From buildings that reflect a society's values to those that represent only their designers, famed architect Rem Koolhaas illustrated contrasting conventions of architecture in an April 13 lecture in Kennedy Hall's Call Auditorium.

"That was architecture [then]," he said, of a slide showing the Parthenon. "This is architecture [now]," of a slide showing a Frank Gehry building.

"The status of the architect has also become very problematic," Koolhaas said, showing slides of Peter Eisenman '54, B.Arch. '55, being mobbed by the press at his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, a beaming Daniel Libeskind with his Freedom Tower model and a serious, anonymous East German architect holding a blueprint on a 1960s construction site.

"Here we have something profoundly unglamorous," Koolhaas said. "And I have to admit that being in this situation is kind of deeply appealing, and I find a profound nostalgia for it."

Showing a wider image of the East German's work -- public housing -- he said: "One of the inevitable effects of the current role of the architect is that for us, this kind of architecture has become seemingly forever inaccessible. It's maybe an embarrassing confession that in the last 30 years no one has asked us to do any housing. And that's not an accident. Celebrity in itself kind of removes the architect from the more serious part of his profession."

Koolhaas' public lecture, "Stress Test," also focused on the work of his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), over the past 10 years, including Paul Milstein Hall on campus. The project, with facilities for the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP), will be completed in August 2011.

When he came to Cornell in 1972 to begin to study the New York urban landscape, Koolhaas said, "My instinct was that in America a different type of architecture had been invented, and that [it] had never been articulated as a new architecture. America builds and doesn't make explicit its intentions."

He said American innovation from 1880 to 1920 included four key inventions that revolutionized architecture -- the elevator, steel construction, air conditioning -- which created "artificial interiors" for the first time -- and the escalator. He cited the New York Athletic Club as a key building of its time, its spaces put to a variety of previously unimagined uses, such as having an oyster bar in a locker room.

Koolhaas also revisited a rejected 2001 OMA proposal to solve the space crunch around Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., by redirecting the Charles River. "I was quite surprised that a university as intelligent as this was so resistant to real thinking -- no, really," he said.

Koolhaas also toured the Milstein Hall construction site during his day on campus and met in Olin Library with students working on the next issue of the Cornell Journal of Architecture.

"Koolhaas has blanketed the intellectual and physical landscape of architecture, urbanism and design culture generally with an unprecedented intensity and durability," AAP Dean Kent Kleinman said in his introduction. "The influence of his approach to hitching social change to material culture has had impact across design disciplines from fashion to filmmaking, from Lagos to Los Angeles."