During Milan Design Week in April 2026, AMO/OMA and Solidnature staged a surreal stone supermarket that replicated the mundane shopping experience with a humorous minimalist take. For one month only, you can order the pieces that stocked the playful installation.

A stone supermarket by OMA/AMO and Solidnature

Titled ‘Il Sonno’, the supermarket was conceived by architect Samir Bantal, AMO's director, and was based on the idea of celebrating the expressive potential of stone, which was the sole material for shelving units as well as groceries, offering an immersive experience within the space.

'Nobody thinks while shopping; it’s a reflex,' says Bantal. 'At Il Sonno Supermarket, this reflex is frozen in stone. Commodities have been transformed into desirable objects, stripped of function. The dream lies in the interval between recognising an object and realising that it has solidified. A supermarket with a fleeting stock, forever frozen in time. The experience of rushing through the supermarket is slowed down to wonder.'

For one month only, until 21 June 2026, you can pre-order 12 of the items from the supermarket shelves, which include onyx bananas, red marble steaks, sandwiches made of travertine with red marble and green onyx, and beautifully veined Flamingo Nebula marble milk bottles. Each piece from the limited edition is unique, as it will feature the chromatic and textural variations of the natural stone.

'Natural stone introduces a different sense of value, rooted in sustainability, durability and authenticity,' says Solidnature owner, David Mahyari. 'Unlike systems built on speed and disposability, it shifts consumption towards awareness, where everyday choices become part of a larger dream – shaping a more conscious and future-oriented world.'

Order now from solidnature.com, prices start at €90

When the world's biggest design fair announced Salone Contract 2027 earlier in 2026, the annual Milanese event, long the foremost staple in the global design calendar, showed that it does not rest on its laurels. Under the presidency of Maria Porro, Salone del Mobile is launching a new project focused on contract furniture and interiors – a take that is intended not only to shake up the industry and 'create concrete opportunities' for growth and sustainability, but also to place the focus firmly back on quality in the design and architecture world. From this year's Raritas (dedicated to collectible design) to next year's Contract, the fair is keen to address all scales in the design world's broad spectrum. The ambition is there – our ears have pricked up.

Salone Contract 2027: the global fair’s newest project

Salone Contract 2027’s announcement was arguably received with a mixture of excitement (the project promises a wealth of new opportunities for the design and manufacturing industry, and it's a new area for the fair to address) and questions (what does 'contract' mean? And how does it apply to designers of all scales?). Pioneering architecture studio OMA was revealed as leader of the project's masterplanning and design. At this week's Salone del Mobile 2026 – where Wallpaper* editors are on the ground and keeping a live blog – the architects offered a glimpse of what's to come during the dedicated Salone Contract Forum at Pavilion 14's Drafting Futures Arena.

'This is a very important step for the evolution of Salone,' Porro said at the event. 'The world of furniture is changing a lot, and this is a big opportunity for design. We thought about creating a Contract pavilion, but we soon realised that our usual rules do not apply here. The name of OMA instantly came to mind [for this journey].'

We attended the forum, so you won't have to – and put together a guide that explains all. Scroll down for more.

Who is designing Contract?

OMA and its research arm, AMO, are perfectly placed to take on the challenge of designing Salone Contract 2027, given their track record of acclaimed, high-profile projects, which range from the EU's visual identity and Barcode flag to the Prada catwalks. Always challenging the status quo and offering new takes on the way forward, the Dutch architecture studio is co-defining, together with Salone president Maria Porro, what Contract work means for the industry and what its physical space might look like.

Led by the practice's Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, Salone Contract 2027 promises to break down the complex and often obscure (to the outsider) work and collaborations within contract projects, showcasing how they can provide space for design to grow bigger and better through such a process.

What is Contract?

At the Salone 2026 forum, David Gianotten and Maria Porro brought up several times how misunderstood the idea of 'contract' can be – and how complex its nature is. So, what is Contract? Gianotten explains the notion and practice of creating through contract work as an ecosystem – an entire environment: 'Contract tries to represent how a project is done as a one-stop shop, and its ecosystem, which is not only about producing furniture or interior, but it is really about the total environment. And in the end, it's even about the reuse and the end of the life cycle [of a project]. So it's not about aesthetics.'

Respectively, the space within Salone that will host this section 'is not a fair, or a show', he says. 'It is more like a stock exchange.' It is also about working with different specialists to move away from the product alone (although product design, of course, remains central), to more of a systems-building, something that thinks about broader lifecycles of projects and a space where maximum innovation can flourish.

What contract is not, Gianotten highlights, is 'just hospitality'. Contract design has a different timeline to single product design, and a very global aspect. Architect and MAXXI director Lorenza Baroncelli, who took part in a panel discussion on the theme, explained that contract may be about scaling up, but 'it is not about missing on quality – it is the future of quality'.

Salone Contract 2027’s physical space

'Creating the pavilion [for Salone Contract 2027] is as important as its content,' Porro stressed at the 2026 Contract Forum. She selected her architects carefully and first engaged with OMA seven months ago to co-define what this new area of the fair might look like.

'Contract is a start situation, not an end situation,' Gianotten says. Following that way of thinking, the Contract space is designed to be open, flexible and collaborative, aiming to create the right environment and ecosystem for value and collaboration.

There is a discreet entrance sequence, an entryway which the architects describe as an 'introduction' to the concept of Contract, familiarising the visitors with what they are about to see, before stepping inside the large exhibition hall. A round area at the centre of the structure will act as a 'forum of exchange', a (literal) circle which will be the project's social heart.

From there, case studies radiate, exhibited as little universes, with each display having the end result, the project at its core, and all the companies involved with it around it. The aim is to show how Contract is all about relationships and collaboration, contributions big and small. Movable elements will be used so that formats can adapt and change project by project and year on year as required.

Who can exhibit there?

OMA's Contract section aims to display how a contract brief is about creating an environment – 'not buying single objects and putting them together', Gianotten explains, 'but designing the whole environment at once'. The exhibitors will be fittingly diverse and covering all aspects of a bigger project – from design and architecture, to furniture design, but also larger manufacturing, smaller independent contributions and anything in-between.

'[Here, we are] not so much interested in the product by itself, but they're really interested in the whole system of the project,' he adds. 'It's not about the sales moment, but it is really about this long-term engagement for all the actors present, even the client, the designer, the producer, but also the operators.'

The naval industry is ahead of the game in this section, Gianotten flags. 'Already, 95 per cent of the boats are done under contracts. It is a sector that has already moved completely into that realm.'

Contract throughout history – key examples

A tightly packed lecture by Rem Koolhaas offered valuable context to the idea of contract work and an analysis of OMA's thinking for the project, going through some of the historical examples the team researched in order to develop their response to their brief for Contract. Koolhaas visited case studies of global work where a similar approach was adopted, and they range a lot, in typology, result and geographical location.

In Roman times, buildings were commissioned in a collective way, Gianotten explains. '[The contract approach was already embedded] in this mindset, where people would deliver everything from the local environment to the use of that building and even the after-use.' Examples cited vary from the way ancient Romans worked in commissioning as a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, to the fascinating design story of the Rockefeller Centre in New York, as presented by Koolhaas.

The latter was run by John Rockefeller himself in a 'very rigid manner' that enabled the project not only to survive and complete, but also allowed a 'density of thinking and collaboration' with the important physical beginning of this contract: [It was to be] accommodated and housed in a single environment and [for the different actors] to be together for five years, day in day out, as a single team'.

The striking Lagos International Trade Fair Complex in Nigeria, designed based on hexagonal floorplans, was another key example of contract work with impressive historical intel and delivery results. Meanwhile, Koolhaas also used an ongoing OMA project in Miami, a private home, to showcase the complex nature of creating architecture and interiors, and how current affairs and global challenges, such as war, climate change and political decisions, affect manufacturing and supply chains – which in turn play a key role in a designer's decision-making.

What's next?

While the full scale of what's to come has not been revealed, there are enough hints to offer a taste of next year's Contract space and the opportunities it might offer to exhibitors and visitors. What sits at the heart of Salone's creatively disruptive approach also resonates with Koolhaas and his team. At the Contract Forum, the architect spoke about taking risks – and seeing risk-taking not as a detractor but a rich and even necessary condition to moving the needle in building and the construction industry, a traditionally slow-moving and arguably risk-averse field.

'I am not comfortable with being comfortable,' Koolhaas says. 'We shouldn’t be avoiding risk; by avoiding risk, we avoid creativity.' Gianotten added: 'Risk-taking is important to innovation. Innovation means taking risks.'

It is the right attitude to instigate change – and the hope is that Salone Contract 2027 will provide the platform for just that.

Check our guide to what to see at Salone del Mobile and Milan Design Week 2026 and follow our editors’ live blog for latest news.

Salone del Mobile 2027 will take place from 13-18 April, Fiera Milano, Rho

Architect and OMA partner Reinier de Graaf wanted to take on the challenge of discussing the present and future of the architecture world ‘aggressively’, he says – and in his latest book, Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto, newly published by Verso, he certainly delivers. The publication is a captivating analysis of the industry, where de Graaf takes stock of the state of the architecture world.

He eloquently touches on some of the big themes in the industry, from the culture of 'starchitects' to AI, intellectual property, sustainability and power (and who is holding it). The result is a vibrant and refreshingly direct read, touching on real-life examples and the architect's direct experiences, which will no doubt make the reader think – whether they are an architect or not.

Explore ‘Architecture Against Architecture’ by Reinier de Graaf

Architecture Against Architecture is divided into two sections (of seven main points and respective chapters, each), the first part addressing architects themselves, and the other, architecture as a whole. It is a provocative read in that, in some ways, it addresses parts of the industry that, especially if you work within it, you might already have witnessed or been called upon to respond to – such as architects' long hours and often non-corresponding pay; or the morality and challenges of whom an architecture practice should work with. However, as de Graaf puts it, what makes this book special is its edit, and the fact that all the different parts that make up the architecture world's current challenges are now confronted head-on, together, in the same place.

The result is introspective and highly critical – at times making you worry and at others, laugh out loud. De Graaf writes in his conclusion and call-to-action: ‘End the focus on figureheads; welcome labour unions; collectivise practice; retire at 67; abolish authorship; rely on AI for matters of taste; end the distinction between theory and practice; free architecture from the concept of art; connect with users, cut out the middlemen; stop building until the existing stock runs out; pardon all things built; plan for obsolescence; adapt to climate change, stop claiming to mitigate it; work not to have clients, have clients to work!’

Are these points self-evident or radical? And who is responsible for changing things? We spoke to de Graaf about the book, his love of writing, and the future of architecture.

Reinier de Graaf on the architecture industry, its challenges and future

Wallpaper*: Tell us about the book. What is it about?

Reinier de Graaf: The book is a set of recommendations. I call it a manifesto, but it's an introspection about the nature of our own profession. How architects' practices are organised, how architects organise themselves, that's the first part, and then the second part is about a set of preoccupations that I think architects ought to engage with more aggressively. I wrote the book because, in my opinion, our profession, which I love dearly, is in deep trouble, and if we don't really confront it, I think it's very, very likely that in ten years' time the profession of the architect will not exist anymore. Maybe there will be people who call themselves architects, but the profession with a kind of solid professional base with a certain level of agency in a complex world will not exist, and I find that deeply worrying. What the book is not is a kind of cynical dismissal of my own profession. Quite the contrary.

W*: I enjoyed the directness of it, and I liked that it is really rooted in experiences. I know it’s not your first book. Are your past books similar in style?

RdG: In a way, this book is a reaction to the reactions of my previous books. My books are never about works of architecture. They're about the work of an architect. In my books, I write observations from the field. I analyse the way things are. What people said about my previous books is that ‘they are a good analysis, but you tell us how things are, but you do not tell us what to do about it’. I decided to pick up that challenge just for the hell of it, and it took the form of a manifesto. My first book was a collection of essays, my second was a novel, and my third book was a dictionary.

W*: Were you always attracted to writing?

RdG: Yes, even before I studied architecture. And then, of course, I wrote a lot of texts for competition entries when I started working at OMA, but you don't write those under your own name. I started writing columns for outlets whenever something either irritated me immensely or when I was very enthusiastic about something, and that led to my first book proposition.

W*: And how did Architecture Against Architecture come about?

RdG: This book's initial title was 'Elephants in the Room'. I thought it would be nice to start writing chapters and essays about everything we, as architects, all know is the case, but that we prefer not to talk about – what we prefer to keep at arm's length because it's deeply troubling. And what if all the 'elephants' are marching in the same direction? Then the title changed to 'The Writing on the Wall', which [referred to] everything we should be worried about but never talked about, and then the idea of a manifesto came. I said, what if I embrace everything that is brewing?

The Communist Manifesto in the 19th century provided a theoretical framework for miscellaneous forms of anarchy and discontent, which were already there – in a way, providing a container for everything. This is what I had hoped to do with the book. It makes me uncomfortable at times because, in terms of some of the recommendations in the book, in my present position, I stand little to gain if all of these were carried through. However, that doesn't mean I think they're not valid. You know, I'm always quite surprised that architects always talk about modernisation. They always see themselves as modern architects. They celebrate modern movements. But our own profession is remarkably unmodern. I thought it would be interesting to write a book about it, as a kind of exposure therapy, confronting all the things you want to suppress.

W*: Your manifesto, with all its chapters, is almost like a checklist of things that need fixing, or at least considering. Does this make sense?

