up in the air, then comes back down to earth again.

But it's not just what he says, or builds - it's also who he inspires. Both Zaha Hadid and Britain's latest architectural wonder kids, Foreign Office Architects, emerged from the creative hothouse of Koolhaas's Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). He is, you might say, the ringmaster of a particular school of intellectual architecture that revels in extreme, sometimes even tortured, form. He has a big exhibition devoted to him, running at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie until January 18. And no, he has not built anything in Britain yet. It might be that we're not quite ready.

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