I think the title is a huge joke that RK is playing on all of us, 'cause I havent found much meaningful "content" there. Sort of like when John Lennon mixed "Revolution 9" under the pretense that The Beatles could record complete nonsense and people would still buy their records.
I saw the exhibition a few weeks ago in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. It pretty much sums up the way OMA works; chaotic, rigoreus and non-conformist. Shitloads of blue foam models, materials and AMO diagrams.
What clearly stands out that every writer in the mag, tries to write like Rem. And they never come close to the master.
I really liked the test about Mies and the IIT project.
I havent seen the exhibition but like the book. The article on the OMA + H&deM collaboration was very interesting - how working with OMA changed H&deM and how working with H&deM changed OMA.
Some background information on the H&deM - OMA collaboration provided by my boss who was a critical bystander during his OMA years:
the girl who wrote the article provides us a romantic look at the project, in real life the situation was way worse. He said it was the most inefficient project done at OMA, literary months of work were thrown in the garbage can and they had to start from scratch again.
i don't know....rem can be interesting, but anything he "writes" seems to just consist of a hell of a lot of scanned pictures and some light commentary. he has, however, opened up the commentary to a lot of places most people didn't even know existed before (pearl river delta, etc.)
"Photo from opening day of the OMA 'Content' show at the Kunsthal Rotterdam by OMA"
May 27, 04 3:58 pm ·
·
sent to design-l 8 May 2004:
Received CONTENT (the new Koolhaas book) in the mail a couple hours ago. Looked through the whole thing page by page once so far. After doing that I realized that CONTENT inside looks exactly like i-D magazine of 20 years ago. The only difference is that i-D is still better at its delivery of content.
[i-D, the worldwide manual of style, a sort of 'underground' fashion magazine that started coming out of London August 1980, and is today more a mainstream, albeit still 'avant garde' fashion magazine.]
I still have my collection of i-Ds from the mid-1980s, and I'll keep on keeping them (especially since they are still so up to date). I doubt I'll still own CONTENT 20 years from now, however.
[reenactment note 356.38976 -- remember how Koolhaas' delivery of CONTENT essentially reenacts i-D's delivery of content 20 years ago. I wonder if Koolhaas even knows he was following the "manual of style"? I seriously doubt it. Just thought of a new working title: From Euphrates Cat To Copy Cat.]
The "Editor's letter' of CONTENT by Brendan McGetrick suggests that "remaining at home [is] torturous," thus it is obvious the editor here doesn't know that remaining at home is the grand luxury of being virtually famous.
The books "style" is a non-issue, in my opinion. It's not designed to be "avant-garde" (a word very uncomortable when coupled with i-D magazine) or anything for that matter. It just aims to look "transparent" -having the style of fanzines, unskilled desktop publishing and web-related imagery- the look we are used to "in the real world".
At the same time it stands out from the shelves filled with dogmatically designed architecture books, which are mainly skillfully crafted fetishes, objects to be owned and shown. Content "just" delivers the message, with an ironic smirk. Selling pages for advertisements and using very low-quality paper and binding to achieve a price that makes the book/mag easy to purchase AND to discard after it has done it's job, adds to the effect of something with CONTENT more than surface. And the content is good.
May 28, 04 7:03 am ·
·
At the IN YOUR FACE symposium at NYU 29 September 2001, featuring Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas and others, I questioned Venturi about his unsureness regarding 'content' when it came to building facades that were also screens that present electronic imagery—Venturi pioneered this idea back in the 1960s with an unexecuted design for the Football Hall of Fame. My point was that if architects design buildings where (some of) the facades are screens, that it might also be the 'job' of the architect to provide the content to be 'screened', or at least provide some sort of direction to how the screen facades might be fully utilized. After a full exchange with both Venturi and Scott Brown, the moderator of the symposium asked Koolhaas if he had any additional thoughts on this topic, to which Koolhaas replied, "I am not interested in discussing 'content'." Koolhaas has since then obviously changed his mind because the whole theme of the Koolhass/OMA/AMO exhibit presently at Berlin, and the title of Koolhaas' forthcoming book, is indeed CONTENT.
It was soon after late September 2001 that http://www.quondam.com , a virtual museum of architecture, began defining itself as "architecture as the delivery of content." I wonder what the current Koolhaas/OMA/AMO exhibit whould have been themed/named if I hadn't attended IN YOU FACE.
thanks quondam for your efforts to put 'content' into koolhaas' work
i actually think that this book is really good, have gone thru 50% of the pages yet, and the piece on the IIT campus is really cool, also the piece on the bangkok project
and the colloboration with HedM looks like such a piece of crap
Just curious, but is his book pronounced "content" as in "I am content with my fate."? Or, is it pronounced "content" like "Most high school kids who act like they are professionals at Photoshop and Flash would be hard pressed to present any worthwhile content on their web sites whatsoever."?
Content
So... what do people think of Koolhaas's Content?
