In the late summer of 2010, the Belgian Pavilion became the undisputed talk of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Curated by Rotor, a young and daring Brussels-based design collective, the pavilion offered a beautifully sincere, irony-free study of the ways architecture ages and suffers under the strain of daily use. In the midst of an international Biennale that was frequently obsessed with the pursuit of brand-new buildings and gravity-defying, gymnastic forms, Rotor’s presentation stood out as a subtly radical display of reality.
The notoriety and critical acclaim Rotor gained with that breakout project helped secure its most prestigious commission to date: organizing a massive, sprawling retrospective of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Opening in October at London’s Barbican Art Gallery and running through February 19, the exhibition attempts to capture the manic pace, self-conscious nature, and perpetual motion of Rem Koolhaas’s legendary firm. Working on a project of this magnitude alongside Rem Koolhaas—who founded OMA in London back in 1975 alongside Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis—could not have been an easy undertaking. Even though OMA specifically chose Rotor to organize the show, Koolhaas appears constitutionally incapable of maintaining a hands-off approach.
Nearly all of the wall text in the exhibition, titled OMA/Progress, was written by the members of Rotor, yet it occasionally features handwritten annotations directly from Koolhaas himself. Considering the stark age difference between the curators and their subject—most of Rotor’s members are under the age of 40, while Koolhaas is 67—it is not difficult to read the resulting dynamic as something of an Oedipal production, a generational dialogue played out in public view on the gallery walls.
Incisive observers may interject here that OMA is not simply Rem, and vice versa. At any given moment, the firm operates as a collective entity with multiple partners—currently numbering seven, including Koolhaas. From its earliest years, OMA, as its intentionally bland and bureaucratic name indicates, has gone to great pains to promote the idea that it is fundamentally a collaborative office. As Koolhaas put it in a recent interview discussing the firm’s ethos, "It’s not purely my voice. It’s more of an orchestration."
One of the small, lingering pleasures of visiting the exhibition is reading the fine-print credits on some of the archival projects and being quietly reminded of all the major architectural talent OMA has cultivated and subsequently sent out into the wider architecture world over the decades. Those distinguished alumni include prominent figures like Winy Maas, Dan Wood, Amale Andraos, Bjarke Ingels, Farshid Moussavi, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and Minsuk Cho, among many others. At the same time, of course, Koolhaas remains among the brightest single stars in the global architectural firmament, possessing a blazing self-regard that matches his outsized influence.
One of the exhibition’s greatest strengths lies in the sidelong, conscientiously indirect way it approaches these complex themes. If it can occasionally be tough to parse the precise authorship of a physical OMA building, the exact same condition applies to the show itself. Rotor establishes its control over the proceedings not through heavy-handed, top-down gestures of curatorial authority, but by means of a strategically messy, agglomerative strategy. Koolhaas is permitted to contribute to this museum-world version of a Wikipedia page on OMA’s evolution, but he is ultimately just one of many would-be historians tweaking and modifying the text.
The visitor’s journey begins in the first two rooms, which feature densely arranged presentation boards that OMA itself produced over the years for many of its best-known projects. It is a clever way for Rotor to acknowledge that OMA, a famously self-critical office, has in essence been curating its own output for decades. But as it turns out, that hall of mirrors is something of a false start. After making your way through it—and walking past a specialized OMA gift shop—you suddenly come across a piece of unadorned, beat-up drywall that officially announces the exhibition, complete with a gallery guard stationed there to take your ticket.
The wall text at this second, true entry point begins with a surprisingly banal statement of curatorial purpose that cuts straight to the heart of the medium’s limitations. "The problem with architecture shows is that they can’t show what they promise: architecture," it reads, reviving a familiar complaint about architecture exhibitions that has been endlessly rehashed in professional circles in recent years. The text continues: "This exhibition gives an outsider view of the insides of a particular architecture office. OMA/Progress is a portrait that consists mostly of found materials, materials that exist for reasons other than this exhibition."
Yet, prominently displayed in the very next room is a historical note from Koolhaas to his architectural associates, which the curators point out was "found pinned on the kitchen wall of the OMA office in New York." Dated back to 1998, it includes a stern and characteristic admonition: "It is crucial that each of you take responsibility for the preservation, maintenance and, if necessary, repair of models, drawings and other evidence of architectural research."
There are certainly moments when this overarching curatorial strategy—raising an idea only to immediately undermine it, much as Koolhaas and OMA have done so frequently over the years—seems a bit too clever by half. Yet in the galleries that follow, as the exhibition snakes across two expansive floors of the Barbican, Rotor’s approach ultimately manages to produce a deft and fitting portrait of contemporary architecture’s most complex and influential firm. It captures an office that can seem simultaneously self-satisfied and deeply self-flagellating.
The resulting show is exhaustingly thorough. As architecture critic Rowan Moore wrote in The Observer, "Don’t expect to understand or even see it all. Nobody will, not even the people who made it." There are dedicated rooms exploring OMA buildings that literally move, such as the famous house in Bordeaux; spaces devoted to projects that were abruptly put on ice by the global economic crisis, like a vertiginous condo tower planned for Twenty-second Street in Manhattan; and designs that were dramatically modified to cut costs, such as Cornell University’s Milstein Hall.
Visitors will also find designs dominated by structural trusses, including the CCTV headquarters in Beijing and the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas. There are inside jokes scattered throughout, including squared-off stools made from the exact same blue foam that OMA uses for its intentionally crude study-models. Perhaps most overwhelming is a continuous slideshow that shuffles relentlessly through every single digital image—amounting to 3.5 million in total—stored across every one of the firm’s digital servers.
Tucked away within the installation is a small section the curators simply call the "secret room." Its walls are plastered haphazardly with raw documents found deep within OMA’s administrative files and its physical recycling bins. Among these, the most poignant is a written request by an anonymous young staff member, submitted nearly a year in advance, begging for just two days of vacation. Hanging nearby is an official Request for Qualifications (RFQ) mailed by Harvard University on June 30, 2008, noting with deadpan bureaucratic urgency that proposals were due back in "July 2008."
That relentless, manic pace—along with the inherent complexity of contemporary architectural practice—is something that OMA has embraced from its earliest days, incorporating it directly and strategically into its professional output. As if to visually and conceptually illustrate that idea, the exhibition includes the presentation boards for an ill-fated OMA proposal for Universal Studios in Los Angeles, which had been commissioned by media executive Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
The accompanying descriptive text of the scheme, written by the firm itself, compares the Universal job to other famous architecture built for corporate America, most notably Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Seagram Building in New York, which was an earlier commission from the Bronfman family. The text notes: "It soon became apparent that the commission was less straightforward than it seemed. Where in ’54 Seagram was a single entity with a clear identity that would be relatively stable during the five-year minimum that any architectural enterprise takes from beginning to end, that was no longer the case: by the mid-’90s, the substance and nature of any corporation was in constant flux, if not turmoil."
This volatile environment is precisely the cultural landscape for which OMA has always designed its buildings, and it is the very same atmosphere that Rotor has so energetically attempted to recreate inside the halls of the Barbican. Forget the crystal-clear, utopian Modernist dictates that once drove Mies van der Rohe; architectural flux and corporate turmoil have become the defining muses for our modern age. Whether or not that shift ultimately counts as progress remains an open question, but it appears to be precisely the way OMA likes it.
