LAGOS/KOOLHAAS: Cities & Architecture / Grand Illusion Cinema October 13, 2006

Special admission: $5 regular, $4 senior/student, $2.50 member

DAILY: 730pm & 9pm | SAT & SUN: 430pm & 6pm
Dir: Bregtje van der Haak / 2002 / Color, video / 55 min.

Lagos’ population is expected to reach 24 million by 2020, making it the third largest city in the world. Every hour, 21 new inhabitants set out to start a life in the city.

Rem Koolhaas—winner of architecture’s Nobel, the Pritzker Architecture Prize—is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard. For the past four years Koolhaas and students from The Harvard Project on the City have gone to Lagos to research the type of urban environment being produced by explosive population growth. The Project on the City is framed by two concepts: academia’s bewilderment with new forms of accelerated urbanization in developing regions; and, second, the failure of design professions to cope with these changes.

The film follows Koolhaas during his research over a period of two years as he wanders through the city, talking with people and recognizing the problems with water, electricity and traffic. But instead of judging the city to be doomed, he is able to interpret this ‘culture of congestion’ positively, thereby creating a completely new concept of the big city.