From the Ground Up is a series on Archinect focused on discovering the early stages & signs of history's most prolific architects. Starting from the beginning allows us to understand the long journey architecture takes in even the formative of hands and often, surprising shifts that occur in its journey. These early projects grant us a glimpse into the early, naive, ambitious and at points rough edges of soon to be architectural masters.

Challenging. 

Difficult. 

Impossible Client. 

Engineered down to the lost derivative possible by the budget.

These are all common ways in which architects could display some hardship towards a project. Yet for Rem Koolhaas and OMA, while working on their first completed project, The Almere police station, the issue was, in Rem's own words, that "the building was not blessed with a beautiful site".

Rem, even from the beginning, did not see the building as a sole character but as a piece of a larger game, a character in a narrative that could be exploited, challenged and rebuilt with the strength of the stories that were attributed to them. Rem has been determined through his career to master the manner in which architecture can frame and instigate conversations. 

The building itself becomes a scaffolding made of architecture as a means to construct and frame possible changes of interaction and interplay...

The building, for Rem, is not the answer. Instead, the building asks the questions and then constructs a place for such questions to be answered. While from the exterior, there isn't much to look at, the interior shows a thoughtful design intended to downplay any air of authoritarianism, claiming an open interior court and Japanese rock garden that emphasize police-public interplay. The building itself becomes a scaffolding made of architecture as a means to construct and frame possible changes of interaction between two narratives that had not been questioned so eloquently and so subtly. 

The Almere police station poised itself at a critical climax of Rem & OMA's trajectories. Almere's existence was a direct result of OMA's ability to finally win competitions and as such, a departure for OMA from the world of purely 'paper' architecture. This allowed the OMA that we know today to begin to take off and begin to build on the philosophies that have been so thoughtfully explored and experimented within the early years of OMA & Rem's architectural pursuits. Yet, such an intervention would not be Rem's last journey to Almere as he would continue working with the city on a theater and a complete master plan. The rest, as they say, is history.