god VS devil

Rem Koolhaas has some photographs to show me. Not glossy shots of some earth-shattering new building he has created but small snaps of street life in the age-old courtyards of Beijing. Known as "hutongs", these are tight webs of hotchpotch homes and alleys gathered around wells.

"Most of them will soon be gone," says the architect, speaking in the Rotterdam headquarters of his company, Oma."The Olympics next year will find them old-fashioned and unsightly. Those who live there are being given new high-rise flats. These are well-equipped and clean, but people, I think, miss their old life down below in the courtyards." Yes, down below - with the fruit-sellers, public kitchens, urban bustle and banter, the travelling conjurors and steaming public laundries. All going to make way for the brave new Olympian world.

In their place, right in the changing heart of Beijing, no fewer than 300 air-conditioned office blocks and hotels are set to rise. The most dramatic of these hutong-gobblers will be the sensational new headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV), due in time for the Olympics next August, and a world away from the antique courtyards. Its architect? Rem Koolhaas.

This is exactly the kind of paradox this highly intelligent and self-questioning architect revels in. In public, he is the master of sock-it-to-me design; in private, he looks with affection at the people and places in his photographs, at an old way of oriental life likely to vanish.

And even as the heroic structure of the CCTV building, designed with visionary Arup engineer Cecil Balmond, climbs up noisily into the smog of Beijing, Koolhaas is working quietly on the discreet new headquarters for the banking arm of the Rothschild empire in the City of London. This will be the Dutchman's first major building in Britain. If you didn't know better, you would be hard-pressed to guess that it was from the same hand and eye as CCTV.

The CCTV tower is nothing if not ambitious. Some 230 metres high, designed in the shape of a 3D Chinese character, its steel structure forms a continuous spatial loop climbing up and around the volume of the building. Inside this complex structural web, there will be a "media village" (more like a city actually), complete with places to eat and play, and a sensational public viewing gallery. It is a rollercoaster of radical ideas.

And yet, for all this free-thinking design, the one thing CCTV lacks is freedom of expression. Daring new architecture, yes. Radical internal planning, sure. Sixteen channels broadcast by whizzy new digital technology, check. Yet, for all this, CCTV remains a sub-ministry of the government of the People's Republic of China, its news programmes controlled by the Propaganda Department.

Koolhaas may have designed some of the most challenging, controversial and critically acclaimed ultramodern buildings of the past decade - Seattle public library, Casa da Musica in Porto, the Dutch embassy in Berlin - yet I can't help thinking that, for all the excitement of working with CCTV, his heart belongs to a world closer to Beijing's hutongs, something altogether more exotic.

Koolhaas, born in Rotterdam in 1944, spent four years of his childhood in Jakarta. "The country was newly independent," he says. "I lived as if I was an Indonesian." He loves Indonesia as the British often adore India. His father, Anton, was a distinguished Dutch journalist, novelist and scriptwriter, who became a friend of Sukarno, Indonesia's first president, a one-time architecture and civil engineering student. Somewhere in the young Koolhaas's mind, I can't help thinking, a taste of the exotic was already mixing with a love of writing and of buildings and places that would lead him to work first as journalist, with the Haagse Post, and then as a scriptwriter in the Netherlands and Hollywood, before turning to architecture in 1968. That's quite a CV for any man, let alone one who had just turned 24.

In 1956, Koolhaas returned to Holland and eventually to his home city, Rotterdam. Anyone born in Rotterdam during and after the second world war might have thought of becoming an architect. From May 14 1940, the old city all but ceased to exist, after being targeted by 90 German bombers. Reports of how many people died varies, but 24,978 homes were lost, along with 24 churches, 2,320 shops, 775 warehouses and 62 schools. Some 80,000 people lost their homes. The Dutch government surrendered to the Germans that day, after just five days at war.

"Have you always been designing Rotterdam?" I ask, thinking how, as a young man, he might well have dreamed of rebuilding his native city, and how it must be hard to ever get the blitzed city out of his mind. He sits up. "You mean because I was first brought up in a city that, in a way, didn't exist?" Yes, so it had to be reinvented. And, if you look at Rotterdam today, the postwar city is dotted about with the kind of buildings you might find in China and the Middle East today. Koolhaas turns his pen over and over: "I know what you mean. We do design a lot of buildings in cities in something like the condition of 1940s Rotterdam: Beijing, where they're pulling down much of the old city to go modern; Dubai, a brand new city growing rapidly like a teenager from the naked desert where there were virtually no buildings before; Abu Dhabi ..."

He changes tack: "But, with buildings like Seattle and Porto and the embassy in Berlin, no, these belong to settled cities and draw their inspiration from what's around them as much as what's been planned to go inside them. The Casa da Musica [in Porto] is often described as being like a meteor that has collided with the city, but that's not what we intended; we designed it as a real part of the existing city, a challenging and a provocative player."

