How did Koolhaas make his reputation in the first place? Particularly in this country, it was mostly on paper, thanks to his writing and a batch of proposed designs and competition entries that fellow architects and students loved to dissect and argue over. He didn't build anything at all in the United States until 2001, and his first two projects here—this Prada store in Manhattan and a joint branch of the Guggenheim Museum and the Hermitage squeezed inside the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas—were interior jobs, not free-standing buildings. Many critics who had seen his work in Europe—buildings with floors that curled up to become ceilings, a tiny house with a swimming pool on the roof—came back raving. They were most impressed by the way he juxtaposed cheap, industrial materials with polished ones and how he gave striking visual form to ideas about contemporary culture and political power. But other critics argued that the projects were more about bluster and trendy rhetoric than substance.