RdG: That's exactly it. It is a checklist, with the exception of architecture criticism, because that was a chapter I left out. But it is relatively complete in my view.

W*: You are also a practising architect, and you're part of a bigger studio. Was it difficult addressing some of the elements in the book about how architects work?

RdG: The wonderful thing about writing is that when you are in the thick of things, you don't think about any of this. I write under my personal title. Yes, I'm a partner in a very big office, and that office is a big part of the world of architecture. So if I'm critical of the world of architecture, that inevitably means that it includes my office; it would be very hypocritical if it didn't. But I refuse to be completely defined by the office, just as the office refuses to be defined by me. There are the independent dynamics of the writing.

W*: Did you have an ideal reader in mind? Would that be an architect? Do you see this book read by non-architects?

RdG: The book has a dedication in the beginning. It says 'for my colleagues', and I guess that's the most immediate group I am addressing. I use architecture as a lens because architecture is so much at the forefront of globalisation. It deals with so much dirty business, and I always have the idea that architecture is a perfect lens to talk about the world. So I always hope the world will be my readership, only to find out that whenever I have a launch, it's all architects who will find the book! It would be nice if these books could play a role in bringing architecture a little bit back into the mainstream.

W*: What chapter was the most fun to write?

RdG: It was the chapter about AI.

W*: And were there any chapters that challenged you?

RdG: I started the book by writing the last chapter [which discusses power and morality], and in the end, I revisited it [and wrote it last]. I found it a particularly challenging one, because it took me about a year to write the book in total, and no matter how fast you write, it is almost impossible to keep up with the speed of reality. I talk about the fact that there are no more good and bad countries. So if there is no morality to be found in where we work, for whom we work, there is only morality to be found in what we do when we find ourselves working where we work for whom we end up working. But that's not easy to write because there are nuances.

The other chapter that I found challenging is the one before that, called Forget Sustainability. It is about the fact that climate change is inevitable. At every climate conference, there is an admission that the goals of the previous conferences haven't been met, and we are heading towards [climate change]. So the real avant-garde of architecture may not be rooted in the vain hope that we might be able to mitigate or prevent climate change, but in the prototypes we might develop to coexist with climate change in a pretty extreme form. What is architecture in the age of the Anthropocene, when everything we find, even nature, is the result of man's actions? Those are not easy subjects; that is hunting big time. I do not rule out that the next book I might want to write might be simply an elaboration of those last two chapters.

W*: Do you see the thesis of the book as radical?

RdG: People ask me: What is the radical proposition you make here? I don't make a radical proposition, but common sense and the checklist of the obvious are being perceived as radical. I find that is indicative, and that's probably the essence of the book. It is a plea for normal conditions in an environment that somehow magically refuses normal conditions against its own better judgment and against its own best interest. That's the message of the book.

If only we bothered to muster up the basic level of solidarity that other professionals have, which actually makes them very strong. So I think the call is first to architects to come together –corny and cheesy as that sounds – to realise that solidarity is actually a means to power, that the will to power and solidarity are flip sides of the same coin. And then once they do, I think the world may hear us. That may be the first step [towards] entering into the mainstream, and then the principles of the book might inform others and other domains, too.

oma.com

If you happened to walk down Prince Street in New York’s Nolita neighbourhood these past few years, you probably noticed a new angular structure rising next to the ‘stacked box’ New Museum, completed by Japanese architecture firm SANAA in 2007.

The new tower, designed by OMA in collaboration with Cooper Robertson (now Corgan), was slated to be a separate yet connected extension, doubling the museum’s overall square footage to 120,000 sq ft. After a decade of development, the museum finally reopens this Saturday (21 March). It marks OMA’s first cultural project in the city, completed almost five decades after firm founder Rem Koolhaas published his seminal manifesto, Delirious New York.

'It’s not simply an extension, but a complement, a counterpart,' Koolhaas said in a video address (the Pritzker prize-winning architect was unable to attend a media preview due to a construction site injury). ‘We didn’t want to compete with scale. We interpreted the commission as if there were two parts that were finally united and that would form a single entity.’

While the two halves appear diametrically opposed – one formed as offset rectilinear volumes and the other a cut-crystal form with oblique setbacks – the spatial flow inside is seamless. The bulk of the expansion comprises four floors of galleries, which host an inaugural show titled 'New Humans: Memories of the Future.' These greatly expanded exhibition spaces extend across both buildings, with little indication of whether you're entering the new building or the old. There’s flexibility in how these open floor plates can be segmented and programmed, more than the existing building offered. As New Museum president Lisa Phillips put it, the addition can be thought of as an ‘insurance policy for the future’.

A series of carefully introduced interstitial spaces – an unfolding atrium staircase and a new street-facing plaza – also address the museum’s present and anticipate a future beyond just art-viewing: ‘Museums are the last truly public spaces in our cities,’ OMA New York director Shohei Shigematsu says – platforms for communities to gather and exchange ideas.

The street-facing atrium staircase, for instance, works to connect different groups of visitors, whether they’re browsing the galleries or catching a lecture. As part of the opening exhibition, a fibre artwork by Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová tumbles down four storeys. The three uppermost levels contain artist studios, offices, a 75-seat forum and a set of ‘sky rooms’, all of which comprise what the museum calls its ‘brain’.

One of OMA’s chief challenges was to telegraph the museum’s range of programming to the street; the SANAA-designed building was a ‘stacked pillar of art’, Shigematsu explains. ‘We needed to create a sense of transparency to outwardly communicate the diversity of activity taking place here’.

True to practice for OMA, this was achieved through the strategic configuration of the building’s massing. While it might seem like it’s pulling away from its counterpart, it’s actually making way for the plaza, which will soon be home to an installation by British artist Sarah Lucas.

The considered deployment of exterior cladding and glazing was also critical. Nodding to the metal mesh façade next door, Shigematsu and his team opted for a fine mesh laminated in sheets of glass. When sunlight hits the façade during the day, it takes on a metallic quality but one can still look outside from various vantage points and feel connected to the city. ‘During the day it has a monolithic quality and at night it exposes the anatomy of what’s going on inside,’ Shigematsu says. On long-term view at the intersection of the old and new façades is the site-specific sculpture titled Art Lovers by Tschabalala Self.

Interior finishes are largely kept to a minimum, but there are moments of excitement. The ground-floor restaurant, which will open later this spring, features materials like cork and textured glass. The stairway balustrades are made out of two layers of back-lit metal mesh, painted from behind in the New Museum’s signature green. The colour appears to glow at every turn.

Shigematsu likened the two buildings to a human couple, united yet unique. ‘The two buildings are similar but different,' he says.

The New Museum will open to the public on 21 March 2026 at 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

Fundación Casa Wabi's Mushroom Pavilion is not only the latest addition to the growing art-and-community-led campus in Mexico's Puerto Escondido, founded by artist Bosco Sodi – it is also, astonishingly, OMA's first completed project in the country. Led by the prolific and celebrated Dutch studio's New York office and partner-in-charge Shohei Shigematsu, the project has just been revealed and does what it says on the tin – its simple, ellipsoidal form has been optimised for the growing of mushrooms.

Explore Casa Wabi's Mushroom Pavilion by OMA

Inside the Mushroom Pavilion's clean volume lies a domed interior. This is divided into three areas – and respective parts of fungi growing: fruiting room, incubation room, and storage. These parts wrap around a central space that was conceived as a hub for gathering and acts as a mini auditorium for the Casa Wabi campus. An oculus at its very top brings light into the centre of the pavilion, illuminating its social activities.

Combining nourishment and community, this is a structure with multiple purposes and layered usage. There are handmade terracotta mushroom pots crafted by local artisans on the structure's stepped base and a concrete shell made of trowelled and poured-in-place concrete (the exterior is burlap-stamped so that it retains the site’s high-iron-content water for mushroom growing). This ensures fungi, people and natural elements come together in a single design, which effortlessly connects with all aspects of its concept.

'Working with Bosco Sodi and Fundacion Casa Wabi, we conceived a pavilion for the very specific function of mushroom cultivation while offering a space for people to come together. The result is an incubator of both food and community that’s spatially fit to support all types of activities for the locals, visitors, and the foundation. As a Japanese architect, it was especially meaningful to contribute an art campus guided by Japanese philosophy and spatial traditions,' says Shigematsu.

oma.com

casawabi.org

In a press conference on 29 January 2026, Salone del Mobile has unveiled its plans for the fair's 64th edition (21-26 April), most notably announcing a new initiative dedicated to contract furniture and led by Rem Koohlaas and David Gianotten of OMA.

The announcement introduced Salone Contract 2027, which will mark the fair's first foray into the field of contract furniture offering an opportunity to dissect it and create new connection for companies participating in Salone del Mobile. 'Salone Contract is designed to intercept the transformation of a high-potential market segment and translate it into concrete opportunities for the manufacturing industry,' reads a note introducing the initiative.

It's a project that marks a conscious shift for the fair, towards no longer existing solely as a presentation of products but as a 'market-oriented infrastructure' to help participating companies manage the increasingly complex demands of contemporary design.

Salone del Mobile 2026: OMA to introduce Salone Contract

For Salone del Mobile president Maria Porro, it was important to find a partner that could introduce the fair to the contract market in a way that was both practical and scientific, helping dissect what is often considered a murky field.

'Contract is today one of the segments where the most significant transformations are taking place, from an industrial, operational and market perspective,' says Porro. 'The collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten of OMA, among the most perceptive observers of the present, represents an opportunity to engage with a strong vision combined with a solid methodological approach.’

'Contract is a segment that relies less on individual products and more on an established ecosystem – one that aligns the design, production, and delivery of both furniture and architecture to create desirable built environments for the long term,' adds Giannotten. 'The growing global significance of the contract segment presents opportunities for industry stakeholders to reinvent themselves, considering not only individual objects but integrated systems.'

For the 2026 fair, Koolhaas and Gianotten will introduce the theme through a dedicated lecture and an international forum that the Salone del Mobile.Milano will curate in collaboration with OMA, as well as a contract-focused pathway that will take visitors across the fair.

'Since the 19th century, world fairs have functioned as experimental grounds where industries project their ambitions, where cultural dialogues are reinvented, and where opportunities for collaboration materialise,' says Koolhaas. 'Today, Salone Contract presents a contemporary iteration of that typology – an arena for examining its relevance and observe how it adapts within an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape.'

Salone del Mobile 2026 will take place from 21-26 April, Fiera Milano, Rho

It’s been a decade since the New Museum announced that it would be expanding its SANAA-designed building on Manhattan’s Bowery. Now, the project – which is set to double the museum’s exhibition space thanks to a 60,000 sq ft extension designed by OMA – finally has an opening date. The contemporary art museum today announced that it will reopen to the public on 21 March 2026.

‘[The] building on the Bowery signals our redoubled commitment to new art and new ideas, and to the museum as an ever-evolving site for risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation,’ museum director Lisa Phillips said in a statement.

The New Museum’s OMA expansion gears up for its launch

The OMA expansion, helmed by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, designed in collaboration with Corgan (formerly Cooper Robertson), will feature new galleries, a reimagined entrance plaza and new flexible programming space, including studios for artists in residence. The addition will also expand the lobby, which in addition to a larger bookstore and museum shop, will include an art-filled restaurant designed by Shigematsu and operated by the Oberon Group.

Crucially, the redesign will address what was considered by many to be the SANAA building’s Achille’s heel: its confusing and clunky circulation. Before, the museum floors were accessed via a single freight elevator and an ancillary hidden staircase. The OMA addition aims to introduce ‘fluid’ movement throughout the building, via three additional elevators and a stairway in the atrium.

‘I am honoured to be awarded this project in the city perhaps most central to OMA’s philosophy, and am thrilled to work with an institution that deeply values the practices of creative forward-thinkers,’ Shigematsu commented in 2017, when OMA was announced as the selected design team. ‘As a Japanese architect, I am very happy to engage in a unique dialogue with SANAA and build alongside one of their seminal works.’

The completed New Museum will be the only building in the world combining the work of two living Pritzker prize-winning architects. It will open with a survey exhibition; new commissions by artists including Tschabalala Self, Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winner Klára Hosnedlová and Sarah Lucas; and offer free admission during its opening weekend.

In Beijing's ritzy Sanlitun district, where luxury retail jostles for attention amid the capital’s kinetic sprawl, Christian de Portzamparc has conjured House of Dior Beijing, the Pritzker Prize laureate's third commission for the French house after Seoul (2015) and Geneva (2024). From every angle, the building – head-turning in its outer sheath of gigantic white petals – is his most ambitious: a freestanding temple to fashion that channels the very gesture of couture into architectural form.

Unlike its Korean and Swiss counterparts – which share the same petal vocabulary but emerged from existing streetscapes with two or three facades apiece – Dior's largest store in China stands exposed on all four sides within Kengo Kuma's Taikoo Li Sanlitun North development. This 360-degree visibility presented Portzamparc with both opportunity and dilemma. Early iterations that wrapped petals continuously around the perimeter proved visually overwhelming. The solution? Alternating those signature resin shells – 14 in total, each shaped differently – with soaring panels of handcrafted golden glass tiles whose subtly varied surfaces shimmer and breathe between the sculptural volumes.

Inside House of Dior, Beijing

The petal forms themselves trace their lineage to the Dior atelier, capturing that decisive moment when flat fabric transforms into three-dimensional silhouette through cutting and draping. In Beijing, Portzamparc pushes this vocabulary further, sculpting each 65-foot-tall element to evoke the caryatids of Athens’ ancient Acropolis: graceful, vertical, dignified. Built using resin-casting techniques in a factory located just outside Beijing, the petals spent 18 months in production.

