Shohei Shigematsu: The Latest Architecture and News

This June, the Roppongi Museum in Tokyo is hosting an exhibition titled "Miss Dior: Stories of a Miss." Designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu, the display presents the 78-year legacy of the renowned Miss Dior perfume, which was launched alongside Dior's revolutionary "The New Look" in 1946. Organized as a journey through seven rooms, the exhibition design features not only the perfume and related memorabilia but also explores the various inspirations and collaborations that have shaped its cultural significance.

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OMA’S inaugural tower in Tokyo and Japan, designed by Shohei Shigematsu and OMA New York, the Toranomon Hills Station Tower, will open this fall, 2023. The inauguration of the Toranomon Hills Station Tower will mark a significant milestone in Mori Building's Toranomon Hills development, an emerging global business center, and urban hub. A multi-layered transportation node integrated into the tower will establish a new gateway linking Central Tokyo with the rest of the world.

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The Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) has announced that it will welcome its first visitors on the 25th of May, 2023. Revamped and expanded, the new campus designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu in collaboration with Cooper Robertson features “new work of signature architecture, the Jeffrey E. Gundlach building, and extensive renovation to existing buildings”.

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The Harajuku Quest, designed by Shohei Shigematsu and OMA New York, represents a renewed commercial and cultural center in the Harajuku district of Tokyo. Located on a site in between Omotesando and Oku-Harajuku, the building is the newest phase of NTT’s “With Harajuku”, a larger urban development that aims to facilitate the flow of people through a series of squares and commercial areas. Harajuku Quest plans to draw people and activities from both Omotesando and Oku-Harajuku and connect the two areas for the first time. Construction is expected to complete in 2025.

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Architecture offices OMA, led by Partner Shohei Shigematsu, and Jacobs have unveiled the design for the new headquarters for the Discovery Partners Institute, part of the University of Illinois System. The building is planned to anchor an innovation district at “The 78”, along the Chicago River. The eight-story building, located on a one-acre site southwest of the Loop, will provide more than 200,000 square feet of office, classroom, lab, and event space for DPI and its university and industry partners.

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OMA / Shohei Shigematsu, together with artists Charlotte Taylor and Nicholas Préaud, created a series of NFTs inspired by an underwater sculpture designed for the ReefLine project. Commissioned by Aorist for its climate-forward NFT marketplace, the video NFT Coral Arena unfolds a virtual narrative of the monument, simulating the evolution of the future physical artwork from an abstract object to being the support of an underwater ecosystem. The NFTs were unveiled during Miami Art Week, and proceeds from their sale will be donated for the completion of the ReefLine project.

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OMA and Shohei Shigematsu have designed a proposal for Miami Beach’s first underwater sculpture park and artificial reef in Florida. Working with Ximena Caminos and BlueLab Preservation Society, the project will function as an artificial reef to protect and preserve Miami’s marine life and coastal resilience. Called ReefLine, the design will be a new 7-mile underwater public sculpture park, snorkel trail and artificial reef located off Miami Beach’s shoreline.

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OMA and designer Shohei Shigematsu have released the design for 10,000 sq. feet of new and renovated galleries for the Denver Art Museum (DAM). The project is part of the phased reopening of the newly renovated Gio Ponti-designed Martin Building. OMA's work is done within the building’s original footprint, and the project is part of an overall campus reunification and building renovation project led by Machado Silvetti and Fentress Architects.

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Where does originality and independent thinking come from? The answer is prosaically straight forward – from an inquiring individual, and an experimental environment wouldn’t hurt to stimulate it. Rem Koolhaas is credited with fostering such an environment, both through building his practice, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), a 300-architect network of seven global offices, and teaching at Harvard’s GSD, as well as lecturing all over the world. Koolhaas now has eight partners. One of the eight, since 2008, is Shohei Shigematsu who heads OMA New York since 2006. The studio originally numbered just a handful of people and over the years has grown into a large practice of 75 architects with a focus on projects in North America.

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Renowned auction house Sotheby’s has unveiled a dramatic OMA/Shohei Shigematsu-designed expansion and re-imagination of their New York City headquarters. Together with OMA Associate Christy Cheng, Shigematsu has redesigned the headquarters to include vast new exhibition galleries for fine art, precious objects, luxury goods, and more. Comprising 40 galleries of varying size across four floors, the new space will increase Sotheby’s exhibition space from 67,000 square feet to 90,000 square feet.

In the proposal, nine galleries will facilitate discreet private sales for dedicated small objects such as watches and jewelry. Three two-story spaces will be set aside for exhibitions, along with a 150-foot-long space for full collections, according to The New York Times. The new space will include “dynamic repertoire” of "spatial conditions", including a white cube, double height, enfilade, corridor cascade, octagonal, and an L-shaped space.

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OMA has unveiled its first residential tower for New York. Located at 121 East 22nd Street, the building sits at the intersection of two neighborhoods, with the busy Madison Square area to the North-West and the relative tranquility of Gramercy Park to the South. The building's facade reflects this duality, with a striking "prismatic corner" of glass contrasting the rest of the building's more conventional window layout. The corner element is designed to frame views, in some places directing users' attention up towards the sky and in others along the busy streets below.

Artist Taryn Simon in collaboration with OMA/Shohei Shigematsu has designed An Occupation of Loss, a major new performance work choreographed around an OMA-designed monumental sculptural setting consisting of 11 concrete wells. Located at Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and co-commissioned by the Armory and Artangel, London, the performance piece focuses on “the anatomy of grief and the intricate systems that we devise to contend with the irrationality of the universe.”

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Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery has selected OMA to expand and refurbish the historic museum and its campus. The project team is being lead by OMA New York’s Principal, Shohei Shigematsu, who will spend the next year in partnership with the museum and in consultation with the community on how to renew and revitalize the august institution. Known as AK360, the building will be OMA’s first art museum project in the United States, and the Albright-Knox’s first expansion in more than a half-century. According to the museum, the project’s name is a reflection on this being the institution’s third expansion in its 154-year history, in addition, it establishes an embrace of public feedback and the acknowledges the condition of being encircled by parkland.

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With the conclusion of this year’s Met Gala, on Thursday the public will have their first look at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new spring show, "Manus x Machina". According to the museum, “[the exhibition] will explore [an] ongoing dichotomy, in which hand and machine are presented as discordant tools in the creative process, and question the relationship and distinction between haute couture and ready-to-wear.” Occurring in the museum’s Robert Lehman Wing, a 1975 expansion by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, the exhibition design has been developed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA New York. Organized by Andrew Bolton, the Curator of The Costume Institute, the exhibition will feature over 100 samples of “haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear, dating from an 1880s Worth gown to a 2015 Chanel suit.” Read on for a small preview of the exhibition, fashion, and spectacle of Manus x Machina, on view from May 5 - August 14.