PHILADELPHIA Rem Koolhaas, world-renowned architect and recipient of the esteemed Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000, will present an illustrated lecture on his current projects, including the new Prada Store which opened in New York City SoHo in December 2001, at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday, April 8. He will be introduced by Penn Trustee Leonard Lauder, Chairman of The Estee Lauder Companies and Chairman of the Board of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sponsored by the Dean Office and Student Council of the Graduate School of Fine Arts (GSFA) at Penn, the lecture is free and open to the public. It takes place at Penn Irvine Auditorium, 34th and Spruce Streets in Philadelphia at 6:00 p.m. (Doors open at 5:00 p.m.) Seating is limited.

Koolhaas is one of the world most widely recognized architects. His firm, Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), is based in Rotterdam, Holland, and is engaged in projects around the world, including plans for the Whitney Museum in New York, the Seattle Public Library, the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus Center in Chicago, the Guggenheim and Hermitage Museums in Las Vegas, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin and the Casa da Msica concert hall in Porto, Portugal. OMA has won several international awards in addition to the Pritzker Prize and was the subject of Rem Koolhaas and the "Place of Public Architecture," a retrospective exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1995.

Koolhaas is a professor of architecture and urban design at Harvard University, where he conducts design research into current urban-architectural conditions in various parts of the world and explores the role of retail consumption in contemporary cities. He conceived the book, "S, M, L, XL" with Bruce Mau.