Hasta La Ideas

An exhibition documenting the working processes of international architecture practice OMA opens at the Barbican Art Gallery in London tomorrow. 

Photograph by Jim Gourley, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

OMA/Progress presents a diverse collection of over 450 items from the practice’s archive including sketches, documents, photographs, models and material samples.

The exhibition is guest curated by Brussels-based collective Rotor, who wanted to represent OMA’s intense productivity with a dense mixture of objects and documents.

Image copyright OMA, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Models of familiar buildings such as the CCTV headquarters in Beijing are accompanied by sketches and transcripts relating to unfinished projects.

At the entrance to the show is a free public gallery containing an index of all of OMA’s projects, videos of lectures by the firm’s partners dating from the 1970s to the present and a shop.

Prada Transformer/OMA image copyright OMA, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

The main space presents OMA and their current projects. A large projection scrolls constantly through every image saved on OMA’s server at a rate of 20 images per second, taking 48 hours to reach the end of the loop of almost 3.5 million pictures.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Upstairs, exhibits are grouped according to themes such as movement or colour and material, while one room is completely covered in waste paper that Rotor collected from OMA’s offices.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

The sculpture gallery features a 1:1 plan of the firm’s most recent project, Maggie’s Gartnavel Centre for cancer care in Glasgow, which opened this week – see our story here.

Image copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

The exhibition runs from 6 October until 19 February 2012. See all of our stories about OMA here and some initial photos of the exhibition in our Facebook album.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Here is some more information from the Barbican:

OMA / Progress
6 Oct 2011 – 19 Feb 2012
Barbican Art Gallery, London

Supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and The Netherlands Architecture Fund and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Additional support provided by The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture and the Flemish Representation in the UK.Media Partner: Icon Magazine

‘Every architect carries the utopian gene.’
Rem Koolhaas

Photograph copyright OMA, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

This autumn Barbican Art Gallery is transformed by a major exhibition on OMA, co-founded by Rem Koolhaas in 1975, one of the most influential architecture practices working today. Known for their daring ideas, extraordinary buildings and obsession with the rapid pulse of modern life, OMA play an active role in the architectural, engineering and cultural ideas that are shaping our world.

OMA/Progress is the first major presentation of OMA’s work in the UK and is guest curated and designed by the Brussels-based collective Rotor, who were responsible for the much praised Belgian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. With unprecedented access to OMA’s archives and daily practice, Rotor has created a revealing portrait of OMA. They have selected and presented a wide range of materials, relics, documentation, imagery and models, yielding fresh perspectives on OMA’s built and unbuilt projects and conceptual work. The result is an exhibition that invites the visitor to discover first hand the breadth and depth of OMA’s output. Rotor comments: ‘ This exhibition gives an outsider view on the inside of a particular architecture office. OMA/Progress is a portrait that consists mostly of found materials, materials that exist for reasons other than this exhibition. It shows architecture as a practice, a messy process that changes with every good project .’

Photograph copyright Philippe Ruault, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Delving into the inner workings of OMA’s intense productivity, OMA/Progress features diverse projects and a range of unexpected objects, photographs, films and findings from behind-the-scenes at OMA. The exhibition, designed re-using the build and scenography of the previous installation, is in three parts; the public zone, which includes a browsable index of all OMA’s projects, videos of lectures given by OMA partners from the 1970s to now and an OMA shop including seminal books and an exclusive collection of prints. Three lower-level gallery spaces introduce OMA and their current preoccupations, including a raw sequence of every single image from OMA’s server – almost 3.5 million – that runs on a 48-hour loop. The upper level is dedicated to a collection of around 450 items that illustrate the history and current practice of OMA, ranging from the iconic – such as models of the Maison à Bordeaux and the CCTV headquarters in Beijng – and never-before-seen artefacts including unpublished manuscripts of a never completed book on Lagos, Nigeria, and the ‘secret room’, a space completely covered in the waste paper collected by Rotor from the OMA offices over a month-long period.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Further highlights include insights into recent projects such as Cornell University’s Milstein Hall and the CCTV headquarters in Beijing; recent competition entries like the Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles; and those that are on-hold indefinitely, like the Dubai Renaissance tower. The array of objects take in Koolhaas’s hand-written faxes; a guide for cutting the form of the CCTV building from a block of foam in four easy steps; samples of the skin of the Prada Transformer Pavilion (Seoul 2009); the personal travertine collection of OMA Partner Ellen van Loon; and paintings reproduced in fabric for a wall covering from Rothschild Bank HQ. Displayed on their own or in series, the exhibits tell revealing and often surprising stories about OMA’s unprecedented and intuitive ways of working.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Triggered by OMA’s preoccupation with architectural preservation, the west entrance of Barbican Art Gallery is opened up for the first time in the building’s history, making the exhibition spaces directly accessible from the Highwalks of the surrounding Barbican Estate. With the existing entrance also in use, visitors are able to freely walk through and occupy the space in the way originally intended by Barbican architects, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon.