The golden tile panels – a nod to imperial China, where such hues were reserved for royalty – required equally exacting craftsmanship. Their placement creates crucial breathing space, breaking the mass while generating a play of shadows that shifts throughout the day. At night, the building becomes a lantern, petals backlit from within, curves casting elegant shadows across the plaza.

‘This project has taken four years, and it's a dream come true,’ says Delphine Arnault, chairman and CEO of Christian Dior Couture. That dream rises five stories filled with clothes and accessories: the ground level hosts Monsieur Dior, Anne-Sophie Pic's restaurant in a separate wing with after-hours access; floors one and two present the women's Dior universe; three belongs to men’s.

The top floor presents an OMA-conceived space populated by white toiled mannequins and a dramatic red ball gown. This leads into a soigné set of VIP salons dressed in hand-embroidered dandelion wall panels in yellow and blue in one salon, and gently indented botanical motifs in another, alongside access to an outdoor terrace.

Connecting these dreamy spaces is a circular white staircase that spirals upward, punctuated by a chandelier of clay petals – an intimate echo of the building's larger gesture – that clink softly with the slightest air movement.

Glass vitrines at each landing display miniature Dior creations, while throughout the interiors, works by Chinese artists animate the rooms. Xiyao Wang and Xu Zhen contribute paintings, Hong Hao created special commissions including three artworks in the restaurant that celebrate red as Beijing’s ceremonial colour, while furniture from Claude Lalanne, Franck Evennou, and Gio Ponti punctuates the spaces.

Throughout, Portzamparc's signature preoccupations assert themselves: the porous facade inviting light and views to permeate inward and outward, the commitment to opening constrained spaces, the calibration between solid and void. It is, incidentally, a quality visible across his Chinese work, from the slender columns and apertures punctuating the China National Convention Center to the north in Olympic Green to this Sanlitun venue.

For Portzamparc, whose portfolio spans cultural landmarks from the Philharmonie Luxembourg to the Shanghai Opera House, the Dior commissions represent something both particular and personal. When he completed the LVMH Tower on New York's 57th Street in 1999, Philip Johnson told him, ‘You are very lucky to have a client like Bernard Arnault’, a tacit recognition of an appreciative patron with both resources and the rare willingness to take creative risks. Two decades on, that relationship has evolved into what Portzamparc has described as ‘an architectural style dedicated to Dior’ – a collection united by principle, yet irresistibly responsive to place.

The result in Beijing? A building that mirrors the couture inside by taking something flat and making it sculptural, structural, alive.

House of Dior Beijing, N6 Taikoo Li Sanlitun North, Chaoyang District, Beijing

dior.com

In a bustling metropolis like New York, a single city block can signal a vibe shift. The same applies to Stone Island – the Italian clothing brand known for its innovative fabrications and signature compass arm patch – which has nudged its SoHo flagship a block northward at 70 Greene Street.

The new location, positioned alongside luxury heavy-hitters like Saint Laurent, Givenchy and Balenciaga, reflects a refreshed retail strategy for Stone Island, one that company CEO Robert Triefus has sought to crystallise since taking the reins two years ago, after a 15-year run at Gucci.

‘We wanted to create a uniform narrative that really reinforces our commitment to innovation, material research and community,’ Triefus tells Wallpaper*. ‘Stone Island is, and has always been to a degree, adopted by different subcultures. And so in this store, there was a very strong commitment to building a destination experience.’

To help define that experience, Triefus turned to AMO, the in-house creative lab of global architecture powerhouse, OMA. The firm had already designed a crop of Stone Island stores in important markets like Paris, Shanghai, Munich and Chicago. ‘I was happy to discover when I joined that the relationship existed,’ Triefus says.

The feeling was mutual for AMO director Samir Bantal. A visit to Stone Island’s headquarters in Ravarino, Italy had the architect ‘geeking out’. ‘All the garments start off white and have to go through this intricate process of colouring, dyeing, washing, et cetera,’ he explains. ‘In a way, that represents how we look at architecture.’

Bantal and the team approached the two-storey flagship as a riff on Stone Island’s philosophy of ‘lab,’ or material innovation, and ‘life,’ meaning community. Upon entering the store, you are greeted by Stone Island’s core collection hanging from stainless steel rods. Some walls are clad in charred cork, lending an almost volcanic texture to the interiors, while others gleam in brushed stainless steel, giving the sensation of stepping aboard a spaceship. Video screens flash Stone Island’s material processes (the ‘lab’) while others display scenes of brand ambassadors and campaigns (the ‘life’).

The store invites visitors to take their time the deeper they venture inside. The back of the store showcases special editions, including Uneven Ripstop Prismatico parka made in a limited run of just ten pieces for the New York location, and features lounge furniture by designers Tim Teven and Markus Töll. Subtle nautical themes – on which Stone Island’s compass logo is based – abound in this space, from porthole-like display niches in the cork-clad walls to industrial ridged curtain rods. ‘This is where you would take more time to view a larger part of the collection,’ Bantal says.

The time warp continues at the very back of the store. Here, a green-carpeted staircase beckons you down to a subterranean lounge, where there’s even more green carpet and more clothing to peruse. You’ll also find a monumental stainless steel DJ booth (Stone Island frequently collaborates with musical artists as part of a programme called Stone Island Sound), a sitting area, books, and even a bar, hidden behind green-stained plywood panels. The lounge will host special in-store events and activations as a way for customers, both new and devout, to get acquainted with Stone Island’s values and community.

‘In America, we're still relatively new as a brand,’ Triefus says. ‘I think in these last couple of years, post-Covid, people have really begun to understand Stone Island.’

And North American consumers are about to get even more familiar. AMO’s aesthetic building blocks will be applied to future Stone Island boutiques (there are plans in the works for locations in Toronto and Costa Mesa, California) as well as select department stores. In the short term, to celebrate the New York opening, Stone Island is hosting an all-day party in collaboration with the sound system studio Friendly Pressure. The event will feature DJ sets spanning house, reggae, Afrobeat, jazz and more.

‘We're not a technical brand, but we are a performance brand in the sense that we have a real wardrobe for real people living real lives,’ Triefus reflects. ‘I think today, in a world where there are a lot of questions about luxury, Stone Island has always, since it was founded in 1982, wanted to create objects that really add value to someone's life’ – even if that’s a day on the dance floor.

Stone Island New York, 70 Greene Street, New York, NY 10012.

stoneisland.com

You will look long and hard for any OMA/AMO drawings at ‘Diagrams’, the new show at the Fondazione Prada event in Venice, even though it is curated by Rem Koolhaas, the practice’s lead partner. The foundation’s show, which coincides with the Venice Architectural Biennale 2025, does feature one image, amongst nearly 200, of the Scalo Farini masterplan for Milan by the Dutch studio. Other than that small moment, its work is absent from this wide-ranging, frequently stunning, always fascinating exhibition. One might have expected more.

Explore OMA/AMO’s ‘Diagrams’ at the Prada Foundation in Venice

At OMA in the 1980s, Rem Koolhaas and his early colleagues, such as Elia Zenghelis, incorporated the diagram into the wealth of drawing types used by architects to create work. Added to the repertoire of the section, plan and perspective, the diagram puts the focus on the building’s use or programme and how this might suit the user first and create form second. The Seattle Public Library’s wonky stack, for example, emerges from layers of different uses: public spaces on the lower floors, the book stack above, and the building’s admin capping it all. The De Rotterdam resulted from separating out multiple uses in a diagram and then bringing them together in a dramatic aggregated form.

The ‘Diagrams’ show, however, is a wider cultural history of the diagram, beginning in the early Renaissance and coming up to the present day, an expression of OMA’s affinity for the diagram rather than examples of the firm's use of it. An arrangement of troops in Machiavelli’s book, the Libro della arte della guerra (first published in 1521), is probably the oldest work in the exhibition; images of photovoltaic cell efficiency are perhaps the most recent. Koolhaas and fellow curator Giulio Margheri have arranged the historical documents into nine different 'urgencies' – the vital concerns of humanity, such as health, migration, inequality and resources. These themes are given an overview in identical vitrines in the central space on the first floor of the palazzo, with each room off that central space exploring the subject in more varied hangs. The war room, for example, has banked vitrines redolent of, well, a war room.

In previous exhibitions, such as the interesting but uneven ‘Countryside’ at the New York Guggenheim in 2020, Koolhaas included a series of awkward, unpalatable or banal images to prove a wider point. In ‘Diagrams’, these moments are kept to a minimum – interestingly, the ugliest diagrams are in the built environment section – providing not only an engrossing insight into the way humans communicate collective needs to each other, but also exemplars of panache, style and in some cases, beauty.

One of the most striking moments in the show is a series of 16 images by the Black activist and sociologist WEB Du Bois for the Paris Exposition in 1900. Not only do they convey the enormity of the massive social progress made after the abolition of slavery, but they are also remarkably clear and simple, proto-modernist somehow.

There is a longer history to the aesthetic of the diagram, however. Koolhaas also suggests that modernism (and, presumably, modernist architecture) was the rise to aesthetic preeminence of an already existing way of thinking. The diagram, he explains in the catalogue, is 'a form of thinking that almost transcends aesthetic style or period'.

Often, there is a strange combination of absolute bathos to the clarity. In 1869, Charles-Joseph Minard depicted the losses of the French army during Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812–13 as a thick black line leaving Paris. As men die on the road to Moscow, the line thins and narrows until it returns to Paris a mere thread. Designers use beauty to convey often ugly things.

There is much to unpack in this wonderful show, curated with sensitivity but also clear admiration for the work selected, born from OMA/AMO’s internal understanding of the power of a good diagram. The thematic organisation highlights the hidden purposes behind the apparently neutral arrangement and display of material in the diagram, as does the focus on authorship. There are clusters of work by Minard and Du Bois, but also others: the economist William Playfair and the cartographer Philippe Rekacewicz, for example. Together, though, this is an absolute must-see if you are visiting Venice for the 2025 biennale.

fondazioneprada.org

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ arrives in Seoul this spring, marking the exhibition's ninth iteration since its 2017 debut at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs. After captivating London, Shanghai, Tokyo, and other global capitals, the show finds new form at Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza.

Under fashion historian and longtime Dior collaborator Florence Müller’s evolving curation, the exhibition traces over 75 years of couture history – from Monsieur Dior’s artistic influences and garden fascinations to the sumptuous theatricality of balls. Her conceptual framework finds physical form through OMA’s New York partner Shohei Shigematsu, now on his fourth outing designing for the house, who has created a blockbuster tribute that celebrates Dior’s legacy through a millennial Korean-inflected lens.

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul

Housed within Hadid’s curvilinear landmark, the exhibition unfolds with measured elegance. Shigematsu confronts a vast 2,000 sq m, columnless expanse with 16m-high ceilings, and transforms challenge into advantage with a dreamy sequence of themed vignettes that breathe with intention – where traditional hanbok fabrics and bojagi patchwork patterns create a subtle dialogue between East and West, and Dior’s past and present float through rooms and fashion milestones.

The spatial design itself whispers of couture techniques – room dividers echo fabric ruffles, while the volumes of classic silhouettes inform the very geometry of the spaces. In the Dior Garden room, for instance, dresses are suspended like botanical specimens beneath a ceiling where light projections shift with the hours and seasons, all contained within a minimalist vessel reminiscent of traditional Korean moon jars.

‘If you consider the whole exhibition as one piece of theatre, each room is a scene and the mannequins are the actors,’ explains Shigematsu. ‘Each room is different, but as a whole, you see the consistency of Dior.’ This cinematic approach transforms an otherwise imposing space into an altogether more intimate reading of the maison’s evolution.

But what elevates ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ beyond mere retrospective is its conversation with Korean artistry. Works by actress Kim Hyun Joo, painter and sculptor Soo Sunny Park, and multimedia creator Zadie Xa intertwine with Dior’s legacy, while local interpretations of the Lady Dior bag – 17 for the Lady Dior ‘As Seen By’ concept and nine for the Dior ‘Lady Art’ project – occupy a tunnel styled like a fantasy wardrobe, taking cues from video artist Nam June Paik and traditional Korean cabinetry.

‘What I respect about Dior is that they're really good at creating a multi-faceted domain,’ Shigematsu notes. ‘They deploy architecture, local design, scent, cultures – all of which converge to create a zeitgeist. A single domain – fashion – is not enough.’

From the iconic Bar jacket in ‘The New Look’ gallery to the dramatic double spiral staircase of ‘The Dior Ball’, where light projections conjure the spirit of grand cinematic choreography, the exhibition balances reverence with innovation. ‘It’s important not to glorify the past,’ insists Shigematsu. ‘A retrospective can also be forward-looking. You don’t want the visitor to say, “Oh, they just opened up the archives."’

In this Seoul iteration, the 75-year journey of Dior reveals itself not as a static archive but, rather, a thoroughly immersive, contemporary experience that acknowledges its roots while refusing to be defined by them.

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ will be showing in Art Hall 1 of Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul from 19 April to 13 July 2025.

dior.com

Last week, the New Museum, a Manhattan hub for new art and ideas, announced that it will open a 60,000 sq ft expansion in autumn of this year. The building has been designed by international architecture firms OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) and Cooper Robertson, and its opening will coincide with an inaugural exhibition called New Humans: Memories of the Future.

