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^{Stair models at the Friedrich Mielke Institute of Scalology. (PHOTO: REM KOOLHAAS)}

"It's not a Jeremiad," says Koolhaas, a touch defensively, of his exhibition, pacing like a hungry panther between phone calls and meetings in his Rotterdam studio. "Elements isn't a rant. It's not negative – as an architect, you can't afford to be that – but it is quite a political exhibition with an underlying theory about architecture." And that theory is? "Architecture is an extremely old and deep-reaching process," he says. "At some point after the Enlightenment, its elements started to mutate, transformed by mechanical means. They became more precise, in a way more rational, while themselves being turned into machines – a staircase turning into an escalator, a ceiling into a complex service duct – and these elements went global." In the exhibition, he says, "criticism is implied by what you see".

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In Elements, machine-age elements are contrasted with those from earlier eras when, despite Roman or Chinese attempts at standardisation, doors and windows, for example, were not only highly crafted but also imbued with individual symbolism and meaning. "Architecture," says Koolhaas unapologetically, "was at its best, perhaps, in antiquity." In recent decades, buildings have grown ever bigger on what appears to be an exponential scale. "The Romans," says Koolhaas, "could build five storeys. With the elevator, we can now go to one kilometre, and one day much more again. At the same time, we're moving beyond the purely mechanical into a realm of digital controls, of carpets that can read footsteps, of room temperatures set by your phone. There's this world of constant data fusing with architecture." And, before I can ask where humans stand in all this, Koolhaas suggests, with a sly grin, that "one day, your own house might betray you".

"This is uncharted territory for architectural theory," he says, "and yet we still talk politely about proportions and niceties of scale. Elements is about the evolution of architecture, an interrogation into its development and the directions in which we're going." The more Koolhaas talks – and he is never less than engaging – the more his criticism of a world filling up with the architectural brainchildren of "Reagan and Thatcher, globalisation and digitalisation" reveals itself. And yet one of Koolhaas's great strengths is his ability to look long and hard, and with an apparent cool detachment, at the architectural and urban ways in which this "Reagan-Thatcher" world has played out over recent decades. He has the mind of an investigative journalist, even though he is a polemicist at heart and would, I think, have made an inspired preacher in a previous life.

^{Elements of Architecture, Central Pavilion, Model in progress. (PHOTO: REM KOOLHAAS)}

The eldest son of Anton Koolhaas, a well-known Dutch novelist, critic and screenwriter, Remmant Koolhaas was born in 1944 in a Rotterdam brought to ruin by the Luftwaffe. The family moved to Indonesia when Koolhaas's father, a keen supporter of Indonesian independence from the Netherlands, was appointed by Sukarno, first president of the new republic and a former architect, to run a new cultural institute in Jakarta. Enthralled by his years in the Far East, Rem Koolhaas has seen the world through Asian as well as European eyes ever since. He worked as a journalist for the left-leaning Dutch weekly news magazine Haagse Post and as a scriptwriter for anti-auteur films, including The White Slave (1969), described by Shumon Basar of the Architectural Association as "somewhere between Luis Buñuel's social surrealism and Russ Meyer's Sixties sex-fests", before turning to architecture.

Trained at London's then avant-garde Architectural Association and at Cornell University, Koolhaas established his own studio, OMA – Office for Metropolitan Architecture – in 1975. He has gone on to become one of the world's most famous architects, endearing himself to successive generations of students with his evident lack of interest in overt material success, his perennial curiosity, apparent maverick nature, and refusal to establish a style of architecture with his partners and associates that can be pinned down or readily labelled. Intriguing though OMA's buildings might be – from the wholly unexpected Casa da Musica in Porto to the vast and radical Central China Television headquarters in Beijing – Koolhaas and OMA are as much admired for their research, and radical publications, as they are for their architecture.

Several years ago, in fact, OMA spawned AMO, a mirror image of the practice devoted to research. It is this team that has worked diligently since autumn 2012, alongside Harvard University students taught by Koolhaas, to imagine and create a Venice Biennale unlike any that has gone before. And what gems they have dug from unexpected mines of architectural history to demonstrate how buildings have changed from rich expressions of cultures and craft into automated and now digitalised machines for processing humans through an increasingly anodyne, if superficially safe and comfortable, world.

Here, for example, is the life's work of 93-year-old Friedrich Mielke, whose Institute of Scalology, Regensburg, has catalogued the development of the staircase in minute detail. Prof Mielke has written 31 books on stairs, and his compendious research demonstrates just how particular stairs were in the age of wood-turning, even when they seem to be of similar or identical design. Here, too, are the labours of Charles Brooking, who began collecting "elements" of domestic architecture from the age of three. Today, the Brooking Collection, based in Cranleigh, Surrey, is an unparalleled museum of architectural details: Brooking is supplying Koolhaas's Venice show with a wall of windows. Mielke will provide the stairs.

And, over there, behind tower-blocks of architecture and building manuals, ancient and modern – from Gypsum Construction Handbook to Classical Chinese Doors and Windows – is a blue foam model of a fiendishly complex wooden capital from an imperial Chinese temple. It took the AMO team two and half months to figure out how to make it, using a translation into modern Mandarin of Li-Jie's early 12th-century manual of state-approved architecture: the result is a "global" element that is anything but banal.

But does today's ever-encroaching sameness suggest that architects – all too often divorced from the craft of building – are increasingly powerless in the face of global construction? "The word powerless is not how I see it," says Koolhaas. "No, you can employ a strong, critical voice. You can still reinvent types of buildings" – as OMA itself has done several times over in the design of private houses, theatres and office towers – "but artists and architects have to become much more critical in terms of making certain assumptions about how we design and build."

^{Monditalia – Corderie - Sacred Spaces. (PHOTO: REM KOOLHAAS)}

In other words, architects need to better understand the processes by which their skills are in danger of being replaced by global development and construction. When Koolhaas tells me that Monditalia, a separate, yet interconnected, exhibition at the biennale looking at the order and disorder of contemporary Italy will feature no fewer than 82 Italian films to make its point, I suggest they might all be replaced with a single French one: Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati's 1958 masterpiece. This makes Koolhaas snigger. "I love Tati… a genius." Briefly, we call to mind scenes from Mon Oncle showing just how absurd the design, and the elements, of an encroaching international modern world might be.

I also suggest that the British pavilion at the biennale should do nothing at all to explain how modernity was absorbed in Blighty: all the pavilion's curators need do is hand out copies of Evelyn Waugh's 1928 novel Decline and Fall so that visitors can read all about Prof Otto Silenus, the young, mid-European architect whose mission, in destroying a venerable English country house and replacing it with one comprising all the very latest in impersonal international design, is to "eradicate the human element from architecture". Koolhaas grins. "I know the Waugh book. It's very funny… the human element, that's precisely what we're examining in Venice."

On this note, and with "six thousand things still to do", Koolhaas is up and off, working full pelt to complete next month's biennale, while simultaneously trying to rethink modern architecture and, in the process, spare us from coming down to earth not in Venice, with all its rich historic beauty, but in Calvino's soulless Trude.

The 14th Venice Architecture Biennale opens on June 7. Details: labiennale.org

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