Installed on the Barbican’s Sculpture Court, the exhibition also includes a 1:1 footprint of OMA’s design for the Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow, allowing visitors the opportunity to walk over, through and around the plan to investigate and imagine the building themselves.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

A programme of live events will tackle the question of progress in architecture and society and illuminate the work of OMA. The headline event, OMA: Show & Tell on Tuesday 25 October in Barbican Theatre brings together all seven partners from OMA for the first time in public, to examine and debate the nature of society, progress and the built environment across the world today.

The Office for Metropolitan Architecture, OMA, currently comprises seven partners and a staff of around 280 architects, designers and researchers working in offices in Rotterdam, New York, Beijing and Hong Kong. OMA/Progress coincides with a focus on the UK by OMA as it completes its first two buildings here: Maggie’s Centre in Gartnavel, Glasgow and the Rothschild Bank HQ overlooking the Bank of England in the City of London.

OMA

OMA is a leading international partnership practicing architecture, urbanism, and cultural analysis. Through AMO, its research and design studio, the practice works in areas beyond architecture that today have an increasing influence on architecture itself: media, politics, renewable energy, technology, publishing and fashion. OMA is led by seven partners – Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, David Gianotten and Managing Partner, Victor van der Chijs. The work of OMA’s partners and Rem Koolhaas has received several awards, including the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 2000 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. This is the first major exhibition on OMA following Content at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin in 2003.

ROTOR

Curators of the acclaimed Belgian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, Rotor is a collective based in Brussels. Founded in 2005, Rotor is a collective of people sharing a common interest in the material flows in industry and construction. On a practical level, Rotor handles the conception and realization of design and architectural projects. On a theoretical level, Rotor develops critical positions on design, material resources, and waste through research, exhibitions, writings and conferences.

BARBICAN ART GALLERY

One of the leading art spaces in the UK, Barbican Art Gallery presents the best of international visual art with a dynamic mix of art, architecture, design, fashion and photography. From acclaimed architects to Turner prize-winning artists, the Gallery exhibits innovators of the 20th and 21st centuries: key players who have shaped developments and stimulated change. Based within an iconic London landmark of considerable architectural interest and importance, Barbican Art Gallery has an international reputation for delivering agenda-setting architectural exhibitions designed to challenge assumptions and encourage debate. Previous architectural exhibitions include Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956 – 2006 (2006); Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban, (2007) and Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture (2009).Architecture as Air, a new installation by Japanese architect Junya Ishigami is on show in The Curve until 16 October 2011.

See also:

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Parc des Exposition by OMA	Maggie’s Centre Gartnavel by OMA	China Central Television Headquarters by OMA

Today the World Monuments Fund announced its 2012 Watch List. Issued biennially since 1996, the World Monuments Watch seeks to draw international attention to cultural-heritage sites in need of assistance. The new list includes 67 threatened sites in 41 countries and territories from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Among the treasured yet endangered places in our own backyard is the former Manufacturers Trust Company Building at 510 Fifth Avenue (pictured), a modernist icon that last we heard was at risk of becoming a Marc Jacobs store. And across the pond, the WMF has spotlighted a similarly vulnerable trio of modernist sites—the Preston Bus Station, Birmingham Central Library, and London’s South Bank Centre—under the category of “British Brutalism.” And that’s just the modern architecture! The 2012 sites reach back to prehistoric times and include religious structures, cemeteries, houses, palaces, bridges, cultural landscapes, archaeological remains, gardens, and entire towns (we’re looking at you, Charleston). “While these sites are historic, they are also very much of the present—integral parts of the lives of the people who come into contact with them every day,” said WMF president Bonnie Burnham at a press conference held this morning. “Indeed, the Watch reminds us of our collective role as stewards of the earth and of its human heritage.” Download and peruse the full WMF Watch list here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The still under construction George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Texas is going dark for a little while, with the last tour being given before its planned opening in early 2013. D Magazine was on hand for this recent and final middle-of-building tour, held to commemorate when the “building’s topmost steel beam [was] hoisted into place.” The tour leader was none other than the architect behind the project, Robert A.M. Stern, the Yale dean who landed the commission way, way back in 2007. Saying that he’s enjoyed the multi-year process, he reportedly showed off all the various bits and pieces of the large space, which grew by two-thirds from its originally-planned size back in 2009. Both President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush were also on hand, clapping along with the crowd as the top beam was delivered to its permanent new home. D notes that the former President made note that “he likes the fact that Manhattan Construction is putting up the Center” because they had also served as the construction company behind the Texas Ranger’s ballpark (the baseball team which Bush was a one-time part owner of).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In the spring of last year, you might recall that Frank Gehry decided to remove himself from the long controversial Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. This turned out to be something of a very fortunate move for the architect in terms of publicity, as shortly after he’d left, the building project began fighting through another issue: what to do with the ancient Muslim cemetery it was being built upon. While that story has gradually moved away from receiving international press, it appears that the project has hit yet another wall. Haaretz is reporting that the firm hired to replace Gehry, Israel-based Chyutin Architects, are now threatening to walk away from the project. This, the paper reports, comes just one month after the company running the construction effort also decided to quit. Both have cited issues with the organization behind the project, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, with the architects reportedly finally fed up with interactions with the group, as it “asked for daily briefings and nagged them to death.” However, according to the LA Times, things might not necessarily be so dire (though certainly still not the most positive). That paper also reports that Chyutin has not resigned just yet, but is threatening to do so, not from being “nagged to death” but rather over a contract issue and a withheld payment, which the Center says was due to “the architect’s failure to meet certain contractual obligations.” However it all pans out, this is yet another blow to a project that’s already seen its fair share of them.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Architects MVRDV of Rotterdam and COBE of Copenhagen and Berlin have won a competition to design a rock-music museum at a former concrete factory in Roskilde, Denmark.