The New Museum originally opened in 1977 on New York’s Hudson Street; it has since moved and expanded, becoming a renowned space for contemporary art. OMA founder Rem Koolhas and partner Shohei Shigematsu are among the architects to work on the extension, the practice's first public building in New York, which will be named after the late philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a long-serving New Museum trustee. It will ‘usher in a new era of possibilities for the New Museum as a vital civic resource for New Yorkers and the global arts community’, said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis director of the New Museum.

She added that ‘the New Museum has always been a ‘future-facing museum’ – ‘not a place for preserving and recording history, but a place where history is made’. As such, the extension will complement the existing building on the Bowery at Prince Street, which was designed by SANAA, whilst also bringing a new dimension, doubling the museum’s gallery space, improving visitor flow, and creating new venues for artist residencies and public programs. The new building will be a ‘highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum’s verticality and solidity’, said Shigematsu.

The OMA partner also revealed that the extension will ‘offer horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation, and a diversity of spaces for gathering, exchange, and creation’. It will include, he said, an outdoor plaza at the ground level, ‘moments of transparency throughout the central atrium’, and terraced openings at the top.

The inaugural exhibition will be an ‘encyclopedic, interdisciplinary exhibition that continues the Museum's engagement with the most pressing issues of today’, said Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson artistic director of the New Museum: ‘Through the work of more than 150 artists, writers, and cultural figures, New Humans reveals how our most terrifying contemporary concerns are in fact as old as humanity itself. [The exhibition] highlights the role artists play in interpreting and confronting the critical issues that will shape our collective fate.’

The New Museum is ‘an incubator for new cultural perspectives and production’, said Shigematsu, and we look forward to seeing OMA’s architectural interpretation of this methodology.

oma.com

The Museo Egizio, dedicated to ancient Egyptian history, archaeology, and art, is a core attraction in Turin’s cultural landscape. As this historic institution celebrates its bicentenary, its renowned Gallery of the Kings has been remodelled by architects OMA in collaboration with Andrea Tabocchini Architecture.

Hosting ancient colossal sculptures and artefacts representing kings and gods, the Gallery of the Kings has been completely redesigned to offer a new, striking, and sophisticated experience. The main focus has been to create a gallery where visitors can connect with the original place and time of these ancient artefacts – Thebes, or modern-day Luxor.

As OMA managing partner, architect David Gianotten, said, 'The opportunity to design the Gallery of the Kings compelled us to explore how the contemporary museum experience and the historical context of artefacts can coexist through architecture.'

Aided by the curatorial and research efforts of the Museo Egizio, the gallery design revolves around a transition from darkness to light, a concept that historically symbolised the process of creation in ancient Egypt. Visitors are drawn through a dark entryway with digital projections on the history of Karnak – the artefacts’ original site – into the two main exhibition spaces.

Natural and artificial lighting fills the tall 17th-century halls where the ancient Egyptian sculptures are displayed. Soft reflections from the aluminum-covered walls lend an otherworldly ambience to the space while also displaying information about the artefacts.

The two halls are arranged to mirror the Temple of Karnak's progression from outer to inner sanctuaries. The first hall evokes the temple's exterior spaces, with two sphinxes facing each other at the centre, flanked by statues of the goddess Sekhmet, culminating with the statue of Seti II. The second hall represents the inner sanctuaries, featuring a chronological display of statues of kings and gods.

This redesign is part of the larger Museo Egizio 2024 initiative, which aims to transform the museum into a central civic space in Turin through a series of public urban rooms. Uncovered windows in the gallery now reveal the ancient statues to passersby on Piazza Egizia and Via Principe Amedeo, inviting the public to engage with the museum's treasures even from outside.

As Andrea Tabocchini expressed, ‘From the outset, we saw this project not just as an opportunity to redesign a unique exhibition space. Culture must honour the past while remaining alive, evolving, and inspiring the future.’ The collaboration between OMA, Andrea Tabocchini Architecture, and Museo Egizio's dedicated team has resulted in a space that bridges history and modernity, offering an immersive experience that honors the past while embracing contemporary design.

museoegizio.it

On a hot day this past June, the designer Simon Porte Jacquemus held his A/W 2024 runway show at Casa Malaparte, the modernist Adalberto Libera-designed home on the Italian island of Capri. Its terracotta-hued rooftop – immortalised in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 movie Contempt – served as the show’s runway, the collection itself a vision of the sensual Meditteranean glamour that has infused the Parisian label since its founding 15 years ago. It is an aesthetic deeply rooted in the Jacquemus psyche: the designer was born and raised in Provence, the idyllic, sun-soaked locale serving as the designer’s lodestar (perhaps his most memorable runway show was held in an undulating Provençal lavender field).

Now, Jacquemus brings the warm glow of a Mediterranean summer to his latest opening: a serene new flagship store on London’s New Bond Street with interiors designed in collaboration with OMA (opening today, 15 November 2024). Deemed ‘The London Boutique’, and following a recent opening in New York, the four-floor, 332 sq m store takes over a former art gallery on the luxury shopping street. Chris van Duijn, the OMA partner, and Giulio Margheri, the associate who led the project, tell Wallpaper* that the desire was to ‘evoke the atmosphere of the Mediterranean within the context of a traditional, Victorian-style home’. As such, those entering through the store’s neoclassical façade – complete with a bas-relief frieze by the Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart – will be greeted by beige stone floors (evocative of Mediterranean paving), stucco walls and twisting, wrought-iron railings.

Wallpaper* tour: Jacquemus’ New Bond Street store, London

‘The design concept involves a “stacking” of shapes, with straight lines, an open plan and a wide window on the ground floor that transitions into more fluid, curved walls, and intimate settings on the upper levels,’ explains Margheri of the store’s interiors. A Portland stone staircase links the various levels – with dedicated menswear and womenswear floors – while a private VIP salon, designed to feel ‘cocooning’, is accessed through a separate entranceway. ‘The space is unified by hand-applied textured stucco and a neutral colour palette, creating a cohesive atmosphere throughout,’ adds Van Duijn, noting that more vivid accents of yellow in the furnishings evoke the bold hues of Jacquemus’ collections.

The store also serves as a gallery-like space for Jacquemus to display his growing collection of art and play curator, something increasingly popular within luxury retail design (across the road, Gucci’s New Bond Street store is also housed in a former gallery and has a regular rotation of contemporary art, as does Casa Loewe, while The Row’s nearby Mount Street store sees shoppers greeted by a James Turrell orb). Close to 50 works by art and design icons populate the space, including a still life by Wolfgang Tillmans, a Raoul Dufy nude and Astier de Villatte ceramics, alongside loans of work by Henry Moore, John Maclauchlan and French art deco designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann.

‘I feel extremely proud to be able, independently, to have open boutiques in Paris, Saint Tropez, Courchevel, Dubai, New-York and now London,’ Jacquemus tells Wallpaper*. ‘Together with OMA, we designed the space to recreate a home, with a south of France feeling. The materials, artworks and furniture were carefully chosen from my favourite merchants and curators and some from my favourite galleries in London. It was important for me to recreate a comfortable and welcoming space in London, where the customers can feel at home in the middle of New Bond Street.’

Jacquemus ‘The London Boutique’ is open now at 33 New Bond Street, London.

Ask Anthony Curis about Lantern, the new cultural and community hub in Detroit’s East Village, and he’ll give you a modest answer. On a rainy March afternoon in the Michigan city, known for its shifting fortunes tied to the automotive industry, he describes the architectural transformations redrawing the area, of which Lantern is part, as ‘a by-product’ of Library Street Collective, the gallery he founded with his partner in life and work, JJ Curis, in 2012. And yet, the many changes happening in Little Village, as the burgeoning creative district is now known, are both intentional and sweeping – and the Curises are behind them. 

There’s the renovation of a 1912 church-turned-art gallery-and-library by Peterson Rich Office. Next to it, a McArthur Binion and Tony Hawk-designed skate park borders a sculpture garden dedicated to the visual artist Charles McGee, with landscaping by Manhattan-based studio OSD. An adjacent rectory was recast into a guesthouse and artist residency by Detroit practice Rossetti, with interiors by Holly Jonsson Studio.

Lantern: a new cultural and community hub in Detroit

‘When we first started meeting with the community members and stakeholders they said incredible, great – but we don’t want it to be an island, we want you to do more,’ Curis says about the response to their plans for the church, their first acquisition. The more they did, the more their list of collaborators kept growing. The Curises’ latest project, developed with OMA New York, transforms a collection of buildings that includes a former commercial bakery and warehouses into a mixed-use complex. 

Sitting at the corner of Kercheval and McClellan avenues, the newly opened Lantern will house the HQ of two local art non-profits: Signal-Return, a community letterpress print shop (whose interiors were designed by Detroit-based M1DTW Architects), and Progressive Arts Studio Collective (PASC), which supports artists with disabilities and mental health differences. Organised around a courtyard, other tenants – artist studios, the music recording company Assemble Sound, plus retail spaces and more – round out a concept that sets out to serve the broader community.

In sync with the Curises’ and the Detroit art icon Charles McGee’s vision of improving the quality of life in the city through art, OMA has designed a building that reflects this idea of making a space that encourages creativity, without losing sight of the urban context. ‘In a city like Detroit, where a lot of the urban fabric has disappeared, it’s great to preserve a building like this,’ says OMA’s Jason Long, who led the design for Lantern. 

Though the space that became the courtyard was missing a roof and a wall on one side, Long decided to leverage the existing structure, warts and all. ‘The solid walls on the most prominent corner of the site are a very simple construction of concrete masonry units,’ he explains. ‘We thought that solidity was something to keep and at the same time we wanted to figure out a way to bring light into that part of the building – and some life into the façade itself.’

Long’s approach for these walls emerged while iterating different compositions of windows, ideas that never really felt right. ‘The existing openings within the building were so straightforward, clear and rational that doing something expressive just never seemed to work.’ He ultimately landed on drilling 1,500 holes into the surface and filling them with cylindrical glass elements. They perforate the façade with a muted transparency that hints at what goes on inside. Long sees it as ‘a somewhat light touch that at the same time has a dramatic impact.’

Not only has this façade been transformed from a solid barrier bordering the street to a textured invitation to explore Lantern, but the way the community will circulate and engage with the buildings has also been altered. By repositioning the main entrance toward the courtyard, formed from 2,000 sq ft of poured red concrete, OMA shields this public space from traffic while opening it up to an alley and the site beyond it. ‘That was our way of gesturing towards what we hope will happen as this area develops,’ offers Long. ‘We try to make all of our projects adaptable in certain ways, knowing that they might be used differently in the future.’

A living and breathing hub for the local community, Lantern is the newest example of how OMA leverages architecture as a catalyst for social change, creating the perfect foil for the Curises’ mission. Long adds, ‘Detroit is in a position to really experiment with urban conditions, culture and buildings. Hopefully, this intervention has been done in that spirit of experimentation.’  

oma.com

lscgallery.com

A version of this article appears in the June 2024 Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

The house of Prada, currently under the creative direction of Miuccia Prada and Belgian designer Raf Simons, stands distinct in the landscape of fashion. Its style is characterised by a dual narrative: on one side, Prada embodies a timeless elegance rooted in sophisticated cultural references, such as Italian neorealism. On the other, it boldly ventures into cutting-edge modernity, bravely skirting the edges of banality.

A Prada fashion show is the prime setting for observing these narratives, particularly when they take on the language of architecture. Here, we are granted a view of how the future of fashion might materialise. Since Miuccia Prada introduced her first womenswear line for the family-owned business in 1988, these runway shows have proved a benchmark to gauge the zeitgeist.

Prada’s show sets have become intrinsic to the presentation of the house’s collections. They are designed by the Rotterdam-based OMA/AMO, led by the eminent Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. This collaboration is the most enduring of its kind, bridging the worlds of architecture and fashion for 25 years. It has revolutionised the fashion show as spectacle and pushed the boundaries of what is expected from a runway presentation.

25 years of OMA/AMO and Prada’s extraordinary runway sets

The collaboration began in 1999 when Prada approached OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) with a request to design its New York store. This marked the active start of AMO (OMA in reverse), the research arm of the practice, dedicated to applying architectural thinking to various disciplines. Initially, AMO’s role primarily involved experimenting with content creation and video production, showcasing a new architectonical ability to enhance the Prada brand through various mediums. With the S/S 2004 fashion show, though, AMO focused exclusively on the set design, which was then regularly staged in an industrial space at the Prada HQ on Milan’s via Fogazzaro. The practice has been collaborating with Miuccia Prada – and later, with Raf Simons – on the show sets ever since.

This season’s sets were particularly striking. For the men’s and women’s S/S 2024 show set, which featured a dripping wall of slime, the architects successfully straddled a difficult line. They not only transformed the set into a space that spoke to the social-media moment but maintained the essence of experimentation with physical space. The achievement marks a unique fusion of digital-age aesthetics with the tangible aspects of architectural design, appealing to a modern, tech-savvy audience while preserving the authenticity of spatial exploration.

With the opening of the OMA-designed Fondazione Prada’s Torre in 2018 – part of the foundation’s new location in Largo Isarco in the south of Milan – Prada’s fashion shows found their new home in Deposito, a vast industrial space on its ground floor. En route there for the A/W 2018 womenswear show, I chatted with my taxi driver, pointing out the neon lights that Prada and AMO had erected on the skyline that season. The driver shook his head: ‘No, signora, non è Prada, è un lunapark!’ (‘No, ma’am, it’s not Prada, it’s an amusement park!’). His confusion reminded me of Koolhaas’ words in his 1978 book Delirious New York, where he stated that ‘Luna Park [in Coney Island] is the first manifestation of a curse which is to haunt the architectural profession for the rest of its life, the formula: technology + cardboard (or any other flimsy material) = reality.’

