Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Wire: last week Dezeen reported on the opening of a new exhibition examining the creative processes of architecture practice OMA at the Barbican. Here’s what the critics have been saying about the show.

Writing in The Observer, architecture critic Rowan Moore describes the volume of exhibits on display as “opaque and baffling” before summarising the overall result as “a display of fierce energy and intelligence.”

In The Telegraph, the exhibition’s curators, Belgian collective Rotor, explain how they tackled the problem of representing architecture in an exhibition by presenting “a story of struggle and entanglement with the world as it really is, rather than with a world made to look good in pictures.”

In a review for Wallpaper magazine, Ellie Stathaki compares the stripped-back presentation style to a “construction site” before praising the exhaustive nature of the selection, which organises the exhibits around different aspects of the design process.

There are interviews with Rem Koolhaas filmed at the exhibition on Dezeen Screen and you can see all of our previous stories about OMA here.

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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

Here are some photographs from the exhibition Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto and currently on show at the Barbican gallery in London.

The show presents work by fashion designers including Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto alongside pieces from a new generation of designers that includes Tao Kurihara and Mintdesigns.

The lower gallery space is divided into four themed sections: In Praise of Shadows, Flatness, Tradition and Innovation, and Cool Japan, while the upper level houses dedicated spaces for each designer.

The exhibition continues until 6 February 2011.

Photographs are by Lyndon Douglas.

More stories about fashion »
More stories about Sou Fujimoto »

The following information is from the Barbican:

Future Beauty
30 Years of Japanese Fashion
15 October 2010 – 6 February 2011

Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion is the first exhibition in Europe to comprehensively survey avant-garde Japanese fashion, from the early 1980s to now. Japanese designers made an enormous impact on world couture in the late 20th century. Visionaries such as Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto redefined the very basis of fashion, challenged established Western notions of beauty, and turned fashion very firmly into art. Kawakubo’s protégé, the techno- couturier Junya Watanabe also features in the exhibition, together with the acclaimed Jun Takahashi, and the new generation of radical designers including Tao Kurihara, Matohu and Mintdesigns. Future Beauty opens at Barbican Art Gallery on 15 October 2010.

Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Centre, said: The great Japanese designers – Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto – changed fashion forever in the 1980s. The tight silhouettes of Western couture were jettisoned for new fluid shapes. Out went the magnificent ornament and extravagant techniques of the post-war tradition and in came a stark, monochrome palette and an entirely new decorative language – holes, rips, frays and tears – emerging from the stuff of fabric itself. I am delighted that Barbican Art Gallery is the first gallery in Europe to chart this fascinating and influential period in design history, as well as the first gallery in Britain to present the Kyoto Costume Institute’s legendary collection.

Curated by the eminent Japanese fashion historian Akiko Fukai, Director, the Kyoto Costume Institute (KCI), and designed by acclaimed architect Sou Fujimoto, with sound installation by Janek Schaefer, the exhibition explores the distinctive sensibility of Japanese design and its sense of beauty embodied in clothing. Bringing together over 100 garments from the last three decades – many rarely lent by KCI, some never seen before in the UK – the exhibition also includes films of notable catwalk shows and documentaries.

Future Beauty explores the work of these designers in relation to Japanese art, culture and costume history. The lower galleries are arranged into four sections: In Praise of Shadows; Flatness; Tradition and Innovation and Cool Japan. Each area focuses on a different characteristic that pervades the work of the featured designers.

The first section, In Praise of Shadows, takes inspiration from the seminal text of the same name written by acclaimed Japanese author Juni’chirō Tanizaki in 1933. In Praise of Shadows reveals the enduring interest in a monochromatic palette, and nuanced textures and forms prevalent in contemporary Japanese fashion which – Fukai argues – arise from a cultural sensibility attuned to light and shade and the power of black. It features pieces by Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto from their revered collections of the early eighties to their work from recent seasons, alongside garments by Junya Watanabe, Jun Takahashi and Matohu.

Flatness explores the simple geometries and interplay of flatness and volume in the work of Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo. This section includes a series of specially commissioned striking photographs by Japanese artist and photographer Naoya Hatakeyama.

In the next section the relationship between Tradition and Innovation is considered – from the radical reinvention of traditional Japanese garments and techniques, such as kimono and origami, to the technological advances in textile fabrication and treatment. It includes a series of paper garments by TAO, OhYa and Mintdesigns; Watanabe’s seminal autumn / winter 2000 collection Techno Couture; examples of Kawakubo’s deconstructionist work; as well as modern takes on traditional Japanese techniques and garments by Yamamoto, Kenzo and Matohu.

The final section in the lower galleries focuses on the phenomenon that is Cool Japan. Featuring works by TAO, Jun Takahashi for Undercover and Naoki Takizawa, for Issey Miyake, among others. Cool Japan examines the symbiotic relationship between street style, popular culture and high fashion. There are also a series of rooms showing catwalk collection films, interviews and Wim Wenders’ classic documentary on Yamamoto Notebook of Cities and Clothes.

The upper galleries of Future Beauty are dedicated to focused presentations on each of the principle designers in the show featuring a range of archive and recent works: Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, Junya Watanabe, Jun Takahashi and Tao Kurihara, as well as Mintdesigns and a number of emerging designers such as Akira Naka, Anrealage, Né-Net, Sacai, Somarta, Mikio Sakabe, and Taro Horiuchi.

Also included in the upper galleries are catwalk collection films, and a wealth of rare books, catalogues and magazines, which highlight Yamamoto, Miyake and Kawakubo’s collaborations with artists, photographers and designers.

Future Beauty: 30 years of Japanese Fashion, 15 October 2010 – 6 February 2011 is co-organised by Barbican Art Gallery and the Kyoto Costume Institute. It is curated by Akiko Fukai, Director/Chief Curator of the Kyoto Costume Institute and Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries.

The exhibition is supported by Wacoal Corp and Sumitomo Corporation Europe Ltd. Additional support for the KCI and Barbican exhibition is provided Shiseido Co.,Ltd. Media Partners: The Daily Telegraph and Dazed & Confused. The exhibition travels to Haus der Kunst, Munich, 4 March – 18 June 2011.

See also:

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The Surreal House at the Barbican	Ron Arad: Restless at the Barbican	The House of Viktor & Rolf at the Barbican

In our second of four films made to coincide with the Ron Arad: Restless exhibition at the Barbican in London, we asked Ron Arad (above, pictured while studying at the Architectural Association) about his upbringing in Israel and how he found himself working as a furniture designer in London. (more…)

London designer Ron Arad has created a polycarbonate version of his famous Well Tempered Chair for the forthcoming exhibition of his work at the Barbican in London. (more…)