Archinect - News

OMA's 'anti-iconic' Bordeaux bridge design wants to be more than just a bridge

2024-07-12T18:08:00-04:00

Archinect has received photos of the newly opened Simone Veil Bridge, designed by OMA/Rem Koolhaas and Chris van Duijn in Bordeaux, France. The project spans 549 meters (1,801 feet) in length and is 44 meters (144 feet) wide, connecting the communes of Floirac and Bègles over the Garonne River.

Photo by Clement Guillaume, courtesy OMA

OMA said this about their unusual bridge programming: "It abandons any interest in style, form, and structural expression in favor of a commitment to performance and an interest in future use by the people of Bordeaux. Cars, modes of public transportation, and bicycles all have their own lanes, with the largest by far dedicated to foot traffic. The width of the bridge’s platform is doubled to create 28 meters of neutral, unprogrammed space that can be used for any cultural or commercial purpose, such as farmers’ markets, art fairs, bicycle rallies, car club meetings, and festivals for music or wine."

Photo by JB Menges, courtesy of Bordeaux Metropol

Part...

OMA Conversations

2024-05-13T21:09:00-04:00

the drawing for (Parc de) la Villette...was based on very definite sources...Of course...it was no gigantic leap if you were familiar with those Belgian cartoons. Willem-Jan Neutelings would always draw these little cartoons for the buildings he made, certainly when he opened his own office...The other inspiration was a painter in Chicago named Roger Brown, who made these tip-up paintings—all his scenes were using that perspective—and he was influenced by Italian 13-14th Century painting.

In collaboration with Drawing Matter, Architect Richard Hall is publishing a 6-part series based on twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Most of the image material is from the in-house project archive of OMA at the Rotterdam office and/or the personal archives of its previous members and the Drawing Matter Collection.

AMO design for the Prada 2024 FW Men's Show stages nature against an invasive interior environment

2024-01-21T08:00:00-05:00

AMO’s latest collaboration with the fashion industry went on display recently as part of the 2024 FW Prada Men's Show, held on January 14th at the Fondazione Prada for Milan Fashion Week.

For the presentation, AMO and partner in charge Rem Koolhaas created a scenographic imitation of an outmoded office environment set against an outer landscape that appears to audience members from beneath a transparent platform stage as though an “analogue projection among the many digital images that saturate one’s life today.”

This theatrical blending of nature and its opposite keys to the brand’s stated desire to produce clothes that reflect the spaces and seasons surrounding them. It, of course, also pays homage to design trends apparent in the latest examples of corporate architecture.

“In the space of the Deposito an improbable encounter takes place: chaos and order, reality and fiction, predictability and spontaneity – seemingly opposite elements – engage in a game of collaboration, a syne...

OMA's Taipei Performing Arts Center officially opens

2022-08-08T15:54:00-04:00

The new Taipei Performing Arts Center by OMA has opened to the public in the city’s Shilin Night Market. Led by Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, the project comprises three theaters: a spherical 800-seat Globe Playhouse, a 1,500-seat Grand Theater, and an 800-seat Blue Box, connected to a central cube.

Previously on Archinect: OMA's role-defying new theater design debuts in Taipei

The cube houses the stages, backstages, and support spaces of the theaters, which allows the Grand Theater and the Blue Box to come together to form a Super Theater.

Image © Shephotoerd Co. Photography, courtesy of OMA

Image © OMA

The Globe features a unique proscenium that supports experimentation with stage framing. The opaque façades of the theaters juxtapose the animated and illuminated central cube that is clad in corrugated glass.

Image © Shephotoerd Co. Photography, courtesy of OMA

Image © OMA

A landscaped plaza sits beneath the central cube, which is lifted off the ground to accommodate t...

OMA's role-defying new theater design debuts in Taipei

2022-05-16T13:20:00-04:00

New photos have been released of the recently completed Tapei Performing Arts Center by OMA.