‘What has always interested me is whether we could find ways to experiment, and to experiment with architectural transformation,’ says Koolhaas when I ask him why he believes the collaboration with Prada has been so lasting. ‘A lot of our work together has been connected to an interest in generating transformation through the know-how of fashion. For instance, if you take the ceiling that moves up and down [as was the case at Prada’s A/W 2023 men’s and womenswear show sets], if you were to do it as an architect, it would take at least a year and a half to engineer, and it would cost at least €3 million at that scale.

‘What is fascinating [about collaborating with a] fashion mentality is that it takes maybe three weeks, and is done not using metal and steel but foam and Velcro, yet the effect is the same. For us, it’s really interesting for us to use fashion tools to experiment with architecture.’

Reflecting on the formula learned from Luna Park, one of Coney Island’s first enclosed theme parks, Koolhaas says: ‘In my early writings about New York, my focus extended beyond just the phenomenon itself; I aimed to understand the early effects of technology on communities and on reality. This early realisation has always stayed with me.

‘But it’s important to emphasise that none of the work we’ve accomplished with Prada would have been possible without a dedicated team. It requires an extensive team effort, and often, changing team dynamics is crucial to keep the project’s intelligence alive. We work with a mix of consistent elements – you could call it a formula – and an endless array of variations. These variations come from our partners, the teams themselves, and the people who work on the project. This is why Giulio is here with us today.’

Giulio Margheri, associate architect at OMA, joined the Prada project team at AMO for the house’s S/S 2016 show. Margheri tells me that AMO never starts with a conventional brief. Instead, the process begins with distinct, sometimes seemingly unrelated words. It’s a deeply involved and interactive journey, typically necessitating around six discussions between the AMO and Prada teams. These dialogues guide AMO’s work by fostering an understanding of the overarching mood or critical elements that might influence the collection. This is then translated into a unique expression, explored in architectural drawings, visualisations, and physical models.

‘There is never one direction we work, but several, and it is a constant,’ Margheri adds. ‘It’s also a response to what is happening in the outside world, or to the political situation. This conversation is always a challenge on both sides. It’s interesting, sometimes when we discuss a show, we at AMO might refer to, let’s say, the “yellow curtains” show (S/S 2021), while the Prada team might refer to the “banana pattern” (S/S 2011). This illustrates that we operate with two different reference systems simultaneously – architecture and fashion.’ Asked for the words for S/S 2024, Giulio responds with ‘organic minimalism’.

Koolhaas dislikes being asked about his or AMO’s contribution to fashion. In his own words: ‘I’m nervous about discussing my work or our influence in such terms. I aim to maintain freedom. Dwelling on this could become a significant burden. Our office strives to explore any direction without being tied down by these heavy considerations, as it could restrict our freedom.’

After pausing, he continues: ‘One aspect I can acknowledge is our demonstration of long-term engagement in fashion, an industry typically known for short-term partnerships. This might be the most intriguing aspect and perhaps why we’re discussing this now. Our collaboration covers a broad spectrum of contrasting approaches, yet they all stem from the same source. From the start, there was an almost automatic understanding of our mutual ambitions and aesthetics with Prada. We instinctively embraced Prada’s ambitions to challenge convention, to work with concepts of ugliness, and to experiment with uniforms and uniformity.’

In line with Koolhaas’ formula in Delirious New York, the collaboration between Prada and OMA/AMO shows that shaping the reality of architecture and the future of fashion through runway shows involves more than just technology and simple materials; it’s fundamentally driven by a continuous hunger for knowledge and innovation.

A/W 2021

For the Prada A/W 2021 show (featuring the first menswear collaboration by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons), AMO created a colourful set designed to be broadcast rather than experienced by a live audience. The models navigated an interior of faux fur and marble planes, with the camera closely following them. This led Koolhaas to coin the term ‘close-up from the back’, a rare instance of an architect creating terminology that was later adopted by the fashion industry

S/S 2024

For the S/S 2024 men’s and womenswear set, AMO focused on the idea of ‘organic minimalism’. Walking alongside a cascade of pink slime (having shifted from the green of the menswear show), the models at Prada’s S/S 2024 womenswear show wore dresses in hues of white, pink, light blue, light green, and brown, complementing the salmon-pink set and creating a satisfying visual spectacle in which the fashion and the architectural framework merged seamlessly.

‘That was indeed stunning,’ says Koolhaas. ‘There was no brief provided about the dress that transforms [in] the space. But I do think that sometimes the set influences what they’re doing. There’s a resonance between the fashion and the design of the space, which is based on a conversation, where these elements materialise in different forms later [on]. For us, it is always exciting to see the final show – not just the space itself but seeing who is inhabiting it.’ 

The slime concept for S/S 2024 introduced fluid architectural elements, something that contrasted with the mechanical rising ceiling used for the A/W 2023 set and somehow felt less industrial, harsh or threatening. This reflects a common trend in the Prada and AMO collaboration – a new set often reacts to the previous one.

A/W 2023

For this show, the focus on the ceilings highlighted a significant architectural ambition. Margheri emphasises the desire for a space that initially seems unchanged, but where introducing just one element can lead to a radical transformation. Here, a ceiling rose as the show progressed, eventually revealing enormous hanging art deco chandeliers (for the men’s show) and columns of sweetly fragranced lilies (for the women’s show). This strategy utilised the height of the Deposito, demonstrating the role of architecture as an engineering discipline to redefine a space.

A/W 2022

For this cinema and sci-fi inspired menswear show, OMA transformed the Deposito into a theatrical space featuring seats from the nearby Cinema Fondazione Prada and a recreation of its iconic olive green carpet. But the spotlight was firmly on the models (including Hollywood actors Kyle MacLachlan and Jeff Goldblum) who emerged and disappeared from tunnels illuminated by bright blue neon lights and lined with metal grating. The resulting scenes echoed a mix of cinematographic references, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Twin Peaks.

S/S 2021

Thanks to their previous spatial experiments, the traditional catwalk had already begun to lose its role as the main principle in Prada’s fashion spaces well before the pandemic. However, the digital presentation of Prada and Simons’ first collaborative womenswear collection, S/S 2021, was markedly different.

‘I would use the metaphor of a film studio because, without any kind of public, we became much more experimental and aware of the camera,’ Koolhaas explains. ‘The freedom of movement that the camera suggested meant that the camera alone became very prominent and present in the show itself. It became a new actor. Since that moment, our approach, even when the public is present, is a lot more about filming and mobility. This change was partly due to Covid but also partly due to Raf Simons’ co-creative direction with Miuccia Prada, who was interested in pursuing that direction. So, the set became a merger of the previous and the upcoming.

S/S 2023

The exploration of height in the Deposito began with the S/S 2023 set, which is a perfect example of the strength of the collaboration. It combined Rem Koolhaas’ intellectually driven architectural philosophy with Prada and Simons’ unique approach to fusing contrasting elements via novel combinations. ‘The Paper House’ – a paper mock-up executed from rolls of regular paper suspended from 10m-high ceilings (white paper for the men’s show, black for the women’s)– served as a subtle tribute to ‘paper architecture’, embodying visionary, yet often unrealised, architectural concepts. More than a mere fashion space, it was a manifestation of architectural imagination and theory.

A version of this article appears in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

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Buffalo AKG Art Museum opens this month (June 2023), inviting the public into its brand-new, OMA-designed home in New York state. When we first visited the project, a little over six months ago, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) was still deep in construction. Now, it is reborn with a striking OMA-crafted extension (led by partner in charge Shohei Shigematsu, and working with executive architects Cooper Robertson), site-specific installations, and a new focus on the local community. 

Buffalo AKG Art Museum opens to the public

'We often say that there are only two types of museums: a museum in the park, embedded in the tranquility of nature, and a museum in the city, implanted within the energy of urbanism. The Buffalo AKG Art Museum is both. It sits at the northern edge of the historic Delaware Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The city is known for its history of industrial revolution and the current revitalisation of remnants from that past. It has a rich architectural history – from silos and manufacturing facilities to buildings by Eero Saarinen, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright,' the OMA team write in a statement. 

This cultural institution is celebrating an inspiring legacy – it is the sixth-oldest museum in the United States. Having undergone various iterations and additions in its long life (its first version was established in 1862), and under the guidance of current director Janne Sirén, it launched a new scheme for a refresh and extension by OMA. Now, it spans decades and styles, from the original 1905 building to a new three-storey, geometric structure. There's a sculpture terrace and a connecting bridge as well as a 1962 building whose courtyard becomes a key public heart for the complex – and where Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann of Studio Other Spaces have designed a site-specific artwork to cover it. 

Shigematsu said during our site visit last tyear: ‘Our focus was to present those efforts as a sign of openness, by having a space where people can improvise, and activities visible from outside – not about a closed authoritarian façade.' To that end, its ethereal volumes and glass transparency were very important: 'If you occupied the ground level with the galleries, then it would become another fortress,’ he added.  

Buffalo AKG Art Museum opens to the public this weekend (15-18 June 2023).

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One thing is certain; when Factory International opens in Manchester this coming autumn, it will be like nothing the art world has seen before. OMA is adept at creating architecture that challenges and surprises, especially in the field of performance. Ellen van Loon, the OMA partner in charge of the project, was also behind the practice’s seminal Casa da Música in Porto (2005), while the studio’s more recent Taipei Performing Arts Center (2022) is nothing if not unconventional, all bold shapes and embracing public, community life. 

The same can be said for Factory International, which sees a soft opening this June, allowing its first guests in to enjoy a series of events during the Manchester International Festival’s (MIF) 2023 edition - while continuing to finesse construction work towards a full, official opening in October.  

Factory International aims to break barriers

What makes it special? It aims to break the barriers, quite literally, between audience and the performers; the front and back of stage. ‘The most important thing for me is that this is a building for the next generation, a building that gives people a place to try new things, not to conform to what you should do – a testing ground, an incubator,’ Van Loon says. 

‘The challenge with this project was that it was anything but a traditional theatre. We were discussing the shape of a new era for theatre; a building that doesn’t have a front of house or back of house distinction – every space needed to be used for everything.’

Factory International: led by openness and adaptability

This indeed encapsulates the spirit of Factory International. The fairly raw structure was purposely conceived to be malleable. It draws inspiration from warehouses, both in the sense of a space that can hold whatever you need it to, but also it terms of its neighbourhood’s heritage, as it translates the area’s spirit of place for the 21st century – it is situated in a part of town by the River Irwell that may now be changing, but was not too long ago full of industrial buildings, ‘surrounded by civil engineering,’ Van Loon explains. 

Inside, this corresponds to extreme openness and adaptability. The backstage connects to the performance hall through a large round window. This symbolises van Loon’s attempt to provide artists with contemporary, liveable spaces to rest and prepare between shows. Dressing areas are typically dark, simple places but these are not only purpose-designed but feature ample natural light and a direct connection to the stage.  

Around the stage, equipment is visible everywhere, even the bits the public normally doesn’t see. ‘Of course we had to make sure that it’s all safe, but also that everything remains open and transparent,’ says Van Loon. Unsurprisingly, this makes a building very flexible - the antithesis of the typical example of a theatre where everything is fixed and all the technical elements are hidden away. ‘You can build the fly tower wherever you want, the large grid enables you to hoist and rig in any position you want. There is fixed seating on the balcony, but everything else is movable.’

As a result, the architectural context has led to interesting discussions with artists. ‘Artists are surprised, and sometimes bemused by [the building],’ Van Loon smiles. ‘I wanted to create something that takes them out of their comfort zone.’ There is true dialogue between building and users here, as both the building can change to fit a performance’s needs, but the artists also respond to the building in unexpected ways. OMA worked closely with MIF and its artistic director and chief executive John McGrath to fine-tune every element, from its clever purpose-built truck lift to bring in large elements, and its movable acoustic wall that can divide up the main hall into two, to its 1600-seat auditorium that can accommodate anything from ballet, theatre, music to cross-art performances. 

‘We love to work on performance buildings. Every time we dream further!’ concludes Van Loon. ‘That is the joy of reinventing the performance building.’

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After an extensive refurbishment, Tiffany & Co has re-opened its iconic Fifth Avenue store in New York City, marking the first renovation since the original opened in 1940. Peter Marino is behind the interior architecture of the new flagship – now dubbed The Landmark – while OMA New York, led by Shohei Shigematsu, oversaw the renovation, including the addition of three storeys to the existing building.

Tiffany & Co Fifth Avenue: step inside The Landmark

‘My main consideration was how to lighten and brighten an American icon without hurting its classic style,’ Marino tells us. ‘We integrated Tiffany & Co’s extensive history – in tribute we used mixed metals, silverworks – and all counters have mixed copper, stainless steel, or brass. There are ten floors, and for all individual spaces, we created unique wall finishes, custom carpets, and different layouts. No two spaces are the same.’

The vast new store is home to a Blue Box Cafe by Daniel Boulud, dedicated museum and exhibition spaces, a floor dedicated to engagement pieces and another to Tiffany & Co homeware, as well as the largest collection of Tiffany high jewellery worldwide. Dotted throughout the ten floors are nearly 40 artworks, including pieces by Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel, Rashid Johnson, Anna Weyant and Daniel Arsham.

