Other people's involvement at OMA is at precisely the heart of this topic. They've grown immensely from what they were pre-2000 to the stable brand they are now but so many people are in the mix now contributing their own interpretations and visions that OMA can never again be what people discovered first in S,M,L,XL.

I don't think we're really talking about a setting sun or sinking ship but more a natural mechanical blossoming of the business apparatus behind a great designer of our time. No matter how we may feel about Shenzen vis a vis Kunsthal (I personally find myself more critical of their work these days) Rem's relevence in contemporary design discourse and influence on the present future of architecture cannot be denied.

seeking-out-the-risk: a very impt thing to recognize, shock me. and something that i hadn't thought about in quite that way.

I too like that analysis. I think that was why he was so drawn to NYC early in his career as it was the 20th century pole of architectural risk-taking. Many New Yorkers may take this for granted. Consequently, the office mantra in the early 2000s was "go east." For someone so fascinated with the modern rise of the Manhattan skyline he must feel like a child in a sandbox for the first time.

...and if Rem's work is to be read in this light, the conclusion is that in the coming decade, OMA is actually building the final chapter of Delirious New York. Though we hold a fondness for the first photographs we ever saw out of Europe, they were mere sketches. Asia and the Middle East are giving him more space (literal and figurative) to take the build his own literary analysis of the urban context.

"BUT IT DOES NEED DEPTH. and the anti-oma building is pretty shallow. neat. but shallow. a one-liner."

The Cellophane house was not presented as the anti-OMA by KTA, rather by someone in this thread. I don't know that it is the anti-OMA, but I'm sticking on this issue of sophistication.

The house might be shallow in the categories you deem important for sophistication, but might be deep in other categories which you maybe dismiss. Just because the two houses I mentioned address one specific problem, that of a change in manufacturing process, does not make them "one liners", at least not to me: in fact, I think they have much depth, although it may not be solely in the "design".

As for soul-less, I will reserve judgment until I actually see the Cellophane house for myself, but the Loblolly house is by no means soul-less. And as far as risk, taking on engrained methods of production, with long established industrial and financial interests behind them, is also a risk in its own way.

yeah but emilio, my friend, i live in japan where prefab as part of everyday home-building world is 30 years old at least (more if you count the timber-frame stuff which is done off-site, labeled and assembled in a day or two) and way beyond cellophane. seriously, the technology of prefabrication just cannot be about the technology or assembling of parts any more, no matter what the ambition is with making things green and all the rest. a few of the projects in the exhibition seem to be heading beyond that, but the particular example seems to be barely a step past what the eames' did.

prefab is used here in most standard housing and has been for decades - factory made, shipped and assembled then modules plugged together. incredibly sophisticated technology for earthquake resistance etc.

but very little sophistication in terms of the human side of architecture, and especially the planning which is for me much the harder and the more important. so i feel pretty comfy with the critique. if you want to blow my mind with pre-fab it will have to be about more than the fab aspect.

loblolly is much better than cello project, fer sure. not my thing still, mostly because i find the planning a bit out of touch, but that is a taste thing and not something i can defend really.


the risk readiness is a nice way to look at oma indeed. i know a few people who were there when the office changed structure, and from what i understand rem basically decided to change the work he went after in a very conscious way.

the office went corporate in certain ways, but i think they are very interesting for persisting in taking on the capitalist market from the other side of the fence so to speak. one of the oma partners gave a speech at ULI last year here in tokyo and totally blew the presentation cuz it was all about concept stuff that the money people thought was load of horse-shit from what i gather. by contrast pelli's japanese partner in crime here in tokyo did a lecture not so long ago that the crowd seemed to be quite happy with. he knew how to talk to the money. don't know what that is evidence of, but it sure did highlight to me how very different oma still is from the standard corporate office players...

ok, so you're hard to impress...ok, so you live in To-kee-o, where houses made out of frigging plastic sheets is already old hat...ok, so Japan is 30 years ahead...so excuse me. Maybe KTA want to take on the US building industry, not the Japanese, and maybe that's a start. you claim that TKA do not implement the human side in their pre-fab...I respectfully disagree with you..

I was wondering why that house was labeled as the anti oma. It seems to be very much a classic case-study era modernist project. The only difference is the plastic was substituted for glass. But then, window systems are always prefabed and delivered onto site anyway.

The formula seems to be this: errect steel structure, crane on enclosure panels, voila! Am i missing something here? How is that any different to how any unitized curtain wall project is assembled?

The funny thing is is that there's lots of prefabbing going on throughout the construction industry. If there is a saving to be gained by the contractor by prefabricating elements of a project, they'll do it. They'll just do it because it make financial sense. The only issue is that most prefab projects are based on timber framing (cheaper than steel, lighter, crane not needed) and look like a suburban house (peaked roof, arches, columns ... whatever) cus that's how folks like their houses to look.

The KTA project is very much one of those architecty prefab dreams, that doesn't really line up with the reality of housing markets. For example - if your lot is 1/2 an acre because it's out in the suburbes - why build a 5 storey house? Why build tall and incur the expence of steel when you could have it all be two storeys and use wood and metal studs?

What happens to the concept if the people living in that house want a solid wall or two, so their not constantly flashing the neigbors?

The main gain of this prototype is the speed at which it can be assembled ... but is slow construction really a worry to the market these days? And what about the cost? Is it really viable financially?

Also - it looks highly dubious from a sustainabilty perspective ...

