OMA/Progress at Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2011-2012 

 

OMA, one of the most influential architecture practices functioning today, Co-founded in 1975 by Rem Koolhaas as the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, it comprises of seven partners, staff of around 280 architects, designers and researchers and support staff in offices in Rotterdam, New York, Beijing and Hong Kong. The exhibition is curated and designed by the Belgium-based collective, Rotor. Rotor decided to show OMA as a firm which is globally proactive and progress-oriented, rather than retrospective, hence ‘OMA in progress’. Rotor commented on the challenge of designing an architectural exhibition saying ‘the problem with architecture exhibitions is that they can’t show you what they promise: architecture’.

There are two entrances to the exhibition, one of which is a previously closed entrance, which was meant to be the public route through the galleries. This route allows visitors to enter free of charge, and pass through while seeing some of the exhibits, and the OMA shop. The shop is positioned centrally; the interpretation of this space suggests the complex relation between commerce and culture in design. The design of the free space differs from the space inside as this content and form for exhibition design was found on OMA’s server, and is displayed as is like a document, without Rotor interpreting the content. This information though in nowhere in this space and was only given in an interview, hence does not provide a context to the visitor.  Does this mean that the visitor not paying for the exhibition be served pre-made marketing/branding content? And that critical content is only for the paying visitor?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The exhibition is split in two levels, the ground floor is dedicated to OMA’s ‘Current Pre-occupations’ while the upper floor displays various projects that OMA has accomplished in the last 35 years. These exhibits are divided into thematic galleries such as materials, movable building parts, urban studies and the like. With 450 objects, and countless text and images, it is a lot to take in and digest. The galleries display finished models side by side with rough prototypes, conceptual sketches.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Current pre-occupations galleries give us insights into of some of OMA’s partners thoughts and their ruminations about the current state of architecture and society, another room shows us live feeds of images from their current sites all around the world, displaying quotes from various employees. The ‘Secret room’ is a quirky addition, the room consists of documents collected for a month from waste paper baskets from OMA’s offices, correspondence with clients, acquisitions lists, all pasted on the wall (confidential material has been blacked out), as though giving us an insight into the mysterious side of the practice. This is only a gimmick as the information does not add to debate on architecture. On the other hand, found cutting such as ‘Architects the sexiest profession’ help us understand the preoccupations of an architect’s mind, and their egos. The upper floor has models of iconic projects along with concept sketches, material explorations for the projects, and the final drawing all on the same level of information. The delivery of the test is though captions at stuck to the floor, or to fixed to walls with glue or staples, this makes reading unpleasant and tedious, audio and documentaries are part of the narrative, but at time seem to break the flow. This kind of delivery makes the process obvious, without assigning weight to the various processes involved, which for a non-architect could be confusing.

In between the two floors is a large screen which plays a plays a video on a 48-hour loop which Rotor made by collecting all the images from the OMA server. There are 3.5 million images in the entire video.[1] However, this simply seems to be a gimmick, as these images do not communicate anything in terms of meaning or added value except their bulk. The same effect could be achieved if one connected the Google images server to the video feed. Architecture critic Rowan Moore of The Observer, in his review on OMA/Progress writes...

‘...It does not present, as some architecture exhibitions do, a series of projects to be contemplated and understood. Architecture is rather seen sidelong. A problem of architectural exhibitions is that their subject is the background of life, but must become foreground for the purposes of a show’.[2]

 

In an interview with Marteen Gielen founder of Rotor, Marcel Mauer questions the exhibition style Rotor used, Marteen Gielen explained that their approach to design of the space was pragmatic, they would rather spend more time on research of content than on the design of the space, hence height adjustable table and some of the existent built structure was used. Lighting was important hence more time was allocated to it.  There is an attempt to show the process and finalised image side by side simply as documents, thus removing the persuasive context of the OMA marketing team.

The explanation to the basic style of exhibition design suffices, very often a choice needs to be made between emphasis on content design or form design, and Rotor clearly chooses content here, as essentially their approach to the exhibition is about archival research and selection. I do agree that Lighting was well taken care of as barbican is a rather dark place with its grey walls, and with such a text and image heavy exhibition, good lighting is a need.  I do wonder if OMA had designed the exhibition themselves, they would have chosen to neglect the ‘form’ of the exhibition.  

 

The visitor’s can also spill out onto the Barbican’s Sculpture Court, which shows a 1:1 footprint of OMA’s new Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow.

 

The exhibition gives us a glimpse of how a large body of work is conceptualised and executed, essentially like a machine that generates architecture. It does convey the new architectural practice is no longer just about buildings, is about branding, being pro-marketing, research, analysing terabytes of data and extensive PR. To support a large architectural firm like OMA, one needs a strong AMO team to publicise them. The exhibition content comes across as collected not selected, and the narrative misses a critical, analytical aspect. There is a lot of content, which overwhelms; it is as  though the curators have left the curating of content to the visitors, asking them to choose what they would like to engage with, and make up their own minds about what OMA stands for. This approach of exhibiting could work well for a general exhibition on architecture, not for a body of work by a single firm, even if their projects are numerous and varied. As an architectural exhibition, one does expect more attention to form and detail, hence shabby furniture and captions are not acceptable, here the excuse being more time was allocated to content. The exhibition does not leave us with an understanding of what OMA is progressing towards, just a lot of information on everything related to architecture and OMA.

 

[1] Botazzi Roberto, ‘Casting a critical eye over OMA’s oeuvre’ in architectural review, 31st October 2011. http://www.architectural-review.com/reviews/casting-a-critical-eye-over-omas-oeuvre/8621652.article

 

[2] Moore Rowan, ‘OMA/Progress- Review’, in ‘The Observer’, 9th October 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artand design/2011/oct/09/rem-koolhaas-oma-progress-barbican?newsfeed=true