OMA/PROGRESS. Barbican announces major OMA exhibition this October

The exhibition promises to be a reference has been made public, the next exhibition of OMA.

The Barbican Art Gallery in London has announced a major exhibition this October on OMA, with the theme of PROGRESS. The exhibition will be guest curated by Rotor – a collective based in Brussels, known for their recent exhibition in the Belgian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. Working with material processes and their use and re-use in architecture, Rotor’s approach will yield fresh insight into both the built projects and conceptual work of OMA and AMO.

The exhibition will explore the radical conceptual, formal and material qualities in the built work of OMA – the result of an unpredictable combination of rigorous research and pure intuition. Acclaimed OMA buildings like the Seattle Central Library (2004) and Casa da Música, Porto (2005) will be examined in new ways together with the office's current projects, which include the headquarters of China Central Television (CCTV), Beijing, and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (both of which are nearing completion). Recent AMO projects to be interrogated include a blueprint for a Europe-wide renewable energy grid, a curatorial masterplan for the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and Strelka, a new postgraduate school which the office helped to set up in Moscow. These various projects and preoccupations reveal OMA's complex attitude towards the idea of progress - a crucial ingredient in the practice of architecture but an increasingly problematic notion today.

Rem Koolhaas, founding partner of OMA, says: "This exhibition will be the first time OMA's work has been shown in depth in the UK. We have chosen to surrender to the forensic abilities of Rotor in order to produce a new translation and consideration of what we (try to) do in architecture and beyond it. We are excited to use the unique spaces of Barbican Art Gallery to reflect the extreme diversity of OMA’s work – in building, researching, writing, and a host of other pursuits that are at the same time intricately connected and apparently random…"

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REM KOOLHAAS

Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944. He began his career as a journalist, working for the Haagse Post, and as a set-designer in the Netherlands and Hollywood. He beganHe frequented the Architectural Association School in London and studied with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University. In 1978, he wrote Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, which has become a classic of contemporary architectural theory. In 1975 – together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp – he founded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture).

The most important works by Koolhaas and OMA, from its foundation until the mid-1990s, include the Netherlands Dance Theatre at The Hague, the Nexus Housing at Fukuoka in Japan, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais of Euralille and Lille, the Villa dall’Ava, the Très Grande Bibliothèque, the Jussieu library in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Seattle Public Library.

Together with Koolhaas’s reflections on contemporary society, these buildings appear in his second book, S,M,L,XL (1995), a volume of 1376 pages written as though it were a “novel about architecture”. Published in collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer, Bruce Mau, the book contains essays, manifestos, cartoons and travel diaries.

In 2005, with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman, he was the founder to the prestigious Volume magazine, the result of a collaboration with Archis (Amsterdam), AMO and C-lab (Columbia University NY).

His built work includes the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Foundation Headquarters (2018), Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris (2018), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015/2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003). Current projects include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester.

Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and is a professor at Harvard University, where he directs The Project on the City, a research programme on changes in urban conditions around the world. This programme has conducted research on the delta of the Pearl River in China (entitled Great Leap Forward) and on consumer society (The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Taschen Verlag has published the results. Now is preparing a major exhibition for the Guggenheim museum to open in 2019 entitled Countryside: Future of the World.

Among the awards he has won in recent years, we mention here the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000), the Praemium Imperiale (2003), the Royal Gold Medal (2004) and the Mies Van Der Rohe prize (2005). In 2008, Time mentioned him among the 100 most influential people of the planet.