OMA, Rem Koolhaas ::: Book selection
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Tadao Ando (b. 1941) is one of Japan's leading architects and designers. This book is a complete monograph of Ando's work, examining in detail over 100 buildings and projects, illustrated by drawings, sketches, plans and other material from the architect's own studio. This exhaustive survey ranges from the smallest of Ando's private houses from the 1970s to such major commissions as the Church on the Water, Hokkaido (1981), the Japanese Pavilion for Expo '92 in Seville and the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum (1992). An interview with Ando conducted by Hiroshi Maruyama accompanies a selection of essays by a range of respected international critics including Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Francois Chaslin and Frederic Jameson together with selected writings by Ando himself. ©Amazon.com
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This extraordinary, massive, and mind-boggling 1,300-page book combines essays, manifestos, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city--and complex illustration--with work produced by Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture over the past twenty years. This almost overwhelming accumulation of words and images illuminates the condition of architecture today--its splendors and miseries--exploring and revealing the corrosive effects of politics, context, the economy, and globalization. In some ways, this is the "Medium is the Message" of 1990s architectural discourse: guaranteed to be hugely influential in the coming decades, but grossly misunderstood by those who have not read it. ©Amazon.co.uk
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In this fanciful volume, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.), both analyzes and celebrates New York City. By suggesting the city as the site for an infinite variety of human activities and events--both real and imagined--the essence of the metropolitan lifestyle, its "culture of congestion" and its architecture are revealed in a brilliant new light. "Manhattan," Koolhaas writes, "is the 20th century's Rosetta stone . . . occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall)." Filled with fascinating facts, as well as photographs, postcards, maps, watercolors, and drawings, the vibrancy of Koolhaas's poignant exploration of Gotham equals the heady, frenetic energy of the city itself. Anyone who loves New York will want to own this book. ©Amazon.co.uk
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It's shaped like a trade paperback book, but its hellzapoppin pages look like a glossy, madcap magazine. Really, Content is more like an explosion in an idea factory, or a wild party thrown by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas in a mood considerably more delirious than his classic 1978 manifesto Delirious New York. It has 70 or 80 sections that look like magazine articles, and they're loosely organized in geographical order, from west to east. Pieces on Koolhaas's projects for Prada and MCA/Universal in LA and the acclaimed Seattle Public Library lead to syncopated meditations on Guggenheim Las Vegas, Chicago's van der Rohe "Miestakes," a modest plan to save Cambridge from Harvard by rechanneling the Charles River, Lagos' future as Earth's third-biggest town, the Hermitage's strange Russian past, Shanghai's Expo 2010, and Asia's skyscrapers, which now outnumber those of the West. When Koolhaas interviews Martha Stewart and gets a Las Vegas update from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, it's straightforward, but many pages are as mystifying as hallucinations--apropos of nothing, a woman is depicted leaving her infrared heat signature on a tombstone, and Vermeer paintings are paired with scenes from TV's Big Brother. You don't read Content in linear fashion, you page through it amazed, gradually acquiring Koolhaas' ultracultivated taste for the bizarre. --Tim Appelo.
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There are few outside a circle of initiates who realize just how important Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) are for international architecture today. Arguably, Koolhaas/OMA is the most interesting architect from the latter half of the 20th century. But how well is this truly understood? Certainly in the Netherlands, OMA is known only for the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. The average culture buff--who sees architecture from a layman's point of view--often only has two criteria when looking at architecture: it has to look good and it has to serve a purpose. Regrettably this section of the public considers the Kunsthal to be a failure on both counts and so is blind to the significance of Rem Koolhaas and OMA. In New York, Koolhaas's Prada store is perhaps equally elusive: it looks unlike any other store and it behaves unlike any other store.~What is OMA maps the fields where Koolhaas is active, not only showing his realized buildings but illuminating his perspective on the contemporary city and urbanity. The book describes with great clarity Koolhaas's role in architectural theory and the body of concepts wielded by him. Authors of international repute from beyond the province of architecture examine Koolhaas's work in the light of social and economic developments. As a result, What is OMA paints an intelligent picture of the sheer range of Rem Koolhaas's architecture and its seminal role in the architectural world. It is the first book to approach Koolhaas's work from the vantage point of disciplines other than architecture and to explain it to the general public. ...a living master...~--Herbert Muschamp~...a prophet of a new modern architecture...~--Thomas J. Pritzker
Edited by Veronique Patteeuw.~Essays by Aaron Betsky, Okwui Enwezor, Neal Leach, Matthew Stadler, Bart Verschaffel, H.J.A. Hofland and Bruce Sterling.~Excerpts by Michael Sorkin, Jean Attali, Anthony Vidler, Fredric Jameson, et al. ©Amazon.com
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Award-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is the founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and has become one of the most intriguing and exciting architectural thinkers of our time. This small-scale, affordable paperback presents a selection of texts from a seminar series conducted by Koolhaas, as well as an essay by the architect discussing three of OMA's large-scale projects. Addressing questions of urbanism and architecture in Europe, Asia, and the United States, these texts ultimately illuminate in a concise manner OMA's long-term mission and ideals. ©Amazon.com
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Award-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is the founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and has become one of the most intriguing and exciting architectural thinkers of our time. This small-scale, affordable paperback presents a selection of texts from a seminar series conducted by Koolhaas, as well as an essay by the architect discussing three of OMA's large-scale projects. Addressing questions of urbanism and architecture in Europe, Asia, and the United States, these texts ultimately illuminate in a concise manner OMA's long-term mission and ideals. ©Amazon.com
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This past November, Berlin gained yet one more spectacular example of contemporary architecture. The new Dutch Embassy by OMA/Rem Koolhaas has been built on the River Spree in what used to be East Berlin. Renowned for his Kunsthal in Rotterdam, Congrexpo in Lille, and the villa in Bordeaux, among other extraordinary projects, Koolhaas will now also be recognized for his Berlin embassy, a structure that firmly attests to the astonishing design talent of the Netherlands' best-known architect. Two concepts underpin the design for the embassy, the first instigated by the city's strict planning regulations, which require that every corner of a city block be built up. Thus, Koolhaas designed one corner of the site to fit a freestanding cube that houses the actual embassy; the other corners are defined by an L-shaped block of three houses for embassy staff. But the principal organizing element is a continuous route that spirals through the building; the different embassy departments are strung off it discretely. The spiral winds its way through the cube accompanied by new and unexpected views of the building--and of the city. In this publication, sketches, drawings and models illustrate the design's points of departure, and Koolhaas himself expounds upon the project's context. German photographer Candida Höfer, famous for her large-scale color photographs of architectural spaces, offers her personal perspective on the embassy's exterior and interior, while Parisian architecture critic François Chaslin provides a textual analysis.
Essay by François Chaslin.~Photographs by Candida Höfer. ©Amazon.com