‘The Landmark represents a new era for Tiffany & Co,’ notes Alexandre Arnault, EVP of Product & Communications, Tiffany & Co. ‘The holistic transformation began in 2019 and marks the store’s first complete reimagining in its history. As a brand with a nearly 200-year legacy, Tiffany & Co’s drive for excellence and innovative spirit are what propel the house forward. The Landmark is the ultimate physical representation of our core values of innovation, fine craftsmanship and creative excellence. The Landmark is the perfect synergy of past and future. The building’s exterior was refurbished to pay homage to its iconic original structure, while the interiors introduce the world to a new Tiffany & Co. Upon entering the store, clients will experience ten floors of wonder and a retail experience unlike any other.’

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In a glass-walled meeting room overlooking the production floor of stone company SolidNature’s Amsterdam headquarters, CEO David Mahyari is recounting his brand's first big break. 'OMA came by looking for some specific travertines that they hadn’t been able to find,' he recalls. During their visit, partners Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon found not only the travertine they had been looking for but also another stone that they even more urgently needed, for the National Library of Qatar, which they were in the midst of designing. 'It was two or three months before we had even officially registered the company,' says Mahyari, whose brother founded the SolidNature in 2011 before handing over the reins to the thirty-something-year-old CEO in 2018. 'So the relationship started before we officially did.' 

That serendipitous discovery spawned a nearly decade-long relationship (as well as Fondazione Prada's iconic dyed-pink onyx elevator) and for Milan Design Week 2023, SolidNature has once again collaborated with the Dutch firm. This time for their exhibition, 'Beyond The Surface', which will see OMA recreate the journey of quarrying, finishing and crafting stone through an allegorical experience that compares the industrial process to the act of dreaming. 

SolidNature presents 'Beyond the Surface' at Milan Design Week 2023

Set in the basement of the neo-Romanesque Casa Maveri, a private villa in Brera, visitors will venture below ground, and into the realm of sleep, passing through a series of illusory installations that respond to themes such as ‘Confrontation’, ‘Revelation’ and ‘Patience’ – each exhibiting various 'treatments, applications and approaches of designing with natural stone,' says OMA senior architect Giulio Margheri – before emerging into the daylight and consciousness in the home’s sprawling garden.

From our conference room view, we watch a team of men at the opposite end of the building prepare pieces that will soon be shipped to Milan. Engulfed in clouds of marble dust that settle like snow on their black uniforms, they’re carving out the shape of a reclining woman, which will become an anthropomorphic seat designed by the Iranian artist Bita Fayyazi. The sculpture will live in the villa’s garden, alongside an undulating bench titled ‘The Wave’, also by Fayyazi, an installation inspired by Elizabethan theatres by Studio Ossidiana and a party-ready table in glass and travertine by Sabine Marcelis.

This will be the second time the Rotterdam-based Marcelis has joined SolidNature in Milan. At Alcova in 2022, she presented a monolithic bathroom system carved entirely out of pink onyx. However, the designer’s relationship with the company stretches back to 2019, when she called on them to develop the travertine elements in her ‘No Fear of Glass’ exhibition at Barcelona’s Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. This year, Marcelis wanted to create an object visitors could interact with, so she took it upon herself to devise a buffet table and bar that could take centre stage during the week’s events – while also revisiting the same glass and travertine palette she and SolidNature explored four years ago.

The ten-foot-long glass tabletop is marked by a gradient pattern that subtly shifts from yellow to orange to red. The glass is propped up by a series of mismatched stone legs that extrude like islands through the transparent pane, and whose natural tone reflects their corresponding section of the gradient. 'I was trying to find that tension between the manmade and the natural,' she explains of the concept. 'I really wanted to showcase what different ideas can bring to the same materials.' 

Marcelis then shaped the tops of the stone pillars to act as serving platters – for example, milling out concave wells for cradling ice – for staging a conceptual feast by culinary artist Laila Gohar. According to Marcelis, the edible installation will respond to the table’s warm-toned hues. 'Every aspect of the project was determined by the colour palette,' she adds. 'Including the food.'

'The main objective for us as a company is to push boundaries and change the perspective of how we normally use stone and what kind of stones we use,' Mahyari reflects on the nature of the collaboration with the architects, artists and designers who will represent the brand Milan. 'The reason why it works so well is because when they come up with an idea – it is never no. It's always OK, let's try.'

SolidNature - Beyond the Surface is on view from 17 to 23 April 2023

Via Cernaia 1
Milan

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When I was growing up in Buffalo, New York, it was in a decades-long post-industrial slump, and known mainly for chicken wings, act-of-God blizzards, and a beloved, often heartbreaking football team. But it had a glorious past as one of America’s most prosperous cities, and an exceptional legacy of art and architecture, including the world-renowned Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Now, Buffalo is experiencing a long-awaited rebirth, along with a stunning overhaul for this gem of a cultural institution.

The sixth-oldest museum in the United States, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery was established in 1862 as the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy to showcase the art of its day. Architect Edward Brodhead Green designed its first permanent building, a Greek Revivalist structure inaugurated in 1905, on the edge of the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Delaware Park. Several visionaries helped make the museum great, including Anson Conger Goodyear, who pushed for the acquisition in 1926 of Picasso’s La Toilette (its nudity temporarily cost him his place on the board). In 1939, Goodyear established the Room of Contemporary Art. ‘That became a boost to the original DNA of “we live with our times”,’ notes current director Janne Sirén, poached from the Helsinki Art Museum in 2013. ‘Or, as the saying goes, “when the paint is still wet”.’ From 1938 onwards, under Seymour H Knox Jr and Gordon M Smith, the museum built up its holdings hungrily and intelligently, acquiring masterpieces by the likes of Matisse, Pollock, Rothko, Bacon, de Kooning and Warhol, and amassing one of the world’s top collections of abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism. 

To display its acquisitions, the museum commissioned Buffalo native Gordon Bunshaft to design a sleek, modernist glass box with an auditorium in 1962. Renamed the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (after two philanthropists who donated generously to the institution), the museum tripled its collection between 1960 and 2000, again overwhelming the space. (At one point, Sirén had a Cézanne and a Monet hanging in his office.) By the turn of this century, the Bunshaft addition no longer met conservation standards or ADA regulations. Art itself was changing, becoming bigger. The Albright-Knox even lacked a loading dock – Sirén says a crane would hoist larger artworks to an opening in the side of the building: ‘There are pictures of Pollocks literally flying through the air, with four art handlers holding the ropes so they don’t fling too much!’

In 2012, the museum asked Snøhetta to draw up a master plan for a new addition. But when Sirén was hired, he took a step back. Buffalo has a nearly 30 per cent poverty rate, and he wanted to involve the local community in the process. ‘Many people appreciate the Albright-Knox in a castle-on-the-hill way, like, “it’s not my museum”,’ he says. ‘Museums can be many things, but they have to be of, and for, the community.’ He held nine months of town hall meetings, and found that people supported an expansion as long as it did not encroach on the park. During the architecture competition, he told the five finalists: ‘We will ask you to flex your design muscle, but we’re probably not going to build anything you propose, because we’re looking for partners.’ The winner was OMA with the New York office’s Shohei Shigematsu as the partner in charge, for a proposal to build an extension over the Bunshaft courtyard (with executive architects Cooper Robertson), and the humility to throw it away. 

Instead, the new addition is a standalone building located where a parking lot once stood. Last summer, as I drove on the Scajaquada Expressway to visit the site, the three-storey, geometric building suddenly loomed into view on my left. Beyond it, the 1905 building stood like a proud parent, attached by the umbilical cord of a curving bridge. Each floor of the new addition will provide between 7,000 and 9,500 sq ft of exhibition space, with the galleries growing smaller and less defined as you move upwards. The ground floor features a 38ft-high space, while the third floor contains an immense 7,530 sq ft gallery with only two permanent supporting columns.

On the second floor, a sculpture terrace will wrap around the building between the exterior walls and a clear glass curtain wall, offering 360-degree views. Walking on it, I took in Olmsted-era trees, a Jaume Plensa sculpture temporarily wrapped in blue plastic on the lawn, the copper roof crest of the 1905 building, and a new architectural artwork by Studio Other Spaces reflected in the dark glass of the 1962 building. 

Shigematsu says the addition responds to the role of 21st-century museums as drivers of community build-up through art: ‘Our focus was to present those efforts as a sign of openness, by having a space where people can improvise, and activities visible from outside – not about a closed authoritarian façade.’ He explains that they arrived at the shape by creating the core of the building, the ground-floor galleries, like a plus sign, opening up the corners to transparency. ‘If you occupied the ground level with the galleries, then it would become another fortress,’ he says. 

The second floor ‘interstitial’ space behind the glass wall can be used for events. Art that is not susceptible to sunlight can be hung on the exterior gallery walls, visible from the street or park below. ‘I think this promenade space will be amazing,’ says Shigematsu. ‘You can have art on one side and the park on the other, and that’s really embodying the potential of the site and the collection.’

The courtyard of the 1962 building, formerly largely inaccessible to visitors, will now be the Town Square, the heart of the museum’s community engagement programme and free to enter. Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann of Studio Other Spaces have designed a site-specific artwork to cover it. Called Common Sky, it resembles an enormous glass-and-steel tree. ‘There’s an element of social consciousness,’ explains Eliasson, ‘and of bringing the outside and the weather in, and all of that kaleidoscopically.’ At the underground parking entrance, visitors will encounter another commissioned artwork, a digitally-designed tapestry by Swedish artist Miriam Bäckström. 

The museum is slated to reopen in spring 2023 with a show highlighting the permanent collection and a new name, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The ‘G’ stands for Jeffrey Gundlach, a Buffalo native and financier who ended up donating $65m of the roughly $190m budget. The scale of the project would not have been possible otherwise, says Sirén: ‘It’s been a Buffalo Bills game, where we move the ball down the field one yard at a time,’ he says, laughing. ‘Several touchdowns.’ 

INFORMATION

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cooperrobertson.com

Sea, sand and blue skies make up much of Miami's timeless identity – which is also sprinkled with copious amounts of smart, contemporary architecture. The Perigon at Miami Beach, one of the latest Miami residential projects, brings together all this, being beautifully positioned by the shoreline in Mid Beach, on a tranquil stretch between Indian Creek and the Atlantic Ocean. Flowing and light, the project was designed by acclaimed international architecture studio OMA, featuring interiors by Tara Bernerd and green grounds by landscape experts Gustafson Porter + Bowman. And this week, the development’s design is revealed as residential sales are launched. 

Spanning 17 storeys and including 82 residences (between two- and four-bedrooms each), the compact tower is bathed in light and feels intrinsically connected to nature, engulfed in water and greenery. Communal areas with decked seating, a swimming pool and planted expanses are matched by large openings in each apartment to ensure the resident feels at one with the serene context at every turn.

‘The Perigon’s wonderful beachfront location has provided Gustafson Porter + Bowman their first opportunity to design a landscape project in Miami and Florida. The landscaped gardens will reflect the rich diversity of Florida’s flora, in a sequence of garden rooms that connect with The Perigon’s elegant interiors. The gardens offer fine views of the ocean and are often accompanied by linear water features, filled with aquatic plants, [and bringing] the sound of falling water; [they] mirror the building’s curved and angular forms,' says the landscape architecture studio's director Neil Porter. 

The project’s design was composed to embrace the outdoor lifestyle of Miami Beach. ‘Miami Beach combines natural beauty with urban density – Collins Avenue is at times a walled fortress blocking off the city from its best asset. We tried to make our building touch the ground as lightly as possible, opening views to the ocean and sky from within the site and beyond. The lifted ends of the tower and liberated ground plane below, with a rich landscape design by Gustafson Porter + Bowman, are an open invitation and place of respite,' says OMA partner-in-charge Jason Long. 

Long continues: ‘The location on one of the thinnest stretches of the island posed a rare opportunity to engage two different waterfronts and the Miami skyline. A simple, rectangular tower would have been a visual straight jacket, so we composed the building as a set of bundled towers, strategically rotated to maximise views out and opportunities for unique layouts within.’ Zig-zagging floorplans with elongated units and overall generosity of space create a comfortable domestic interior that combines both panoramic views and seclusion, where needed.

Construction is expected to be completed in 2025.

INFORMATION

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Since department stores were introduced in the 19th century, they have revolutionised the way we shop. In Berlin, Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe), continental Europe’s biggest department store, with a sales area of some 60,000 sq m, has been one of Germany’s foremost retail outlets since it opened its doors in 1907. The store has since witnessed two world wars, emerging in the 1950s as a notable feature of the nation’s post-war redevelopment and subsequent economic success. But after a century of trading, changes in shopping habits – not least those brought about by the internet – called for a major rethink and a complete revamp. Enter, OMA. 

The (mostly) Rotterdam-based architecture practice was asked six years ago to make a master plan for the building to make it more accessible and interesting to a wider demographic. ‘It's basically a question of updating it,’ says OMA partner Ellen van Loon, who led the project with founder Rem Koolhaas and project architect Natalie Konopelski.

‘We are in a period where virtual and physical shopping are required by both the customer and the retailer. In that sense, department stores are going to be a much more connected kind of enterprise. And then the question will be: how do you connect the two worlds? That is now one of the big questions in shopping,’ says van Loon.