Now a part of the capital city’s Shilin Night Market, the new Center houses two 800-seat theaters and a larger 1,500-seat venue in addition to support areas all connected by a centralizing cube-like form that OMA founder Rem Koolhaas thinks will free both patron and performer from a stultifying industry-wide trend.

Image: © OMA by Chris Stowers

“Theater has a very long tradition. We have seen contemporary performance theaters increasingly becoming standardized, with conservative internal operation principles. We want to contribute to the history of the theater,” Koolhaas explained in a statement. “Here in Taipei, we were able to combine three auditoria in a particular way. We are interested to see how this architecture will have an impact in terms of extending what we can do in theater.”

Image © Shephotoerd Co. Photography, courtesy of OMA

Photos reveal the cubic ...

Qatar will receive three new museums from a trio of Pritzker Prize winners

2022-03-28T19:24:00-04:00

Three new major museum projects were announced yesterday at the 2022 Doha Forum in Qatar.

Qatar Museums Chairperson Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani was on hand to premiere the new initiative, which is meant to kick off the next phase in the country’s development goals propelled by a continued investment in the cultural economy.

Al Mayassa was joined by two-thirds of the architects for the museums: Jacques Herzog of Herzog & de Meuron, who will design the Lusail Museum, and ELEMENTAL director Alejandro Aravena, whose firm will be responsible for the Art Mill. OMA’s Rem Koolhaas, who will design the new Qatar Auto Museum, was the lone holdout.

The Art Mill represents the 21-year-old ELEMENTAL’s first foray into the museum typology. Envisioned as a fusion of performances spaces, contemporary art galleries, and dedicated areas for artist residency programs, what was formerly the site of a historic flour mill will now be transformed into an anchor for various Qatari c...

OMA adds a bit of firm history into its design for the new Amex Centurion card

2021-08-13T17:05:00-04:00

A tiny new addition to Rem Koolhaas and OMA’s famed catalog will be launching in the USA in September after a successful European launch earlier this year.

The new Centurion Card design is a collaboration between the Dutch studio and American Express aimed at updating the bulletproof old metallic versions of the card that have been on the market since 2005.

The Boompjes project, Stefano de Martino at OMA

The card’s design is based on the original plan for Boompjes, the never-realized Rotterdam redevelopment project that Koolhaas counts as the first major commission in his home country. Amex came across the Boompjes designs (which feature prominently in several different museum collections including the MOMA) after approaching OMA with the project in 2019. The design was originally centered around the Roman theme that has been synonymous with the company since its inception in America in the late 1950s.

The design is taken from a 1982 silkscreen triptych rendering designed by Koolha...

'Countryside at the United Nations' by Rem Koolhaas + AMO opens in New York

2021-06-16T12:40:00-04:00

AMO, the research, branding, and publication studio of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has taken over the fences of the United Nations headquarters in New York for a public exhibition that serves as a continuation of Countryside, The Future.

Curated by architect and OMA founder Rem Koolhaas and AMO director Samir Bantal, Countryside was originally presented in February 2020 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition presented research gathered by AMO over five years, bringing together discussions from scientific, sociological, artistic, and political spaces. It set out to define and explore the contemporary “countryside” of the “98% of the Earth’s surface not occupied by cities.” Countryside, The Future was unfortunately shut down just three weeks after its opening due to the coronavirus pandemic but continued after the museum reopened.

Previously on Archinect: See photos from "Countryside, The Future" at the Guggenheim Museum

This new showcase, informed by ...

Countryside: The Future and the Past

2021-01-26T20:48:00-05:00

It is no exaggeration to say that our present is the future that Dorothea Lange’s images foretold. The crisis of agriculture in the face of toxic capitalism and climatic disaster that is at the center of her famous photographs might also have served to focus and sharpen "Countryside: The Future," where it is occasionally a subject but more often merely an unstated subtext.

In "Countryside: The Future and the Past," Deborah Gans reviews Countryside: The Future, at the Guggenheim Museum, the multimedia culmination of years of interdisciplinary, globe-spanning research led by OMA's Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal, director of its think tank, AMO, alongside Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures, curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister at the Museum of Modern Art, the first solo show devoted to the celebrated documentary photographer in more than half a century.

