OMA: The Latest Architecture and News

“Forty years ago the public cause proved a powerful source of inspiration. Given the numbers of architects that chose to serve it, one might even speak of a common ground. In the age of the ‘starchitect’, the idea of suspending the pursuit of a private practice in favor of a shared ideology seems remote and untenable. In the context of the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, this exhibition hopes to provide a small contribution towards finding that common ground once more…” – OMA Partner Reinier de Graaf, August 2012

Throughout Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s, large public works departments employed architects to design a multitude of public buildings in an effort to serve the public cause. Reinier de Graaf describes this “heyday of public architecture” as “a short-lived, fragile period of naïve optimism – before the brutal rule of the market economy became the common denominator.”

Hot on the heels of the Jencks Award, yet another accolade is rumored to be coming Rem Koolhaas‘ way. The claims are flying about the twitterverse: OMA’s Koolhaas will be the next Director of the Venice Biennale.

American retailer Coach has commissioned OMA to develop a new merchandising system that accommodates Coach’s wide diversity of products while returning to the clarity of Coach’s heritage stores. Since establishing its first workshop 1941, Coach has expanded from a specialist leather atelier to a global distributor of “democratized luxury goods”. This expansion has clouded the clarity of the brand’s original library-like stores, which used a rigorous organizational system that categorically sort projects inside minimal wooden shelving at assisted counters. OMA intends to create a flexible, modular system that embodies the clarity of the original stores and responds to the individual needs of locale.

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OMA has released their 60-hectare master plan proposal for Floriade 2022 – the next occurrence of Europe’s largest horticultural expo that attracts an average of two million international visitors every ten years since it was established in 1960, which is currently open in Venlo. As part of a team that includes the province of South Holland, eight local municipalities and ARCADIS, OMA is helping Holland Central compete against three other cities within the Netherlands to become the next Floriade host.

Continue after the break to learn more.

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Earlier we shared with you these rough clips of the recently completed CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, filmed by Tomas Koolhaas as part of a feature length documentary film that he currently making about his father, Rem Koolhaas. In this short clip, Tomas Koolhaas interviews a homeless man inside the Seattle Central Library as an attempt to capture his unique experience within the glass and steel mesh walls of the famous public library.

Tomas Koolhaas studied at the Los Angeles Film School. Upon graduating, he spend ten years working as a cinematographer and has recently switched his focused more towards directing and writing. The documentary film, REM, is set to debut in 2013. Watch for updates here on the REM Facebook page.

UPDATE: In an e-mail to ArchDaily, a Sr. PR Manager at OMA told us that while Victor van der Chijs expressed his hopes that Turkey will host the Olympics in an interview with an Anatolia news agency earlier this month, OMA is not planning on opening an office in Turkey any time soon.

Enjoy this interesting footage captured by Tomas Koolhaas – son of Rem Koolhaas – in February 2012 of the recently completed China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters in Beijing. The monumental structure took eight years to complete and is OMA‘s first major building in China, as well as their largest project to date. The building is planned for occupancy later this year to broadcast the London 2012 Olympics. Check out our previous coverage for more building information.

Continue after the break to view a short clip inside the CCTV building during construction!

Today, in the industrial Zuidoost area of Amsterdam, construction begins on the new OMA-designed headquarters for the fashion brand G-Star RAW. Led by OMA partners Reinier de Graaf, Ellen van Loon and Rem Koolhaas, the project will consolidate G-Star RAW’s existing disparate facilities into a single 27.500m2 horizontal building.

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An OMA-designed temporary pavilion at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival was inaugurated today with a screening of Kanye West’s debut short film Cruel Summer. The pavilion, with a design led by Shohei Shigematsu, is a raised pyramid containing a seven-screen cinema invented by West’s creative team, Donda.

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The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture – a non-profit international arts space based in Moscow founded by Daria Zhukova – has unveiled plans for a new building in Gorky Park. Designed by OMA, Garage Gorky Park will renovate the famous 1960s Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year) restaurant, a prefabricated concrete structure that has been derelict for more than two decades. Garage is expected to complete and occupy this 5,400-square-meter building sometime next year, with plans to later expand to the nearby Hexagon pavilion (or Machine Pavilion).

Rem Koolhaas: “We were able, with our client and her team, to explore the qualities of generosity, dimension, openness, and transparency of the Soviet wreckage and find new uses and interpretations for them; it also enabled us to avoid the exaggeration of standards and scale that is becoming an aspect of contemporary art spaces.”

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After Mayor Bloomberg, Cornell President Skorton and Technion President Lavie announced Cornell’s victory over Stanford to build an eleven acre state-of-the-art tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the team has now tackled their next step in choosing six high-profile architecture firms competing to design the schools first academic facility.

Selected from over more than 40 firms from the U.S. and abroad, the finalists include Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Morphosis Architects, Steven Holl Architects and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Continue reading for more information.

Nearly two years after OMA was announced the winner of a two-stage international competition, the construction of the new Taipei Performing Arts Center has commenced. This ambitious project, led by OMA partners Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, generated a lot of debate among architects when it was announced back in 2009 due to its particular form. Morphed by a series of programmatic operations, the form intersects three types of theater in order to accommodate a variety of performances.

The Proscenium Playhouse, which seats 800, is expressed on the exterior as a large sphere while the other two theaters, respectively capable of seating 1,500 and 800, are represented as peripheric cubes. All the stage accommodations are brought together within the central cube, allowing for more flexibility as theaters can be used independently or combined, thus expanding the possibilities for experimental performances – an art that is very strong in Taiwan. At the same time, and in a similar way as OMA’s CCTV building in Beijing, China, a “public loop” channels circulation through the building, exposing the spaces that make the TPAC work, areas typically are hidden from the public but are as revealing as the performances themselves.

In this aspect, the building is like a machine at work with its engine exposed, somehow reminding me of OMA’s Prada Transformer – a machine-like building (the anti-blob) that changed its configuration to host different types of events.

The 180 million dollar project is set to be completed in 2015. More details, including sections and updated renders, after the break:

John Pawson, OMA, West 8 and Arup were all asked to come together to design The New Design Museum in London. Their design will accommodate up to 500,000 visitors per year. Notable for its superb complex hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof intended by the architects to symbolize a tent in the park, it is regarded by English Heritage as the second most important modern building in London, after the Royal Festival Hall. Plans to bring the new design to fruition is scheduled to be completed by 2014. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon discuss their design of the Rothschild Bank headquarters in London. Viewing the bank as a “dynamic system”, the main task was to create an “always efficient and always pleasant” machine that will accommodate all of the Bank’s London staff and reunite its connections with the city, including the St. Stephen’s Walbrook. OMA’s design for the New Court is the fourth iteration of NM Rothschild & Sons’ headquarters, all of which have been built on the dense and narrow medieval alley of St. Swithin’s Lane.

De Rotterdam is a unique multifunctional building on the shores of the river Maas on the Wilhelminapier in Rotterdam designed by Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) of Rem Koolhaas. Its remarkable mix of functions makes this building a true vertical city.

By following the construction for 4 years (January 2010 – end of 2013), Ruud Sies presents a photographic report on a very special project in the development of Rotterdam, one that also forms a link to the Wilhelminapier as a historic spot. The full report can be viewed here. More images after the break.

On October 19th Charlie Rose interviewed OMA founding partner Rem Koolhaas (his fifth appearance on the show). The discussion ranges from Koolhaas’ current interest in the countryside, rather than the city, his firm’s newly completed Milestein Hall project at Cornell University, and the launch of the book Project Japan: Metabolism Talks written with Hans Ulrich Obrist and edited by Kayoko Ota. Watch the interview here.