Austausch: August 2011

Freitag, 5. August 2011

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15 March
Barbican announces major OMA exhibition this October

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…"