Although the exhibitions are very different in scale, ambition, and emotional tenor, each is propelled by the efforts of vastly different urban artists and professionals to document and comprehend historical transformations in rural life. Together they offer an intriguing counterpoint: one body of work is determined to remain detached; the other is driven by political commitment.

'Countryside, the Future' through the post-pandemic lens

2020-11-06T13:35:00-05:00

Certainly New Yorkers’ revaluation of the countryside had begun long before the “Decameron”-style outflows of remote-working urbanites and their families, fleeing the coronavirus last spring. [...] The phrase “farm to table” has been a cliché for years, and Park Slope idealists long ago exported their Marie Antoinette rural fantasies to the Hudson Valley.

With the coronavirus eating its way through America's hinterlands and the election unmasking a deeply entrenched urban-rural ideological divide, NYT art critic Jason Farago takes a second look at the Rem Koolhaas-starring exhibition Countryside, the Future which opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum back in February — only to close again three weeks later due to the unraveling pandemic.

"What 'Countryside' does is take seriously the contention that all avant-gardism gets commodified, that dissent is always co-opted, and that under such conditions you might want to get out of town," Farago writes.

Related on Archinect: Koolhaas in the countryside

Rem on post-pandemic architecture

2020-05-15T13:00:00-04:00

“Our entire profession is geared toward the values and demands and needs of human beings,” [...] “But all over the world, these huge mechanical entities are now appearing. They are typically enormous, typically rectangular, typically hermetic.” [...] “We need to conceive of architecture that accommodates machines and robots, maybe as a priority,” Koolhaas says. “And that then investigates how robots and human rights might coexist in a single building.”

Rem Koolhaas his thoughts on how architecture as a discipline might change in the post-COVID-19 era, as social distancing, automation, and anti-urban attitudes begin to take hold.

Koolhaas tells TIME's Belinda Luscombe, “It would be opportunistic if I said either, I told you so, or, basically, You can now tell that [cities] are actually really dangerous environments to live in,” adding, “I think that it’s simply slightly reinforcing the argument that it’s incredibly important to begin to look not necessarily away from cities but at the neglect of the countryside.”

See photos from "Countryside, The Future" at the Guggenheim Museum

2020-02-27T18:46:00-05:00

The architecture world has been abuzz lately over the recent public opening of Countryside, The Future, the new exhibition taking place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).

Let's take a look at some of the photography from the blockbuster exhibition.

Installation view of the Guggenheim Museum rotunda. Image by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

The exhibition makes use of the museum's continuous spiral design to display a wide range of materials. Image by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

The Rotunda oculus, filled with large-format information displays. Image by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

The exhibition is co-organized by OMA co-founder Rem Koolhaas, OMA's research arm AMO and its director Samir Bantal, Guggenheim Museum Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives Troy Conrad Therrien, and a vast team of researchers and interns hailing from the Harvard Graduate Schoo...

Justin Davidson scorches Rem's "Countryside"

2020-02-25T14:36:00-05:00

Welcome to “Countryside, the Future”: This is what you might get if you asked a celebrated European philosopher-architect to reinvent the Iowa State Fair. No mess, no smells, just acres of color printouts, cryptic homilies about nature, and a couple of pesticide-spraying drones. Did you know that agriculture is increasingly computerized?

New York Magazine's architecture critic, Justin Davidson, takes a no-holds-barred look at the Countryside, The Future exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The exhibition, developed by a research and exhibition team led by OMA/AMO and Rem Koolhaas, explores "radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories [...] or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities."

Regarding the exhibition, Davidson writes, "Given that the countryside is a site of radical reinvention, how is it possible that there are, as one wall text suggests, virtually no books about it? That’s a profound mystery, or would be if you ignored the tens of thousands of volumes published in recent years about, say, wilderness, farming, fishing, nature, the environment, small towns, communes, rural populism, folk cultures, indigenous peoples, land management, wildlife management, hunting, water, winemaking, and deserts … not to mention suburbs."

