New Court, the new London headquarters for Rothschild, and OMA's
first building in London, has been completed. The 21,000m2 building
is embedded in the narrow medieval alley of St Swithin's Lane in
the heart of the City of London. more
testFollowing a launch in New York and an appearance on the Charlie Rose show, Rem Koolhaas will be signing
copies of Project Japan: Metabolism Talks... at the Taschen store in Brussels tomorrow (Tuesday),
18 rue Lebeaustraat, 17.15-18.30. Project Japan, written with Hans
Ulrich Obrist and edited by Kayoko Ota, is a vivid history of the
Metabolism movement - the first non-Western avant-garde and the
last moment that architecture was a public rather than a private
concern... Full book info
here. more
As the headline event accompanying OMA/Progress, all seven OMA
Partners came together tonight for their first ever public
conversation. The talk, called 'Show & Tell', took place in the
Barbican's 1,200-seat theatre. Tickets sold out in a matter of
hours. Rem Koolhaas, Victor van der Chijs, Reinier de Graaf, Ellen
van Loon, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka and David Gianotten
discuss their roles within OMA, and how new ideas are transforming
the 36-year-old practice. The discussion was chaired by Chris
Dercon, director of Tate Modern. more
Rem Koolhaas appeared on Channel 13's Charlie Rose Show this past Wednesday. Rose questioned Koolhaas on OMA's current preoccupation with the countryside, our new book Project Japan, and what role an architect can play in society today. Watch the interview here. It was the fifth time Rose has interviewed Koolhaas on the legendary talk show, starting with a discussion on Euralille in 1994. more
Progress, a major exhibition of OMA's work and ideas, is now open at the Barbican in London. The show is curated not by OMA but by Rotor, a Belgian collective that has been occupying OMA's Rotterdam office for the past few months, gathering materials and intelligence on the office. Foraging in the archive, and even in OMA’s wastepaper, Rotor has selected hundreds of objects from the last 35 years that tell a fresh and independent story of the office.
OMA and the Maggie’s charity today open a new centre on the grounds of Gartnaval Royal Infirmary in Glasgow. Maggie’s is designed to provide emotional and psychological support to those affected by cancer in the greater Glasgow area. Maggie’s Gartnavel is OMA’s first completed work in the UK since the Serpentine Pavilion in 2006.
This weekend the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam
opened its new exhibition space, the Schatkamer ('Treasury').
Designed by OMA as a combination of spaces providing both intimacy
and overview, the Schatkamer is located in a previously
inaccessible room beneath the main exhibition levels. The new space
will display 100 of the most prized possessions from the NAi's
extensive archive, including work by Cuypers, Dudok, and Rietveld.
Full project info here.
With four weeks to go before the opening of the major exhibition OMA/Progress at the Barbican in London, Rotor – the Brussels-based collective to whom OMA has surrendered curatorial control – is developing a hyper-detailed scale model of the exhibition. OMA/Progress features a never-before-used entrance to the Barbican, a "free zone" in the atrium, and two floors of unusual artifacts that show OMA's diversity and preoccupations in a totally new light... more
OMA celebrated the opening of Milstein Hall this week as students and faculty held their first classes in the new 25,000 square feet of flexible studio space at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) in upstate New York. The Cornell Sun reported students flocking to the new drawing tables inside the elevated slab of Milstein Hall, which connects the existing Rand and Sibley Halls in a contiguous workspace. "Not only is this going to be our new home, but everyone has a new attitude," Ben Waters, a student, told the Sun. "Everyone has this new-found sense of pride for the program." (See the video of student reactions here.) more
OMA has won the competition to design the new Parc des Expositions (PEX) in the innovation zone of Toulouse, in southern France. PEX is conceived as a new gateway to the city and will host exhibitions, conferences, and concerts. The 338,000m2 project is designed to be a compact mini-city – an antidote to the sprawl of a standard exposition park, and a means to preserve the surrounding French countryside. more
AMO's renewable energy projects Zeekracht (for the North Sea), Roadmap 2050 (for the EU) and The Energy Report (for the WWF) appear today in a video made by Wallpaper for its new "Visionaries" series. OMA partner Reinier de Graaf and Associate Laura Baird explain the office's fundamentally different approach to the issue of sustainablility, seeking solutions "that transcend the scale of a building, a city, and even a nation, and at some point the scale of a continent."
OMA features in the exhibition "Daringdesign: Chinese and Dutch designers with guts", opening today at the newly refurbished Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. Among works by eight offices and designers, OMA presents a new, highly-detailed model of the Taipei Performing Arts Centre: three theatres plugging into a central cube; soon to go under construction and due for completion in 2012. more
Prada's spring/summer men's catwalk show, designed by AMO, streams live at 18.00 CET today from Milan fashion week. Watch live at http://www.prada.com/en. AMO's concept for the show is to organise the audience as a "perfect field": 600 visitors sit on individual blue foam blocks distributed over a 1.5 x 1.5 meter grid spread through the entire hall.
OMA's exhibition (IM)PURE, (IN)FORMAL, (UN)BUILT opens today at the L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Made in collaboration with students at the Paris Malaquais School of Architecture, the exhibition focuses on three French libraries designed by OMA, two of them unrealized but crucially important in the development of the typology of libraries, one about to go under construction… more
OMA's design for a new building for Rotterdam's town hall – now in the design development phase – has received a four-star ("Excellent") rating from BREEAM (the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method). OMA won the competition for Stadskantoor in 2009, responding to the design brief's stipulation that the building must be the most sustainable in the Netherlands.
more
The OMA-designed McKinsey & Company Hong Kong Office opens today. With the aim of challenging the conventional model of corporate office design, OMA brings McKinsey a brand new office design that caters to its needs for flexibility and enhanced collaboration, while fulfilling McKinsey's rigorous requirements for maintaining client confidentiality.
Coinciding with the start of the Venice Biennale today, OMA and Prada open an exhibition surveying recent collaborative works. The exhibition appears at Ca' Corner della Regina, a former palazzo, alongside highlights from the Prada Fondazione collection. more
OMA has begun to install its exhibition of projects with Prada at Ca’ Corner della Regina, a 17th century palazzo in Venice and the venue of a new outpost for the Fondazione Prada. The show, which opens on 1 June to coincide with the Biennale, includes the Prada Transformer project and a detailed scale model for the future Fondazione Prada in Milan (pictured here being hauled in through a window); the rest of the palazzo will feature work from the Fondazione's collection, including Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. more
Groundbreaking takes place today for the new campus of Chu Hai College of Higher Education in Hong Kong, designed by OMA. The campus will facilitate encounters between students from different departments in verdant surroundings, and offer a new identity for the college. The campus will open its doors in 2013. more
Cronocaos, OMA's exhibition on the increasingly urgent topic of preservation in architecture and urbanism, opens to the press today in New York. First shown at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale and now occupying the New Museum's new gallery space – a former restaurant supply store on the Bowery – Cronocaos examines the growing "empire" of preservation and its consequences for the way we build, demolish, and remember. more