I love this quote on their websit:

"While we tend to think of buildings as permanent, they are in fact only a resting state for materials, a temporary equilibrium that is destined to be upset by the entropic forces that drive the physical universe. "

uh ok ... so shouldn't they be talking about how the house can be disassembled, how parts cen be reused and resold.

i think they do talk about that, j-turn, just maybe not right there.

Yeah, they talk about it all the time, see their book, for example.

The steel framing system on the Cellophane House is not custom designed for pre-manufacture by KTA. Instead, KTA adapted a commercial steel scaffolding system into service for this proof of concept. Part of the intent of the house is to not fall into this one-off "pre-fab" or "factory-built" bull that everyone falls for. Just FYI.

*cringe*


4) technofetishism / generative components / scripting? maybe. if you add patternmaking and 2d-graphical architecture

*double-cringe*


Certainly the question of how much real, practical, independent influence inhabitants can have on space remains hugely unresolved. All the attempts Ive seen since the 80's, noble as they were, seem to have almost unanimously failed, at least in spirit. Im not sure what the reason is, technical problems, legal problems, social hesitancy, the idea may just be premature. I mean you can do prefab, you can even get to some radical self-organizing robot new babylon, but if real people in the real world dont have the time, energy, or desire to make independent changes to the spaces they inhabit I dont see the reward for all the effort. I think to this point OMAs been pretty real about the state of things, that you influence the way people live by changing the relationships between spaces. Ive loved the OMA projects Ive seen, theyre totally solid, exiting too.


But I'll be frank, theyre built for a generation of people that arent used to having real freedom and control over their environments. I wont pass political judgment, the guy is alot smarter than I am and I dont think its really about that anyway. But theres a one-directionality to it, where Rem makes programmatic decsions for us and we the little people just accept his genius and comply. I dont think thats enough. I mean theres this ocean of intellectual territory out there, and when Im in those buildings I feel like Im choking. Dont get me wrong, I feel the same way about Mies, I think theyre both brilliant, but theres an opportunity for so much more.


Real life isnt about control and program and commercialism. I dont care what anyone says.

"The KTA project is very much one of those architecty prefab dreams, that doesn't really line up with the reality of housing markets."

The whole point is that it's trying to buck the reality of housing markets and the production of buildings. Whether they will succeed is another matter altogether.

But enough about KTA, this thread is about OMA (and not MOMA).

lol, emilio. yeh, i am a pretty skeptical bugger its true, but only when architects claim to be doing more than they actually are. if there were no background to the KTA project i would say nice project, but for the rest....not convinced. feels a bit hollow, really.

thing is with oma is they don't claim to be doing shit. that isn't on the agenda. no world saving ambitions at all as far as eye can see. for which oma might be critiqued, perhaps. rem has an answer to that of course. but the approach also means there is nothing to argue about. which i quite like.

in the late 80's i bought ed mazria's solar powered home book. totally blew me away. was one of the reasons i went to architecture school in fact. after awhile i came to understand that as much as ed was able to make efficient homes he was entirely incapable of making them look or feel liveable and was mostly just catering to the fringe crowd. essentially just the people who already buy the idea, the self-selectors. which is why projects of this kind of technique-based fantasia need to be much much deeper. they in fact have to be BETTER than the common crap, and on more than a technical level. not only to architects but to everyone else out there. like open plan homes, they have to speak to the modern way of living or there are not going to be many takers.

i see the same thing going on with the pre-fab stuf. much of it gets you to nice pre-fab, but it doesn't get us anywhere else. the point of pre-fab seems to simply BE. which is cool. but that has already been done. i just want more. and i don't see why after all these years no one is trying. certainly the off-the-shelf cradle to cradle idea of the plastic house is a nice start, but it doesn't take is very far does it?

but anyway, my main critique was that it was offered as the replacement/opposition of OMA and i was writing in that context. on its own the building is fine. not amazing or new, but fine. i was more impressed by the other projects in the exhibit though.



interesting take on OMA, oe. i can totally understand your point.

one of the things that i find most inspiring about trad Japanese architecture is that without a person inside it the architecture has no meaning at all. literally, the functions are not set in the rooms until a person occupies it and says this is the bedroom, living room, whatever. and it can change constantly because there is no furniture that is not movable really. bedroom livingroom diningroom guestroom are all the same room or none of the above. its very powerful. in western vision of architecture the architecture exists whether a person is there or not. the purpose is sculptural almost, an object that requires space but not inhabitation. people are optional frankly.

in our own work we try to imbue some of that japanese ambiguity and casualness into the architecture, without getting rid entirely of the sculptural quality. the goal is to be cool without being obnoxiously so and to make buildings that really need people in them to make sense. the designer really should fade to the background as quickly as possible. not easy to do, but i think leads to interesting possibilities...or not. i am still working on the idea.

The risk-seeking argument stated above is right on (is that Messrs Novel et Lauf's latest nom du guerre?) coupled with Rem's first love of Socialist agendas and extreme control/no-control issues. Super - my one sentence summation of a man's career, pre-packed with all the other deep insights. I aspire to that level of risk-taking, aussi

//main point/////But why are we pretending that he's doing it all by himself. Doesn't OMA have cadres of designers and theorists (not to mention partners) on staff? It doesn't scale - that he oversees all proposals coming out of the offices, all the time. Witness the

witness the...?

i think rem keeps pretty fine control of content. from talking with those who work for him it certainly seems like he knows what is going on and is directing the office pretty firmly...that could be spin mind you.

...witness the desolation that was Carthage?*

I wouldn't know to call it spin, or just shop talk. We hear a lot of shop talk.
Example. "years ago I interned for a regional starchitect who went mad and designed door thresholds. She made me wear underwear on the outside of my trousers"