...

Koolhaas in the countryside

2020-02-14T13:21:00-05:00

The Office of Metropolitan Architecture's (OMA) much-anticipated exhibition, Countryside, The Future, is set to open next week at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

The exhibition, according to the museum website, explores "radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories collectively identified here as 'countryside,' or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities, with a full rotunda installation premised on original research."

The exhibition is organized by OMA co-founder Rem Koolhaas, AMO director Samir Bantal, The Guggenheim's Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives Troy Conrad Therrien, and others. It features research and contributions from students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Wageningen University, Netherlands; and the University of Nairobi.

According to a recent article in The Guardian from UK architecture critic Oliver Wainwright, Koolhaas got the idea for the exhibition ...

See new views of OMA’s first NYC building, with 'prismatic' details

2019-05-30T18:02:00-04:00

The new L-shaped residential building at 121 East 22nd Street represents Rem Koolhaas's architecture firm OMA‘s first ground-up Manhattan project; developers Toll Brothers City Living have released new photos of the eye-catching structure on the border between the Gramercy and Madison Square Park neighborhoods, highlighting its unique design. The new condominium residence is comprised of two blocks that straddle an existing tower, the 11-story School of the Future, constructed in 1915. The building’s north tower has two interlocking planes that meet to form a distinct, three-dimensional corner. The 13-story south tower features an “undulating grid of punched windows” overlooking 22nd Street.

Photo by Laurian Ghinitoiu for OMA

According to the architects, the building’s three street fronts and presence in two neighborhoods presented an opportunity for multiple viewpoints that referenced Cubist artwork. The north tower in particular shows the meeting o...

“I can only look at the decision to leave the EU with disbelief”: Rem Koolhaas wants to show the EU's positive impact on Britain

2019-05-24T16:26:00-04:00

I am determined not to talk about Europe in terms of crisis or anxiety. I hope that the forces that allow Europe to continue developing constructively can coalesce and collaborate. But it would be foolish to make any predictions about what will happen next. For the first time in my life I don’t understand what is going on in Britain.

With all the uncertainty surrounding Britain's future, Rem Koolhaas recently shared his thoughts with The Guardian on how he watched the country improve when it first became part of the European Union. In light of the EU elections to encourage people to vote, Koolhaas took part in the Eurolab initiative to show how EU and Europe has made a positive impact on Britain. “As someone who experienced this transformation on a day-to-day basis I can only look at the decision to leave the EU with disbelief,” Koolhaas says.

Artist and OMA co-founder Madelon Vriesendorp is "architecture's lost heroine"

2019-04-08T15:35:00-04:00

“For us, [Vriesendorp] has always been a central figure in the production of architectural ideas and discourse,” says Eva Franch i Gilabert, the director of the AA. Between 1982 and 1992, Vriesendorp taught at the AA. In 2015, the school hosted her 70th birthday. “She is a seminal voice of the institution,” Franch says. “She is all about opening up people’s imagination, regardless of age, disciplinary labels or expertise.”

When accepting the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize that recognizes women who have made significant contributions to architecture, the 2018 winner Madelon Vriesendorp shared of having to defend her legacy. Like many women in the profession, the artist and co-founder of OMA has been written out of the script even having one of her most famous paintings Flagrant Délit, which shows two skyscrapers in bed together, often associated with her husband Rem Koolhaas.

Vriesendorp almost didn't accept The Architectural Review's award she tells Nell Card of the Guardian. “I was going to refuse it. I thought: I didn’t do anything for architecture. But then I thought I could make it a bit political: I could make an argument for women who haven’t been recognized.”

The Dutch artist has been hesitant about her role in the field, having spent most of her career sidelined by the male architects of OMA. But, Vriesendorp is now becoming the headliner, with numerous honors and dedicated retrospectives that br...

