Nearly all of the wall text in the exhibition, titled OMA/Progress, was drafted by Rotor, but it frequently bears the handwritten annotations of the 67-year-old architect. Given the generational divide between the curators—most of whom are under the age of 40—and their subject, it is difficult not to view the entire enterprise as a kind of architectural Oedipal production.
Of course, observers of the firm have long noted that OMA is not simply Rem, and vice versa. At the time of the exhibition, the global practice operates with seven partners, including Koolhaas. From its earliest days in London, where Koolhaas founded the office in 1975 alongside Madelon Vriesendorp and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis, OMA has intentionally chosen a bland, collective moniker to underscore its collaborative ethos. As Koolhaas observed in a recent interview, describing the collaborative machinery of his firm, it is not purely an individual voice, but rather a complex orchestration.
One of the quiet pleasures for architecture enthusiasts navigating the Barbican galleries is pausing to read the fine-print credits on early project boards, serving as a nostalgic reminder of the extraordinary talent OMA has cultivated and subsequently launched into the broader design world over the decades. The firm’s illustrious alumni roster includes prominent figures such as Winy Maas, Dan Wood, Amale Andraos, Bjarke Ingels, Farshid Moussavi, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and Minsuk Cho, among many others. Yet, even within this deeply collaborative framework, Koolhaas remains one of the brightest and most singular stars in the architectural firmament, possessed of a blazing self-regard that matches his outsized creative output.
One of the great strengths of the exhibition lies in the sidelong, conscientiously indirect way Rotor approaches these competing themes. Just as it is frequently difficult to parse the true authorship of any given OMA building, attributing absolute control in the exhibition is a slippery endeavor. Rotor asserts its curatorial authority not through heavy-handed, top-down decrees, but through a strategically messy, agglomerative methodology. Koolhaas is permitted to contribute to this museum-world version of a Wikipedia page chronicling OMA’s evolution, but he is fundamentally just one of many would-be historians tweaking and revising the text.
The journey through the exhibition begins in the first two rooms, where visitors encounter a densely arranged display of boards produced by OMA itself for many of its most celebrated projects. This opening gesture serves as an acknowledgment by Rotor that OMA, a famously self-critical office, has essentially been curating its own output for decades. Yet this initial hall of mirrors ultimately proves to be a false start. After navigating the dense boards and passing a special OMA gift shop, visitors stumble upon a piece of unadorned, beat-up drywall that officially announces the exhibition, complete with a gallery guard stationed to collect tickets.
The wall text at this secondary entry point sets a deliberately provocative tone with a surprisingly banal statement of curatorial purpose. The text complains that the eternal problem with architecture exhibitions is their inherent inability to show what they actually promise to deliver: architecture. It goes on to explain that the exhibition offers an outsider’s view into the internal workings of a specific design office, functioning primarily as a portrait constructed out of found materials—things that exist for reasons entirely independent of the museum show itself.
Yet, in a characteristically contradictory twist, prominently displayed in the very next room is a memorandum written by Koolhaas to his architectural associates. As the curators point out, the note was found pinned to the kitchen wall of the OMA office in New York. Dated 1998, the memo issues a stern warning: it is crucial that each staff member takes personal responsibility for the preservation, maintenance, and, if necessary, repair of models, drawings, and all other tangible evidence of architectural research.
Moments like this—where the curators raise an intellectual idea only to undermine it moments later—echo the exact tactical maneuvers that Koolhaas and OMA have employed throughout their professional history. While this strategy can occasionally feel a bit too clever by half, as the exhibition snakes across two floors of the Barbican, Rotor’s approach ultimately succeeds in forging a deft and fitting portrait of an architectural practice that somehow manages to appear simultaneously self-satisfied and self-flagellating.
The scale of the exhibition is exhaustingly thorough. As architecture critic Rowan Moore observed in The Observer, visitors should not expect to understand or even see everything on display, because nobody will—not even the people who made it. Galleries are dedicated to buildings that physically move, such as the famous house in Bordeaux; to projects that were indefinitely shelved by economic downturns, including a vertiginous condominium tower planned for Twenty-second Street in Manhattan; and to designs radically modified to reduce costs, such as Cornell University’s Milstein Hall.
There are also subtle inside jokes scattered throughout the galleries, such as squared-off stools fabricated from the exact same blue foam that OMA routinely uses to craft its intentionally crude study models. Visitors can also view a continuous slideshow that endlessly shuffles through every digital image—amounting to some 3.5 million files—stored across every server in the firm’s offices.
Tucked away in a corner is a modest section that the curators have dubbed the "secret room," featuring walls completely plastered with documents salvaged from OMA’s administrative filing cabinets and recycling bins. Among the most poignant items in this repository is a written request submitted by an anonymous junior staffer nearly a full year in advance, asking for a modest two-day vacation. Beside it hangs a Request for Qualifications mailed by Harvard University on June 30, 2008, which laconically notes that proposals are expected back in July 2008, underscoring the relentless velocity of institutional demands.
This manic pace and the sheer structural complexity of contemporary architectural practice are realities that OMA has embraced since its inception, integrating them directly and strategically into its design methodology. To illustrate this philosophy, the exhibition features presentation boards for an ill-fated OMA proposal for Universal Studios in Los Angeles, a commission originally awarded by media executive Edgar Bronfman, Jr. The accompanying descriptive text, authored by the firm, explicitly compares the Universal assignment to earlier monuments of corporate American architecture, such as Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York, which was commissioned by the same Bronfman family decades earlier.
The text notes that it quickly became apparent that the Universal commission was far less straightforward than it initially seemed. While the Seagram Building in 1954 represented a single corporate entity with a stable, clearly defined identity that could remain relatively constant over the multi-year lifespan of an architectural project, that traditional corporate stability had entirely vanished by the mid-1990s. By then, the very substance and nature of corporate entities were locked in a state of constant flux and institutional turmoil.
This volatile cultural and corporate landscape is the exact environment for which OMA has always designed its buildings, and it is the very atmosphere that Rotor has so energetically sought to recreate within the cavernous halls of the Barbican. Setting aside the crystal-clear Modernist dictates that guided pioneers like Mies van der Rohe, the exhibition suggests that flux and institutional turmoil have become the true muses of the modern age. Whether or not that evolution constitutes genuine progress remains an open question, but it undeniably appears to be precisely the way OMA likes to operate.