When Koolhaas says "we", he means his 230-strong Oma practice. This stands for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, founded in London in 1975, though the taxi driver who drops me at the bland Rotterdam office block where Oma has its headquarters, says that Oma means grandma in Dutch. This is also the home of Amo, Oma's research arm. Koolhaas has published fascinating and sometimes contrary reports and books on countless urban subjects since his first, very successful book, Delirious New York, in 1978. At Harvard, where he is a professor, his post-graduate students work up huge reports on Koolhaas's pet subjects, such as the way in which China's Pearl river delta, stretching from Hong Kong to Macau via Guangzhou, was becoming one continuous built-up area - and, more by default than design, effectively the biggest city in the world.

Another report looked at how shopping is fuelling urban growth, and changing development and design. So impressed was fashion designer Miuccia Prada with the findings - she has a PhD in political science - that she commissioned Koolhaas to design stores for her fashion empire in the US. The latest Harvard study focuses on Lagos, a city that, typically, intrigues Koolhaas because it is at once venerable and modern, messy and lyrical, rich and poor, energetic and corrupt, but above all alive in a way that his native Rotterdam, a ghost city in August, clearly isn't. "I like Rotterdam," he says. "We work here in a cheap office, out of the way with no distractions. We think for ourselves. We are in some ways outside the architectural loop. We do not follow fashion."

And yet Koolhaas is loved by the fashionable. He is one of those architects who receives star treatment in design magazines. Every month, Oma receives more than 1,000 applications from graduates all over the world hoping to work there. Koolhaas has received pretty much every award going. He roosts at the top of the architectural tree with the likes of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Toyo Ito.

When he says he hates "celebrity" culture, he almost means it. Koolhaas, though, is nothing if not contradictory. A man who thrives on free thinking, he works happily for absolutist governments. An architect who claims to distrust fashions in design, he is responsible for some of the most eyecatching of all new buildings, the Casa da Musica and CCTV chief among them. He is also in the process of designing "anti-icons", buildings that are almost willfully bland or simplistic, in Dubai. He seems to find the growth of Dubai absurd, yet is very much involved there, with the design of ambitious office buildings (one designed to revolve), apartment blocks and convention centres. Some of Oma's Dubai designs, such as the proposed Ras-al-Khaimah convention and exhibition centre, look as if they've been culled from the pages of sci-fi comics; others seem like slab-sided 1960s office towers.

Koolhaas does indeed live at least two lives at once. A tall, wafer-thin man crackling with a quiet energy - he swims, he says, whenever and wherever he can - he has two homes with two women in two separate cities. In Rotterdam, he shares his life with his partner Petra Blaisse, an interior and garden designer; and, in London, he stays with his wife, the artist Madelon Vriesendorp, with whom he has a son and a daughter, both in their 20s. Just as Koolhaas can love the hutongs of Beijing and design the CCTV tower, it seems he can live a complex personal life. In any case, he says, London is the one city where he can happily do nothing.

Because he has been willing to take risks, and because he is unlike most architects (who are, on the whole, a more contained and singularly directed species), Koolhaas has had his professional ups and downs. When Oma's first major building project, a centre for art and media technology in Germany, fell through, Koolhaas worked on his eye-popping book S, M, L, XL, with graphic designer Bruce Mau. Published in 1995, this outlines Koolhaas's belief that the sheer bigness of cities and their buildings today means that the old classical and Modern Movement rules of design, proportion and planning are largely meaningless. Meanwhile, commissions for projects in exactly such cities poured in.

"The market economy thrives on spectacle and novelty," says Koolhaas. "Its buildings are ever more dramatic. It offers the promise of total freedom, but in architecture this quickly leads to the danger of grotesqueness. It is hard to do serious, disciplined buildings in such a condition. The media, of course, encourages this teenage architecture; it gives most attention to extreme capitalist buildings, to this ever- growing accumulation of architectural extravagance, to fanciful museums full of shops. We calculated that between 1995 and 2005, Oma was asked to propose designs for 34 soccer fields of new museums, all a product of market growth rather than culture. Perhaps there is still a residual nostalgia for refinement, but the pressure is on the other way."

Only too aware of the absurdities of the bigness of today's cities and their architecture, he nevertheless designs big "iconic" buildings himself, while decrying the practice and researching and designing smaller alternatives. Small wonder that, when I enquire what he plans to do next, he says: "Write more." Asked recently to remodel the Hermitage galleries in St Petersburg, Koolhaas suggested doing as little as possible, keeping modern architectural intervention to a minimum.

Rem Koolhaas is one of the world's most intriguing architects. He is also an acute observer of politics, economics, cities and the way buildings work. How he manages to balance the two is something of a wonder. Here is an architect who could happily sit down one day with God to design refined and purposeful public buildings knitted into the fabric of old cities, and the next with the devil to design the wayward architecture demanded by ultra-capitalism.