The Boompjes project, Stefano de Martino at OMA

2019-02-25T00:03:00-05:00

There was no programme, there were no plans. It was a tectonic exploration of form, articulation and presence—the gratification to work on a form by virtue of its own rules: scale, proportions, aspect, consistency.

"The triptych itself started with an A3 drawing of the building, gradually expanding it with the growing context and plot. Rem came with the idea of featuring different aspects of the whole project in one drawing. I devised a series of overlays floating over the main image to visualize all kinds of information. An otherwise classic aerial view became a multilayered panoply of information, a mash-up of scales and techniques.'

OMA (1975), triptych, Boompjes Tower Slab, 1982. Colour silkscreen print, 716 × 1216 mm. Silkscreener: Bernard Ruygrok.

"Rem wanted to show the building as you drove past it. Following the curves you would see the building from many different angles. From there I invented a set of perspectives that I called ‘autogrammes’. They show the building unfolding and collapsing as you drove toward it and swerved away over the bridge. Another diagram explains the transparency of the slab/tower and how the slanted towers reflect the water back into the city. In addition ther...

Rem Koolhaas' theories on Junkspace are the inspiration for this Synth-pop album (and music video!)

2019-02-02T21:29:00-05:00

Seventeen years after publishing his thoughts on 'Junkspace' in October Journal, Rem Koolhaas is seeing his theories reprised through an unexpected medium. The Tempers, the New York-based Synth-pop band, dedicated their latest album to Koolhaas' cynical paper in which he defined much of contemporary architectural production and consumption as Junkspace, the "residue mankind leaves on the planet."

Screenshot from Love at the Mall, by the Tempers.

The music video for The Tempers' song, Love at the Mall, begins with a clip of Koolhaas speaking in an interview about the text: "The essence of shopping is to eliminate reality as much as possible." It then follows the loose narratives of CGI mannequins, plastic flamingoes and synthetic palm trees in a sparse mall setting, adopting several of the themes of Koolhaas' text, such as alienation, conspicuous consumption and artificiality.

Other songs on the album, including Air Conditioner, Desire and All That is Solid Melts into Air dive deepe...

Concrete Utopia

2018-11-14T09:22:00-05:00

In the construction of the new Yugoslavia, modernist thinking and design were deployed to guide the country’s rapid urbanization and industrialization as well as to unify the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse population.

In columnist Belmont Freeman's latest article for Places, he examines the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and finds a rigorous and revealing survey of Yugoslavia’s extraordinary built legacy that until now has been neglected by mainstream architectural historians.

OMA Partner Ellen van Loon on openess in architecture and women in the profession

2018-10-01T15:09:00-04:00

Yet it is Ms. van Loon’s innate sense of openness that allows her to think freely, particularly as a woman in a male-dominated profession. She said she had seen an improvement in the number of women in the profession, along with the increasingly important roles they play, and their influence on the design of buildings. [...] “Now at OMA, we’re 50/50 men and women, though let’s hope there are a few more female partners in the future."

The New York Times introduces OMA's only female partner, Dutch architect Ellen van Loon, who recounts her first fascination for Rem Koolhaas and looks at some of her recent high-profile projects, such as the new Qatar National Library, Rijnstraat 8 in The Hague, and the recently completed 'Blox' museum/office/gym/restaurant/residential complex in Copenhagen.

Oliver Wainwright on OMA's new Copenhagen Blox building: "missed opportunity for Denmark"

2018-05-02T14:25:00-04:00

OMA’s Blox project stacks a museum, offices, gym, restaurant and housing in a provocative attempt to condense the thrilling energy of a city into a single structure – but the result is a gloomy glass monolith [...] It is OMA’s first ever playground, and it doesn’t look as if having fun comes naturally.

Photo: Rasmus Hjortshøj – COAST

The Guardian architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, reviews OMA's new 'Blox' building in Copenhagen, and it's easy to see that he isn't a fan. Like at all.

