What they weren’t trivializing or coarsening with commerce, railroad executives were simply neglecting. Whether desperately or cynically, they seemed to understand that redevelopment of their money-losing, nine-acre station would be more palatable if the public could be made to forget the glories of Mr. McKim’s original design. Pink granite walls were allowed to turn gray. Straw-colored travertine looked nicotine-stained. Jules Guerin’s murals disappeared under veils of grime. — nytimes.com

Rem Koolhaas/OMA will design The Factory, the proposed £110 million (approx. US$166.3 million) Manchester Arts Centre in England. Koolhaas won the commission ... over fellow starchitects including Zaha Hadid, Mecanoo, Grimshaw Architects, Rafael Viñoly, DS+R, and Haworth Tompkins. [...]

Named after the Manchester-based record label, The Factory is described as a cutting-edge, flexible cultural institution that ... will also be a major component in the cultural redevelopment of the city. — bustler.net

The question to be addressed by confronting these different types of ‘enclaves’, is of the role of architect and the scarce influence of the architectural practice to affect the social realm. The intangible architectures that emerge from these urban ecologies create a wider system; an archipelago of enclaves can be found from one place to another, from one epoch to the next one — dpr-barcelona

“Money is not an issue here” is the motto that leaps out at you in both the Prada and Vuitton Foundation museums, although in Paris it is thrown into high relief on the building’s facade by the almost vulgar silver logo of Louis Vuitton—the star company in the LVMH group. — The Art Newspaper

The design is relatively straightforward and free of OMA’s usual quirky structural tricks, once you get past the sliding entrance portals. Plywood-lined steps...lead you to an educational area, where visitors can explore the Garage digital archive, and back down the terraced levels of a bookshop. Up on the main gallery floor, there’s a big open space, currently filled with ping-pong antics...When the building is finally completed in [Sept.], a big red staircase will lead up to an open roof-deck. — The Guardian

Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Museum for Contemporary Art is due to open the doors of its new $27m home in Gorky Park to invited guests on 10 June and the public two days later. The museum is housed in a Soviet-era pavilion that has been converted by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas [...].

In another riff on the building’s architecture, Garage will be hosting a conference in October on Soviet Modernism, a project of the Austrian curator Georg Schöllhammer [...]. — The Art Newspaper

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas talks to SPIEGEL about the new Fondazione Prada museum he designed in Milan, the danger of turning cities into historical Disneylands and his desire to raze an entire neighborhood of Paris. [...]

Koolhaas: Before the 1980s, the decisions were made by cities. Since then power has shifted toward private investors. Nothing good has come of this for Holland. [...] I regret that cities no longer have money to even pursue a vision of their ongoing development. — spiegel.de

Filmmaker Wes Anderson has a knack for creating fictional spaces with attention paid to the last excruciating detail. His latest space is real, though, and even better, you can get a drink there. [...]

Three new buildings, which were part of a century-old distillery and transformed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, will now house art rather than alcohol. But for the thirsty there’s also a new bar, called Bar Luce, that Anderson designed himself. — qz.com

Seventy years after the end of the war, Berlin is finally filling the last gaps left by Allied bombs, which destroyed more than two-thirds of the buildings in the city center. Architects say the construction boom offers Berlin a chance to make up for decades of bad planning and mediocre architecture. “This is a new time in Berlin,” says Libeskind [...]. “It’s one of the great cities of the world, and we expect it to compete. We don’t expect it to be some backwater.” — bloomberg.com

After years of delays, Amsterdam RAI is getting its own hotel and with its 650 rooms, Nhow RAI will win the title of largest hotel in the Netherlands. The design of the building was chosen from eleven candidates and is designed by Rem Koolhaas from well-known Rotterdam architecture firm OMA. [...]

Among the features will be a virtual 3D holographic meeting space for having “in person” meetings with the holographs of people in another location. — nltimes.nl

Some of the spaces are as Mr. Koolhaas found them; others have been reconfigured but look as though they haven’t been touched. The three new buildings are made of glass, white concrete and an aluminum — NYT