The ROCKmagneten project comprises the conversion of the factory halls plus three new structures to house the Danish Rock Museum, the headquarters of Roskilde Festival and their new Roskilde Festival Folkschool.

The museum will be clad in gold spikes while the black office block will be covered in speakers, to be used for outdoor events in the plaza below.

The former factory site is currently occupied by musicians, artists and skaters and the company hopes to maintain this platform for informal creativity, with space around the site for temporary exhibitions, events and pavilions.

The first phase of construction is due for completion in 2014.

See all our stories about MRVDV here.

Renders are by Luxigon.

The following details are from the architects:

ROCKmagneten: MVRDV and COBE win Danish Rock Museum competition in Roskilde

The MVRDV and COBE scheme for the transformation of a former concrete factory into a multifunctional creative hub was chosen as the winner of an international design competition.

The masterplan proposes an informal transformation of the 45.000m2 site into a dense neighborhood, incl. 8.000m2 existing factory halls, organized around a plaza for events.

Three new volumes will be added on top of the halls: The 11.000m2 ROCKmagneten consists of The Danish Rock Museum, The Roskilde Festival Folkschool incl. student housing, and the headquarters of the famous Roskilde Rock Festival.

They share program in a public creative communal house. The museum with a total of 3.000m2 will be completed as the first phase in 2014.

The site is located between Roskilde city centre and the Festival grounds of the annual rock festival. The brief demanded preservation halls of the former concrete factory Unicon and the informal character of the site which is currently used by artists, skaters and musicians.

How to organise liberty, creativity and informality? The main idea is to create contrast by preserving the existing fabric as much as possible and positioning the new volumes above the existing halls. The masterplan defines areas for future buildings and temporary pavilions around a large event plaza connecting the halls and the ROCKmagneten with the main street. As a result Unicon becomes Musicon.

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The old industrial halls will be insulated and opened for daylight but keep their rough character. The big open spaces inside the halls will then be interconnected and partly filled with elements of the ROCKmagneten’s public program and partly consist of ‘undefined’ space where temporary activities, events, exhibitions or the unplanned can take place. The halls function as the heart of the creative hub for the Musicon area.

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Three new volumes will be added on top of the halls. The Danish Rock Museum (3.000m2) is the main focus of the masterplan with a facade of gold colored spikes. The exhibition concept of the new museum is based on the rock star experience, like ‘the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust’. Visitors can arrive by limo on a red carpet, stand in line to get a ticket and then enter the main exhibition hall through a stage elevator. The descend down through the bar marks the exit of the museum. The foyer of the museum not only provides access to the whole ROCKmagneten but can also be used as an outdoor concert stage, performing to either the big event plaza or the halls.

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The Roskilde Festival Headquarter is an office block on top of one of the factory halls shaped as a stack of loud speakers with a black rubber facade. Some speakers are real and can be used for concerts on the plaza.

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The Roskilde Festival Folkschool will occupy one of the halls with rooms for lectures, study, lounges etc. positioned around an open space containing a fireplace. A 3-level circular volume on top of the halls contains 80 double rooms for students.

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The ambition is to create a green machine; based on the smart combination of proven technologies the buildings will act in accordance with the environmental vision of Roskilde Festival. The annual rock festival is the biggest in Northern Europe and organised as a charity which donates its profit. Bands such as U2, R.E.M., Coldplay, Pet Shop Boys, Prince, Rammstein and Robbie Williams perform to an enthusiastic crowd from all over Europe.

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MVRDV and COBE conceived the plan with Arup engineering, Wessberg engineers, LIW planning landscape architects and Transsolar for climate and energy.

See also:

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Alphabet Building by MVRDV	Comic and Animation Museum by MVRDV	Le Monolith by MVRDV