KaDeWe reimagined by OMA

To meet this challenge, the architects decided to scale down the vast space, dividing it into navigable sectors. ‘The floor plates are enormous, and with limited vertical circulation and very few orientation spots, visitors can easily feel lost. So we divided the space into four “quadrants”, each with its own architectural expression, and all of them connected by “primary streets”. It is almost like urban planning, as in a city, but translated to the inside of the building,’ she adds. Each quadrant is accessed from a different street entrance and is organised around a central atrium.

Earlier in October, the vertical circulation in the first quadrant was finished and opened to the public. It features timber-clad escalators in its heart that are a bold presence yet also a warm backdrop for all the shops.

KaDeWe, together with other landmark stores such as London’s Selfridges and Galeries Lafayette in Paris, helped define department store traditions. ‘What is interesting about these buildings is that during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, most department stores chose to seal up all their windows with a plasterboard wall. We decided to open them all up again and that is probably the most important thing we did in getting back the historical value of the building,’ says van Loon.

‘That brings two big benefits: firstly, it gets daylight into the space; secondly, the building also has an enormous amount of balconies all around, and they will be put in use again on the upper food and beverage levels,' she continues. The daylight extends further, as the original vaulted rooftop has been transformed into a glass volume emerging from the structure. Visitors can now view the sky from the ground floor upwards and, by taking a final flight of escalators to the roof, can enjoy grand views of the sprawling city below.

OMA is also creating the first installations for the ten display windows at the front façade of KaDeWe on the corner of Tauentzienstrasse and Passauer Strasse. ‘The shopping window does not necessarily need to show products, but can act as a portal to the city. It could be a teaser – our theme is currently to play with the senses because the senses are a substantial part of shopping,’ says van Loon.

Ownership of such historic buildings implies a certain degree of social obligation. ‘The retailers operating these spaces must also give something back to the city. If an institution like KaDeWe could do that on a cultural level, it would be beneficial for everybody; and the interest it creates would also allow the department store to connect to people from all walks of life and of ages,' the architect adds. ‘Andy Warhol once predicted, “Some day, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” It took a very long time, but it feels that we are now finally at this point.’ 

INFORMATION

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Welcome not just to the whirling world of Milan Fashion Week, but outer space too. For S/S 2022, Milanese label Sunnei took guests on an immersive, disruptive voyage, staging a deep space-inspired runway show in a 7,000 sq m warehouse in south-west Milan, designed to disrupt and interrupt its audience.

For S/S 2022, guests have entered a host of ornate palazzos, universities and museum show spaces, but for Sunnei an otherworldly palette cleanser was essential. After entering a stark, industrial space, the audience was greeted by a long white tunnel, conceived in collaboration with Milanese interdisciplinary agency 2050+, founded by former OMA partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli in 2020, which covers exhibitions, research, films and building, including the curation of the Russian Pavilion at the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale. 

‘We met in our garden over a coffee, no previous brief or communication. We exposed our initial ideas and Ippolito and his team immediately caught on,' Sunnei founders Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo say of their brand's collaboration with 2050+. ‘It was clear something impactful would be bred. It didn’t take many meetings or a long back and forth before landing on the final project. We are not fans of useless frameworks or heavy processes.'

On entering, guests picked a Sunnei-branded cotton bag, inside of which was a pair of the label's latest sunglasses, the chunky ‘Prototipo 3’, which secure around the head with a goggle-like elastic strap. Standing within the bare structure, washed by dim light, they donned their eyewear and awaited the start of the show.

It began to a pulsing, throbbing soundtrack and a hit of bright white light, as models strode in colourful, experimental designs: 3D knits and bold stripes, voluminous silhouettes, and densely tasselled, chunky accessories. A voiceover blared, ‘What you are about to witness is extraterrestrial', while lighting throbbed in purple and blue hues.

‘Over this year of isolation, we worked in what seemed like a hyperbaric chamber and we wanted to stress this feeling and re-create it in a way that could feel both ethereal and disruptive at the same time,' Rizzo and Messina say of the show concept. ‘Moreover, we wanted to create a moment of rupture, to convey our growth and reformed direction. To bring this metaphysical concept into real life, we decided to construct a space within a space to shake guests and confuse them, to then shock them with an abundance of lights, patterns and sounds. All of which could only fully be experienced through a special lens we provided the guests with upon entry. A metaphor of the filtered, digital world we live in nowadays.'

At the show's finale, models gathered in a long line along the stark tunnel, illuminated by light, and luxuriating in their bright, otherworldly, eclectic silhouettes. As the spectacle ended and guests descended from the tunnel back into the vast, shadow-swathed industrial space, their perspectives distorted and shifted. As they re-entered the roads around Milan, blinking in the sunglight, they immersed themselves not just in the home city of the label, one so associated with contemporary creative community, but also within its vision of the future. 

The Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles has just unveiled its latest addition. The Audrey Irmas Pavilion is not only famed architecture studio OMA's first California religious commission; it is also its first cultural building in the state. Led by practice partner Shohei Shigematsu, the modern pavilion was concieved as a contemporary addition and counterpoint to the complex's 1929 Byzantine-Revival sanctuary next door. 

The Audrey Irmas Pavilion, named after its lead donor, incorporates a new initiative and community space – the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace, a dedicated facility for ‘older Angelenos’. Flexible spaces that can accomodate meetings of various natures and sizes make up the interiors – although the main gathering spaces comprise the Grand Ballroom, a smaller chapel/event space, and a sunken garden. 

The pavilion’s design makes a bold, contemporary statement in its setting. At the same time, it was important to the architecture team to respect the existing context, which has inspired the volume’s angled walls that lean away gently from the existing historical buildings. 

The pavilion's distinctive façade is key to the lasting impression the building makes. It is made up of 1,230 hexagonal panels of glass fibre-reinforced concrete (GRFC). Meanwhile, practice founder Rem Koolhaas was commissioned especially to design a mezuzah (a piece of parchment in a decorative case containing verses from the Torah) for each door frame within. ‘I was both intrigued and challenged to design these for the doors within the pavilion. [A mezuzah] is an unexpected religious object having to answer explicit religious edicts, laws and rules, which made it totally fascinating for me and a very good lesson to have,’ says Koolhaas. 

‘The making of the Audrey Irmas Pavilion sustained forward momentum through the Covid-19 pandemic, a period in which the act of human interaction was questioned and contemplated,' Shigematsu adds. ‘Its completion comes at a time when we hope to come together again, and this building can be a platform to reinstate the importance of gathering, exchange, and communal spirit.

‘We assembled a constellation of spaces, distinct in form, scale, and aura – an extruded vault enveloped in wood establishes a multifunctional, central gathering space and connective spine; a trapezoidal void draws tones from the temple dome and frames its arched, stained-glass windows; and a circular sunken garden provides an oasis and passage to a roof terrace overlooking LA. Three interconnected voids make the solid form of the pavilion strategically yet surprisingly porous, engaging the campus and the city.

‘The pavilion will support both old and new activities, values, and traditions to foster a renewed energy for gathering.'

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Rotterdam and OMA have long been intertwined. The Dutch port city has been home to the celebrated architecture practice for over four decades now, and it is also co-founder Rem Koolhaas’ birthplace. Still, the architect didn’t spend a lot of time there until the 1980s. Instead, he followed a more international trajectory in his early years. His childhood was mostly divided between Amsterdam and Jakarta, and after graduating from the Architectural Association in London, he moved to New York to attend Cornell. His book, Delirious New York, published in 1978 to much acclaim, was a kind of love letter to the great American city, exploring its development as well as notions of urbanity and congestion that came to define his career.

OMA was established in 1975 between New York and London (by Koolhaas together with Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp) and by the time of the book’s publication, the architect was heading back to Europe. ‘I was in a strange position, as the book made me relatively well known, but I had never built anything,’ he admits. He decided to return to the Netherlands to pursue work; and if New York played a landmark role in making Koolhaas architecture’s favourite theorist, Rotterdam allowed him to build, to turn theory into practice.

Landing in Amsterdam in 1979, a meeting with a Rotterdam city councillor soon resulted in a ‘dream’ assignment – and one of the first big commission wins for OMA. ‘He was sitting in front of a map of Rotterdam and asked, “So, where do you want to build?” It was very generous. I saw a site on the river and the interesting thing about it was that it was very constrained on one side by water, on the other by a bridge, on a third side by a road and on the fourth by a building,’ says Koolhaas. He picked the site and started designing. The scheme was named Boompjes (‘little trees’ in Dutch) and mixed housing and workspace along the Maasboulevard. It marked the start of a long relationship between the port city and the architecture firm.

Rotterdam, devastated by bombing from both sides during the Second World War, presented a challenge and an opportunity for architects and planners in the second half of the 20th century – large parts of it had to be entirely rebuilt. This was also the reason Koolhaas chose it as his Dutch base in 1980, shortly after the Boompjes commission (two more schemes, the IJ-plein housing and a commissioned study for the possible renovation of the Koepel Panopticon Prison were also in the works in different parts of the country). ‘It made the city very fertile ground for architecture. I had more affinity and interest in Rotterdam. I started an office there almost on a hunch,’ he says. So, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the OMA headquarters was next door to the Boompjes’ plot and the water (a London office had opened in 1975, and Koolhaas and colleagues travelled back and forth as needed). 

Due to its geographical constraints, the Boompjes site could only be experienced in two ways: either passing by the road running parallel to the plot on ground level, or approaching it from across the River Maas via a bridge. These ‘unusually controlled’ views stimulated Koolhaas’ imagination and informed the design. This, combined with the fact that the city authorities allowed him great flexibility, meant the site was ripe for experimentation. ‘We made the design so that it was like an accordion. It could be spread wide or if you approached it from a single angle, you only saw a very narrow side,’ he says. 

The formal response reflects Koolhaas’ architectural preoccupations at the time. The design incorporates a series of five tall, lean highrises set against a horizontal slab placed at the top. Some vertical elements are perpendicular to the slab, others sit at an angle, while one is just slightly apart. The formation became a kind of urban screen, filtering light and framing views from the river to the city and the other way round. ‘Of course, I had written a book about New York, but I was actually much more interested in another typology, the slab,’ the architect points out. ‘Towers are the expression of capitalism and slabs are the main expression of socialism. In the 1980s, it was very interesting to try and create a hybrid shape. Boompjes is a hybrid.’  

The main artwork for the design, produced in 1982, is a silk-screen rendering created by Koolhaas with Italian architect Stefano de Martino, and can still be found in the practice’s archives. It is a triptych – a colourful, geometric composition that brings to mind abstract or constructivist art, and the work of Piet Mondrian or László Moholy-Nagy. A print run of a couple of hundred editions was produced and now many of these sit in museum collections – at MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, CCA and The New Institute, for example. ‘We wanted to explain everything you need to say about this project in a single representation,’ says Koolhaas. The buildings’ colours nod to the passing ships’ bright hues; as port activity was ever-present in the office views, it provided constant inspiration. 

Beyond formal considerations, Koolhaas’ vision for the long and narrow site explored new models for housing development and the future of living. ‘In the 1980s, housing in the Netherlands meant social housing,’ he says. ‘I had just come from America and I was interested in less defined spaces, open spaces. So the building had an industrial quality.’ The design, including a range of private apartments from studios to larger duplexes and loft-style spaces, with its river views, ‘was about flexibility, openness, an uncluttered space’. It also contained a gym and a library on site – a particularly forward-thinking move at a time when amenities in larger-scale residential schemes were anything but the norm. 

Boompjes was sadly never built (‘We presented it to the city a number of times; in the end they sold the site to a developer, but nothing came out of it,’ Koolhaas concludes) but its ideas were pioneering, and live on. In the late 1990s, OMA was commissioned to work on another site by the river in Rotterdam, which faced a similar situation – again, approached by a bridge and its perception controlled by limited viewpoints. That project, just across the water from the Boompjes site, eventually became De Rotterdam, a mixed-use, ‘vertical city’ completed in 2013 beside the city’s Wilhelmina Pier. 

Now, Boompjes is about to get one more incarnation. In 2019, American Express approached OMA for an artistic collaboration with Rem Koolhaas on a new design for Amex’s exclusive Centurion Card. The practice had been working with the card’s signature Roman references, when the client came across the Boompjes project. It became a starting point for the new design, with Rem and his team adapting the triptych visual to the card’s specifications. The result launches from this month. Blending graphic design with thought-provoking architecture that was truly ahead of its time, the product is the smallest item ever designed by Koolhaas. ‘I see graphic design as a crucial domain to project ideas in,’ says Koolhaas, who regularly explores two-dimensional design through OMA’s research and design arm, AMO. ‘Architecture is also a domain to project ideas in. The similarity [between the disciplines] is about ideas, and these can take any form.’ §

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OMA's latest offering, the MEETT Exhibition and Convention Centre in Toulouse, seems to be a place of connections – a project that links the city and the countryside, an industrial part of town with the agricultural landscape to the north, and through its function as an expo site, Toulouse with the rest of the country and the world. 

MEETT is located to the city's north, in its new ‘innovation zone.' Yet, OMA has resisted creating a continuation of central Toulouse, by using ‘the massive scale and diverse program of MEETT as an antidote to the sprawl of a standard exposition park, in order to preserve the surrounding Occitanic countryside.' Instead, a comfortable scale and strategically planned connections, infrastructure and open spaces are the name of the game here. 

The complex's arrangement allows for space to breathe and spatial generosity. The project is planned around three main volumes, created in parallel to each other: a row of modular exhibition halls; a convention center and multi-function event hall; and a reception area, including a silo car park for some 3000 cars. 