I think the title is a huge joke that RK is playing on all of us, 'cause I havent found much meaningful "content" there. Sort of like when John Lennon mixed "Revolution 9" under the pretense that The Beatles could record complete nonsense and people would still buy their records.
I bought both Content and Revolution 9.
I saw the exhibition a few weeks ago in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. It pretty much sums up the way OMA works; chaotic, rigoreus and non-conformist. Shitloads of blue foam models, materials and AMO diagrams.
What clearly stands out that every writer in the mag, tries to write like Rem. And they never come close to the master.
I really liked the test about Mies and the IIT project.
I havent seen the exhibition but like the book. The article on the OMA + H&deM collaboration was very interesting - how working with OMA changed H&deM and how working with H&deM changed OMA.
Some background information on the H&deM - OMA collaboration provided by my boss who was a critical bystander during his OMA years:
the girl who wrote the article provides us a romantic look at the project, in real life the situation was way worse. He said it was the most inefficient project done at OMA, literary months of work were thrown in the garbage can and they had to start from scratch again.
A brilliant book in my opinion. The most important book on architecture in this century so far.
i don't know....rem can be interesting, but anything he "writes" seems to just consist of a hell of a lot of scanned pictures and some light commentary. he has, however, opened up the commentary to a lot of places most people didn't even know existed before (pearl river delta, etc.)
someone posted this to the image gallery:
"Photo from opening day of the OMA 'Content' show at the Kunsthal Rotterdam by OMA"
sent to design-l 8 May 2004:
Received CONTENT (the new Koolhaas book) in the mail a couple hours ago. Looked through the whole thing page by page once so far. After doing that I realized that CONTENT inside looks exactly like i-D magazine of 20 years ago. The only difference is that i-D is still better at its delivery of content.
[i-D, the worldwide manual of style, a sort of 'underground' fashion magazine that started coming out of London August 1980, and is today more a mainstream, albeit still 'avant garde' fashion magazine.]
I still have my collection of i-Ds from the mid-1980s, and I'll keep on keeping them (especially since they are still so up to date). I doubt I'll still own CONTENT 20 years from now, however.
[reenactment note 356.38976 -- remember how Koolhaas' delivery of CONTENT essentially reenacts i-D's delivery of content 20 years ago. I wonder if Koolhaas even knows he was following the "manual of style"? I seriously doubt it. Just thought of a new working title: From Euphrates Cat To Copy Cat.]
The "Editor's letter' of CONTENT by Brendan McGetrick suggests that "remaining at home [is] torturous," thus it is obvious the editor here doesn't know that remaining at home is the grand luxury of being virtually famous.
The books "style" is a non-issue, in my opinion. It's not designed to be "avant-garde" (a word very uncomortable when coupled with i-D magazine) or anything for that matter. It just aims to look "transparent" -having the style of fanzines, unskilled desktop publishing and web-related imagery- the look we are used to "in the real world".
At the same time it stands out from the shelves filled with dogmatically designed architecture books, which are mainly skillfully crafted fetishes, objects to be owned and shown. Content "just" delivers the message, with an ironic smirk. Selling pages for advertisements and using very low-quality paper and binding to achieve a price that makes the book/mag easy to purchase AND to discard after it has done it's job, adds to the effect of something with CONTENT more than surface. And the content is good.
At the IN YOUR FACE symposium at NYU 29 September 2001, featuring Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas and others, I questioned Venturi about his unsureness regarding 'content' when it came to building facades that were also screens that present electronic imagery—Venturi pioneered this idea back in the 1960s with an unexecuted design for the Football Hall of Fame. My point was that if architects design buildings where (some of) the facades are screens, that it might also be the 'job' of the architect to provide the content to be 'screened', or at least provide some sort of direction to how the screen facades might be fully utilized. After a full exchange with both Venturi and Scott Brown, the moderator of the symposium asked Koolhaas if he had any additional thoughts on this topic, to which Koolhaas replied, "I am not interested in discussing 'content'." Koolhaas has since then obviously changed his mind because the whole theme of the Koolhass/OMA/AMO exhibit presently at Berlin, and the title of Koolhaas' forthcoming book, is indeed CONTENT.
It was soon after late September 2001 that http://www.quondam.com , a virtual museum of architecture, began defining itself as "architecture as the delivery of content." I wonder what the current Koolhaas/OMA/AMO exhibit whould have been themed/named if I hadn't attended IN YOU FACE.
It would probably have been named CONTENT.
thanks quondam for your efforts to put 'content' into koolhaas' work
i actually think that this book is really good, have gone thru 50% of the pages yet, and the piece on the IIT campus is really cool, also the piece on the bangkok project
and the colloboration with HedM looks like such a piece of crap
quondam - you got jokes.
wow.
maybe we owe the last ten years of architecture completely to quondam. in your face, venturi!
Just curious, but is his book pronounced "content" as in "I am content with my fate."? Or, is it pronounced "content" like "Most high school kids who act like they are professionals at Photoshop and Flash would be hard pressed to present any worthwhile content on their web sites whatsoever."?
in true rem. both are correct. right?
Haha, yah, I think you are right! :)
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.