Tibor Pataky defends PhD thesis

The public defense of Tibor Pataky’s doctoral thesis entitled Inventory of Problems: The Rotterdam Kunsthal by OMA/Rem Koolhaas, 1987-1992 will take place on April 15 at 18h00. The jury, which accepted the thesis last February without reserve, was composed of Marilyne Andersen (president), Pier Vittorio Aureli, Christophe van Gerrewey (supervisor), Roberto Gargiani, and Martino Stierli. The event will be held over Zoom. Please use this link.

The presentation will be given in English.

The Kunsthal in Rotterdam is a key work in the oeuvre of OMA/Rem Koolhaas that marks the threshold between the firm’s architectural production of the decades before and after 1990. The dissertation aims at a deeper and comprehensive understanding of this work of architecture. It gives a chronological account of the entire process of planning and design from the origins of the commission in 1987 to the completion of the building in 1992. This process is being discussed in a series of pertinent contexts, such as the site and its history, the architecture and the theory of the late 1980s, and contemporaneous political events like the Fall of the Iron Curtain and the dynamics of European Integration so as to reconstruct the historical moment the Kunsthal emerged from.