"From the outside, it doesn’t look promising. Far from suggesting unpredictable intrigue, the building exudes the off-putting sense of a generic corporate office block," Wainwright writes and concludes his critique of this "missed opportunity for Denmark" with a nod to a similarly sized—but bright and joyous—stacked-big-blocks building by Danish OMA offspring, Bjarke Ingels' Billund Lego House.

OMA completes “Torre” vertical gallery in the Fondazione Prada arts compound

2018-04-19T14:33:00-04:00

Today OMA announced the completion of Torre, the third new structure the firm has completed in the Fondazione Prada arts compound, a former gin distillery in Milan. Standing at 60 meters tall, the white concrete Torre is a vertical art gallery that “is devoted to the development of a new typology for the exhibition of art”, OMA describes.

Photograph by Jacopo Milanesi, Courtesy of OMA.

With Rem Koolhaas, Chris van Duijn, and project architect Federico Pompignoli, as project leads, Torre features a facade with alternating glass and concrete surfaces. The building has nine levels, with each one designed with different spatial parameters and variations. The ceiling height cumulatively increases with each floor, from the bottom to the top of the building.

“[R]ectangular plans alternate with wedge shapes, the orientation of the rooms alternates between panoramic city views to the North, or narrower views in opposite directions, East and We...

OMA’s massive Qatar National Library officially opens

2018-04-17T14:20:00-04:00

The Qatar National Library in Doha officially opened its doors on April 16th. Designed by OMA, the new building encompasses the National Library, the Public Library, the University Library, and the Heritage Collection, which consists of valuable texts and manuscripts related to the Arab-Islamic civilization.

Photograph by Iwan Baan, Courtesy of OMA.

At 42,000 square meters, the library is conceived as a single room which houses both people and books.“We designed the space so you can see all the books in a panorama" said Rem Koolhaas. "You emerge immediately surrounded by literally every book – all physically present, visible, and accessible, without any particular effort. The interior is so large it’s on an almost urban scale: it could contain an entire population, and also an entire population of books.”

Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti, Courtesy of OMA.

Photograph by Hans Werlemann, Courtesy of OMA.

According to the firm, the edges of the building are...

OMA’s MPavilion 2017 moves to new permanent home at Monash University

2018-03-06T14:49:00-05:00

A long summer season with well over 100,000 visitors and 477 free events over 133 days recently wrapped up for the OMA-designed MPavilion 2017 in Melbourne.

The structure will now commence a new, more permanent life after it has been announced that the pavilion will move from its temporary site at the Queen Victoria Gardens to a new home at Monash University in Clayton, a Melbourne suburb.

Photo: John Gollings. Image courtesy of MPavilion.

Conceptualized by Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, this is the fourth MPavilion in a series of six to be gifted to the City of Melbourne by Australian philanthropist Naomi Milgrom.

Previous pavilions designed by Sean Godsell, Amanda Levete of AL_A, and Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai have found permanent homes at the Hellenic Museums, in Docklands, and in Melbourne Zoo.

Photo: Timothy Burgess. Image courtesy of MPavilion.

"We are pleased that OMA’s MPavilion 2017 will be relocated to one of Melbourne’s universities; places of knowledge and debate," s...

OMA reveals renovation plans to transform the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow

2018-02-20T13:42:00-05:00

OMA/Rem Koolhaas have released plans for their redesign of Moscow's New Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val. As one of Russia's largest museums, the space hosts 20th century Russian and Soviet art including works by Malevich, Kandinsky, Chagall, and Soviet artists such as Aleksandr Deyneka and Vera Mukhina.

Image courtesy of OMA.

Image Courtesy of OMA.

Since 1985, the gallery has sat in a large modern building designed by N.P. Sukoyan and Y.N. Sheverdyaev that consists of multiple exhibition halls for a total floor area of 61.091m². OMA's redesign will create four distinct sections of the museum—a space for art storage, an Education Center, room to house the collection, and a Festival Hall. The renovation will also focus on creating a new entrance along the Moscow river and carefully placed cutouts in the façade will open up the interior spaces to the city.

Image courtesy of OMA.

