INTELLIGENT DESIGN.(Rem Kohlhaas)

Before he can build, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas likes to say, he must first seduce a client with his vision--a process that he describes as "foreplay." As with most things Koolhaas does, his strategy for eliciting desire is unorthodox. Architecture firms typically present computer renderings that seamlessly insert an imaginary new building into a familiar skyline: a tidy fantasy of the future. Koolhaas is messier. He prefers to show clients what he calls "thinking produced in its raw form."

On a drizzly September afternoon in the Baroque heart of St. Petersburg, Koolhaas conferred with two young colleagues in a corridor outside the office of Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum. Shortly, he would present his proposal for an "invisible" addition to the museum. At Koolhaas's request, one of his associates extracted a model from a container the size of a shoebox. It was a blunt geometric form, suggesting, in profile, the lid of a grand piano. It was also brazenly shoddy. Pieces of blue foam, orange posterboard, and Plexiglas had been glued together in the manner of a child's craft project. The model had been hastily assembled the previous night at the headquarters of Koolhaas's firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (oma), in Rotterdam. Hours before flying to Russia, Koolhaas had ordered radical simplifications to the design--"Often, my most important role is to undo things," he later explained--and there had not been time to make a more polished prototype.

Koolhaas, a sternly handsome man, with hazel eyes that are perpetually underscored by half-moons of fatigue, examined the ramshackle object without embarrassment. "This is intelligent," he said to his colleagues, putting on his reading glasses. Like many architects, he signals his profession with intimidatingly unusual eyewear. He currently favors a modular design, in which rectangular plastic lenses snap into chopstick-straight temples of various colors. Today's choice was reserved: tortoiseshell.

As far as Koolhaas was concerned, it didn't matter much what the model looked like; if the addition was actually built, its facade would be almost entirely hidden from view. He and his colleagues had devised a scheme that would tuck a sleek modern structure inside the nineteenth-century skin of the General Staff Building--a mazelike annex of the Hermitage where Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs once had its headquarters. The new structure would supplant two empty courtyards, some abandoned stairwells, and a series of unused offices. In their place would be a freestanding "core museum" that would offer expansive new galleries and provide clear pathways to parts of the 1827 building that were not easily accessible. These alterations would amplify the building's already considerable exhibition space and allow the Hermitage to showcase its collection more effectively. Yet a visitor to Palace Square, the checkerboard plaza at the center of the museum complex, would not be able to tell that the Hermitage had changed since the days of the tsars. "We are trying to reimagine the Hermitage without making a manifest intervention," Koolhaas told me. He speaks English in a rapid monotone, with lightly warped vowels; it's an ideal delivery system for oracular pronouncements.

Koolhaas, who is sixty, is a champion of the new who is bitterly disappointed by most new things. In fact, the Hermitage project was inspired by his contempt for the cliches of current architecture--in part, as he had explained, "the nauseating contemporary impulse to impose spectacular glass additions on spaces that already have their own aura." Koolhaas is simultaneously a builder and a wrecking ball, and his remark was aimed at such celebrated museum expansions as I. M. Pei's glass pyramid outside the Louvre and Sir Norman Foster's vast glass-tiled canopy for the courtyard of the British Museum. (In lectures, Koolhaas has accused Foster of turning an icon of the Enlightenment into a kitschy homage to the Mall of America.) oma's proposal for the General Staff Building was a Koolhaasian call for lavish restraint. It would require the Hermitage's directors to spend millions of dollars on an expansion without getting a shimmery showpiece in return. "St. Petersburg does not need a Guggenheim Bilbao," he said. He began unbuttoning his pin-striped Prada overcoat, which was cut unusually short, emphasizing his skyscraper frame--he is a slim six feet five.

Piotrovsky, a silver-haired man with aristocratic grace--his father, Boris, had also served as the Hermitage's director--opened his door and briskly welcomed Koolhaas inside his grimly luxurious office. Droopy silk curtains covered the windows, and the walls were lined with faded tapestries. The office was surprisingly chilly; draped over Piotrovsky's striped shirt was a black scarf, which he wears to protest the fact that the museum, which is mostly funded by the state, cannot afford proper heating. As he gestured for the architect to sit down at the Romanov version of a conference table--two other chairs were occupied by rickety towers of old books--he said that gossip was circulating in town that the Hermitage leadership favored Koolhaas's scheme. "It was recently reported in Izvestia that I was spotted reading one of your books on the railway," he said, chuckling.

Koolhaas smiled and sat down beside Vladimir Matveyev, the museum's deputy director of exhibitions, an art historian with a basso profundo's voice and girth. "I want to begin a discussion with the Russian architecture world," Koolhaas said, adding that he was wary of being seen as a foreign interloper. He noted that he had visited the Soviet Union many times to see Constructivist and Stalinist buildings--"In 1971, I came down with my only case of pneumonia in this city," he said--and expressed his ardor for "sixties and seventies Soviet architecture" as well. On the drive from the airport to downtown St. Petersburg, Koolhaas had focussed on a bleak row of dilapidated concrete apartment towers and swooned over their "heartbreaking delicateness."