It is a bit odd to hear Rem Koolhaas say he is fascinated by the countryside now. His name is so intimately connected with the city, with its emptiness, its greatness, its promise and disappointments.

When I met Koolhaas in front of a café in the posh southern part of Amsterdam, he was dressed in a black beanie, a thin black overcoat, black trousers, black shoes. He is tall, thin, almost gaunt, with intense blue eyes and a shaved head. At seventy-five, the architect looks younger than he is.

Rem Koolhaas is the epitome of the starchitect, part of that select group of architects who get to design elaborate, extremely expensive buildings. Koolhaas is known for brash designs, for unapologetically big buildings in boxy, geometric shapes. He is no fan of flowing lines. He dislikes ornaments. His buildings rarely look anything alike. They merely share a somewhat oscillating, unstable quality. Many of them are so asymmetrical that they look as if they should capsize. It is often necessary to see them from several angles in order to grasp them.

Koolhaas is ruthless in the pursuit of his ideas. He is widely known as a difficult man. He is unyielding with clients that try to water down his designs. He is often visibly impatient with his own employees. He hates questions from journalists that he considers too obvious, too inane, too lazy. When confronted about his fierce reputation, he likes to quote Dostoevsky: “Why do we have a mind, if not to get our own way?”

Koolhaas worked as a journalist before he became an architect. He has continued to write throughout his life—he has published books on architecture that run well over two thousand pages in total (although they are full of images and sketches as well as text). The vast majority of his books deal with cities. His first is about “delirious” New York City, which he admired exactly because it was removed from the bucolic, the idyllic, the wholesome. “Manhattan,” he wrote in 1978, “has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.” His attention has been consumed by the development of urban centers all over the world: the Pearl River Delta in China, Lagos in Nigeria, the ancient Roman city, and retail shopping in the West. He has spent almost his entire life in dense metropolises: in Rotterdam, Jakarta, New York, London, and now Amsterdam. His office is in Rotterdam, about an hour from the city by car. He commutes almost every day. A driver picks him up in the morning in...