Despite receiving all the honors and recognition that his profession can award, Koolhaas still struggles. He thrives on struggle. He estimates that one-third of the firm’s work derives from competitions, and OMA wins only one out of every three or four it enters.

Often, he is vying with younger architects he once employed. Recently, for a coveted commission to build a headquarters for the Axel Springer media company on a site that was part of the Berlin Wall, OMA bested Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Büro Ole Scheeren, both headed by former OMA architects. Last year, OMA triumphed over BIG in another contest, this one to design the Miami Beach Convention Center. (Illustrating the vagaries that bedevil architects, in January a newly elected mayor killed the OMA project.) Koolhaas seems to accept the Oedipal aspect of these conflicts with his former protégés. “It’s the natural order of things, so I don’t have a trauma with it,” he says. What irks him is the suggestion that a stint at OMA transforms an architect into a newly hatched Rem. “There is an assumption that there is a similarity of thinking,” he says. “For me, privately, the most pronounced difference is a wider cultural-political vision and a more precise anticipation of what the important issues are going to be. I am more interested in participating in moments of significant change—and in taking bigger risks.”

The attraction to creative discomfort—the preference for Parent’s tilt over Nugent’s ramp—is central to Koolhaas’s thinking. “He has an issue with comfort and the desire of people for comfort,” his son, Tomas, says. “He thinks it’s the antithesis of ambition.” Tomas and Charlie chose to attend state schools in Tufnell Park, on the border between Islington and Camden, in North London. “We could have gone to private school, but we went there,” Tomas remarks. “That’s in line with Rem’s idea of not being too comfortable.”