The redesign will be OMA's third cultural project in Russia, having previously worked on ...

The Invention of Wessex: Thomas Hardy as Architect

2018-02-13T14:08:00-05:00

There is a good case for listing Thomas Hardy amongst the greatest of all conceptual architects — the prophet, well before the fact, of a particular type of speculative, imaginary architectural project which would boom a century later.

The 19th-century author Thomas Hardy has never been considered much of an architect. Yet as Kester Rattenbury shows, his creation of Wessex was an architectural project - one that drew on the ideas of his time, but also predicted some of the most inventive architectural work of our own age. Hardy saw rural England through an experimental, modern frame, and his Wessex Project was as radical in its time as Learning from Las Vegas and Delirious New York were in theirs.

The Power of Smallness by Aina Coll Torrent

2018-02-08T00:24:00-05:00

MONU magazine's current issue #27 on "Small Urbanism" shows how small things can have a great impact on city life and planning, exploring themes such as micro-occupations as political protest, urban furniture to recover public spaces and fight criminality, acupunctural interventions for refugee settlements or tiny models used for military strategies.

There are architectural spaces that capture you through their smallest details. Almost five years ago, I visited the Crematorium building by Asplund in the Woodland Cemetery, in Stockholm. After crossing the artificial landscape along a seemingly introverted building, I remember entering a forecourt, grabbing a beautiful door handle and entering a waiting room before reaching the chapel. A wooden bench was softly emerging from the wall, like a curved silk fabric, oriented towards a long window to an enclosed courtyard. The warmth of the space, enhanced by the metaphor of a domestic carpet and the rounding and softness of the corners, was suddenly disturbed by the image of a very small window which was framing very precisely the artificial hills and trees that were guiding the visitor when entering the site. The feeling of connection to an endless outside world condensed in a window was, somehow, sublime.

View through the window at the Woodland Crematorium, by Erik Gunnar Asplund....

Cooper Robertson tapped as executive architect for New Museum expansion

2018-01-25T18:36:00-05:00

Last year, the New Museum announced that Rem Koolhaas and Shoehei Shigematsu would be heading the institution's expansion that will nearly double their footprint in New York. The contemporary art museum has been situated at 235 Bowery in a building designed by the Japanese firm SANAA since 2007.

Shortly thereafter, the museum bought a neighboring six-story masonry building that has since housed their incubator programs. As part of the expansion, the museum plans to connect the two, adjacent structures while overhauling 251 Bowery for an additional 50,000 square feet of galleries, improved public circulation, and flexible space for the institution’s experimental programs.

In collaboration with the design architects at OMA New York, Cooper Robertson has been selected as the executive architects for the expansion. Spearheaded by partner Scott Newman, FAIA, and senior associate Andrew Barwick, RA, this commission is the latest in a long line of notable museum projects by the firm, whos...

Ready to wear Rem's 'frontpack'? Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron reinterpret nylon for Prada

2018-01-22T16:31:00-05:00

In her latest interpretation of the material, Prada asked the architects Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron — with whom she collaborates regularly — to design something in nylon for the show, and to select another talent from their field to do the same. They chose, respectively, the German designer Konstantin Grcic and the French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. T spoke to each of them about their designs.

Prada just wrapped up its anticipated fall/winter 2018 show, which the fashion powerhouse held in a converted warehouse in Milan, designed by AMO.

"The building is organized in sectors that each correspond to a specific theme," a Prada statement describes the venue conversion. "Boxes, crates and all the other objects that colonize the warehouse are marked with a series of ambiguous symbols that express the multiplicity of the Prada identity. Classical themes like idealized accessories, gizmos, mascots and recurring motifs of the collections are transformed into emblems that hint at the content of the crates."

'Prada Warehouse' by AMO. Credit: AMO.

Noteworthy moments of the fall/winter collection were the collaborations with architects Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron, contributing designs that interpreted this year's theme: nylon.

Frontpack by Rem Koolhaas. Image: Prada.

Frontpack by Rem Koolhaas. Image: P...