<p>The coronavirus, according to Rem Koolhaas, will change architecture</p>

Rotterdam – The Dutchman Rem Koolhaas, who won the Pritzker Prize for architecture, is a staunch critic of the current state of airports, arguing that they have lost their original purpose. Now, in the time of coronavirus, he has expanded his criticism – he believes it is necessary to rethink and reorganize the form of many public spaces. This also applies to cities, especially those whose purpose has gradually become merely to attract visitors. Koolhaas's views were discussed in the American magazine Time.

The Dutchman does not hide his criticism of airports: "We must enter their intricate interiors. And it has only one goal, namely to force us to shop." Crowds of passengers are thus driven through a labyrinth designed to create a constant sense of overcrowding, leaving people no choice to decide for themselves and maintain distance. Airports have thus lost their primary purpose. "It used to be a highly rational space that simply allowed you to get from one place to another," Koolhaas reminds us.

And he believes that the situation with cities is no better. "The problem is that over the past 20 to 30 years, they have become places where relatively wealthy people and tourists gather. Cities have drastically changed, and we haven't paid enough attention to it," says the author of the book Delirious New York. Long before the world started using the term social distancing daily, Koolhaas saw the problem in the fact that half of the world's population lives in metropolises built on two percent of land. This was also the subject of his exhibition Countryside at the Guggenheim Museum, which highlights the indifferent attitude towards rural areas of the planet. The museum had to close in March due to the pandemic, less than a month after the exhibition opened. And at a time when many city dwellers began to wish to live somewhere with fewer people and started thinking about the origin of the food on their table.

Koolhaas believes that it is not necessary to abandon cities but rather to reflect on the reasons for the neglect of the countryside. "Our entire profession is focused on the demands and needs of human beings. However, all over the world, large mechanical buildings are emerging. They are vast, rectangular, closed. We must conceive architecture in which machines and robots will be prominent. But it is also necessary to explore how robots and people can coexist in one building," Koolhaas stated.

At 75, he is old enough to know about the suffering of post-war Europe. As a boy, he lived in Indonesia, where he learned how the occurrence of infectious disease can destroy an unprepared healthcare system. The reality of the current pandemic is a reminder of his younger years.

He deals with architecture but also teaches and writes books. If there is a theme that connects his work, it is the focus on what other colleagues do not pay attention to, whether it is materials or cities in Nigeria. One of his projects in Rotterdam was designed so that the best view of it was from a moving car. He placed the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow in a renovated former restaurant, which he clad in polycarbonate.

He is also the author of the headquarters of the Chinese television network CCTV in Beijing, and he disagrees with the current criticism of China over the coronavirus. "It is a form of sinophobia; the distance between China and the West continues to grow. Those clear warnings from China were not heeded here," Koolhaas said.

However, he was pleasantly surprised by the rapid response of people when the seriousness of the situation became apparent: "I was immensely surprised by how enormous resources were released, how adaptable people were, and how they changed their behavior in the most radical way."