The latter is placed at the centre of the composition, leading visitors to the volumes flanking it and their respective functions. Seen as an ‘extrovert' structure by its creators, the centre's design was led by OMA partners Chris van Duijn, Ellen van Loon and Rem Koolhaas. ‘MEETT is not an architectural intervention, but an urban machine. Both monumental in its scale and subtle in its overall impact, it will be a new gateway to Toulouse,' say the architects. French practices PPa architectures and Taillandier Architectes Associés were both associated designers in the project. 

The structure has a fairly limited colour and material palette, alluding to a functional, pared down approach that is simple – yet carefully thought out – and easy to navigate. A series of black boxes, white-colored steel and a polycarbonate skin make up the exhibition halls. Inside, vast, impressive spaces with a utilitarian feel are filled with natural light. 

The Event Hall and Convention Center building is flexible and can be transformed through partitions into various configurations, according to each activity's needs. Meanwhile the reception area functions as a ‘street' and is named as one, titled Rue Centrale. A transportation hub linking MEETT to the city centre sits next to a 170m long plaza, which forms the project's public space, drawing in the crowds during planned events.

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Back in February, journalists in Milan, agog at the news that Raf Simons was joining Miuccia Prada as co-creative director of the historic house, speculated over espressos as to what the duo’s debut show would bring. But no one imagined that their first S/S 2021 show would not be physical – but live streamed worldwide without an in-person audience – to journalists, buyers and Prada fans alike. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to deepen our relationship with the digital world, and Simons and Prada touched on the importance of today's online universe, stating ‘technology is a part of humanity itself’, in S/S 2021’s show notes. As anticipatory fans live streamed the show from their iPhones, laptops and tablets, models strode within an all yellow curtain lined space lined with plush carpet – designed by regular show set collaborators OMA/AMO. The ceiling hung with monitors – today’s utilitarian take on the decorative chandelier. Usually, post Prada shows, journalists scramble backstage to listen to Miuccia Prada’s take on her designs. For spring, this audience was opened up, with Prada and Simons staging a Q+A post show, answering questions submitted worldwide from online guests from Kiev to Nara.

In S/S 2021’s show notes, Prada and Simons described the collection as ‘a creative conversation in progress.’ Exploring the concept of uniforms (an attitude to dressing that has resonated with designers for spring), it featured facets of the duo’s design heritage. Simons’ streamlined silhouettes, and focus on streetwear shapes and typography, and Prada’s subversively feminine shapes and exploration of colour. Fifties pleated skirts were paired with hoodies, emblazoned with slogans designed by Simons’ regular collaborator Peter de Potter. Icky archive prints from A/W 1996 and S/S 996 were used as canvases to print onto and the Prada logo was reimagined in a soft padded triangle, the only embellishment on pared-back nylon vests and trousers.

Prada and Simons spoke of ‘garments are drawn around the body, held by the hand’ and in a well-known Miuccia-ism, models clutched moire opera coats and technical mackintoshes around their chests. Hybrid design was also a focus, with shawl coats featuring in-built bags and mini skirts, with soft pouches. The designs spoke of a duality between utilitarian and elegance – paradoxes integral to Prada’s design DNA.

 As part of Prada and Simon’s Q+A, Celia Thomson asked: ‘Is anything authentically “new” anymore or is everything regenerated’? In response, Simons mused: ‘The new just for the sake of doing new, doesn’t sound like the most important word.’ S/S 2021 saw a rejection of the superfluous, an evolution of heritage and a collaborative approach to design. They're tenets that will always trump novelty.

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This quirky golden-brown stone and glass structure is the recently completed Galleria Department Store in the city of Gwanggyo, just 40 minutes south of Seoul. The Gwanggyo store is the sixth and largest branch of the luxury department store franchise owned by Hanwha and has been designed by Rem Koolhaas’ architecture firm OMA, in collaboration with local Korean architecture firm Gansam.

The building had been the talk of town during its construction due to its eye-catching design. The textured mosaic stone façade has trails of rugged glass protruding from it, in stark contrast with the opacity of the stone. As if a sculpted stone is emerging from the ground, the architecture evokes nature – from the neighbouring Suwon Gwanggyo Lake Park – and connects it with the urban environment surrounded by ubiquitous high-rise buildings.

A public route has been excavated from the stone volume as a multifaceted glass façade facing out, twirling up towards the rooftop garden. For passersby, this is a fascinating element to observe, while for visitors inside, this transparent passage offers alternative vantage points to explore and enjoy the city while moving up the escalators.

‘With a public loop deliberately designed for cultural offerings, Galleria in Gwanggyo is a place where visitors engage with architecture and culture as they shop. They leave with a unique retail experience blended with pleasant surprises after each visit,’ says OMA partner Chris van Duijn who led the project.

What distinguishes the building from other department stores is that the Galleria Gwanggyo is the first department store in Korea to allow light to enter the building from all corners through the ‘Public Loop’. Department stores have traditionally been built as closed structures with no windows so that customers lose their sense of time and focus on shopping. This new attempt by Galleria is revolutionary in that sense – as it has masterfully incorporated light as a mechanism to bring joy and entertainment, and in turn, tempting customers to linger longer.

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Miami is a heady swirl of art deco architecture and luxury condos, tropical climes and pristine beaches, glitzy nightclubs and well-worn divebars. More recently, however, it has embraced a series of trophy buildings designed by the Who’s Who in architecture, from Rafael Viñoly to Frank Gehry, Foster + Partners, Bjarke Ingels, and Herzog & de Meuron. Here, we look at the architectural projects and real estate developments shaping Miami today.

Park Grove, OMA

Rem Koolhaas’ firm has already made its mark on a significant swathe of Miami, with the completion of a trio of buildings in Faena District in 2016. Now, it’s full steam ahead with a multi-tower residential enclave in Coconut Grove, backed by powerhouse developers The Related Group and Terra Group. Drawing inspiration from Biscayne Bay, OMA partner and project lead Shohei Shigematsu has imagined the towers as linked barrier islands. Each residence features open floor plans, 12ft ceilings with floor-to-ceiling windows, kitchens and bathrooms by designer William Sofield, Sub-Zero and Wolf appliances, expansive terraces, and private elevator access. Over 50,000 sq ft of the development has been parcelled for luxury lifestyle amenities, ensuring residents will almost certainly never want to leave Park Grove. Read more here.

LOCATION: Coconut Grove, Miami
YEAR: 2013 – ongoing
KEY FEATURES: Wine tasting rooms with private storage, five acres of private gardens by Enzo Enea, art collection, mind-body wellness lounge and bio-sauna, Meyer Davis-designed interiors, restaurant by James Beard Award winner Michael Schwartz

One Thousand Museum, Zaha Hadid Architects

Described astutely in a PBS documentary as ‘one of the most complex skyscrapers ever to make it off the drawing board’, One Thousand Museum was Zaha Hadid’s final undertaking before her death in 2016. Completed at the end of last year, the 62-storey tower has already cemented its status as an architectural icon of Downtown Miami’s skyline, thanks to its bold exoskeleton design. The 84 museum-quality units have been realised as half-floor, full-floor and duplex residences, fitted with Gatto Cucine kitchens, Gaggenau and Sub-Zero appliances, Molteni & C custom closets, integrated smart technology, and a choice of luxurious finishes chosen by Hadid herself. Potential buyers can also choose from curated collection of turnkey residences by design houses Artefacto, B&B Italia, Roche Bobois, Meridiani, and Luxury Living Group. Read more here.

LOCATION: Biscayne Boulevard, Miami
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: Exoskeleton design, aquatic centre, rooftop helipad, bank-quality vault, indoor/outdoor spa, private beach club, on-demand house car, multimedia theatre, specialised security and valet personnel

El Espacio 23, Jorge M Pérez

Forty years in the making, El Espacio 23 is a private museum dedicated to philanthropist and entrepreneur Jorge M Pérez’s vast art collection and first opened to the public during Art Basel Miami Beach last year. A passion project of the billionaire real estate developer, the space is housed in a repurposed 28,000 sq ft warehouse in Miami’s Allapattah neighbourhood and designed by Pérez himself who sees it as an extension of his home (amenities include a library, living room and bar area to entertain guests). The year-round programming includes a series of residencies for artists and curators representing a range of diverse range of disciplines and ethnic backgrounds, as well as activations inspired by the surrounding neighbourhood of Allapattah.

LOCATION: Allapattah, Miami
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: Artist apartments reserved for residency programmes, shared workspace, library, bar and lounge area

Rubell Museum, Selldorf Architects

When Mera and Don Rubell were looking for an architect to convert a former industrial complex into a museum-worthy setting for their family’s collection, the Miami mega-collectors turned to art world favourite Annabelle Selldorf. Located in Miami’s emerging Allapattah neighbourhood, the museum will draw on the Rubells’ extensive holdings of over 7,200 works by more than 1,000 artists. Selldorf Architects gutted and transformed six warehouse units into a cohesive 100,000 sq ft campus – tripling the exhibition capacity of the collection’s previous space. The Rubell Museum now unfolds across a single level, comprising 40 galleries, a flexible events and performance space, a richly stocked research library, a bookstore, an outdoor bar and restaurant serving Basque cuisine. Read more here.

LOCATION: Allapattah, Miami
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: Refinished concrete floors, single-storey complex, courtyard garden featuring rare plants native to the Everglades and Florida

Eighty Seven Park, Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Flanked by a 35-acre public park to the south and a private park to the north, few condominium projects in Miami – if any – can boast the green credentials of Renzo Piano’s Eighty Seven Park. ‘What we’re expressing is that this building belongs to nature,’ said the Italian architect when we first checked on the development’s progress in 2017. The 70 residences, spread over 18 elliptical floors, emphasise outdoor living – each comes with a generously sized wraparound terrace ranging from 15-25ft wide. Paris-based design firm RDAI notes the interior design was built around natural materials collected at the site: the Venetian terrazzo flooring that recalls Miami’s white sand beaches, for example. Read more here.

LOCATION: North Shore, Miami Beach
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: 24-hour concierge and butler service, enoteca (wine shop), onsite botanist, oceanfront swimming pools, spa, state-of-the-art fitness centre, outdoor juice bar, private elevator access to all units

Monad Terrace, Ateliers Jean Nouvel

‘From the beginning – and always – it has been important to me to put the spirit of place in all my work,’ says Jean Nouvel. ‘Here in Miami, I wanted to create a building that is like the reflection of the sun on the water.’ Comprising 59 luxury waterfront residences nestled around a shimmering lagoon, Monad Terrace in South Beach is the Pritzker Prize winner’s first and only residential project in Florida. The striking sawtooth façade is made up of honeycomb glass screens, which diffuse sunlight and provide privacy to residents while maintaining unobstructed views of Biscayne Bay. Vertical gardens on the north and south façades offer additional shade.

LOCATION: South Beach, Miami Beach
YEAR: 2020 (under construction)
KEY FEATURES: Honeycomb sawtooth façade, 116ft swimming pool and hot tub, climbing gardens, private or semi-private elevator access, wellness centre, residents’ lounge

Residences by Armani/Casa, César Pelli

This sleek, monolithic oceanfront tower was the last project designed by venerable architect César Pelli before his death in July last year. The 56-storey structure is composed of ‘two intertwined sail-like shapes, billowing and expanding as they rise’, says Gregg Jones, principal of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, while its blue-hued glass was designed to flow seamlessly into the water below. Giorgio Armani has stepped in personally to deliver Armani/Casa’s first residential project in the US, envisioning elegantly understated interiors fitted materials like white gold leaf, onyx and bronzed mirrors. Imagined as ‘homes in the sky’, the residences feature expansive terraces, master suites with his-and-hers bathrooms, and are wired with smart technology to access select building amenities.

LOCATION: Sunny Isles Beach
YEAR: Q4 2019
KEY FEATURES: Ocean-view yoga studio with Pilates equipment, Armani/Privé lounge, museum-quality art collection, 24-hour multilingual concierge service, cigar room, wine cellar, two-storey revitalisation spa, exclusive beach amenities, classic Hollywood-inspired movie theatre

Mr C Residences, Arquitectonica

Fourth-generation members of the storied Cipriani family, Maggio and Ignazio Cipriani are the forces behind Mr C, a hospitality and residential brand for luxury modern living. Following projects in Los Angeles and New York, the brothers are now making waves with Miami, teaming up with Terra’s David Martin, architect Ray Fort of Arquitectonica, and interior design firm Meyer Davis to bring a taste of old world Europe to a bayside residential tower in Coconut Grove. The 118 residences in the 21-storey building will feature 11ft ceilings, open floor plan layouts, private outdoor terraces, custom-designed Italian kitchens by ITALKRAFT with terrazzo and quartz countertops, European porcelain tile floors, and spa-like bathrooms.

LOCATION: Coconut Grove, Miami
YEAR: Expected Q3 2022
KEY FEATURES: Sail-inspired design, private Bellini bar on the pool deck, speciality gourmet market, lifestyle and nautical concierge, Bayshore owners’ club, peloton studio, indoor yoga studio, in-home delivery from on-site café

Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about the countryside for years, he tells a captive audience on a blustery New York morning, and it’s time to give it some attention. Koolhaas is introducing ‘Countryside, The Future,’ an exhibition that opens today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It’s a temporally and spatially massive show, the kind of focus on architecture that most practitioners and historians only dream of. And the exhibition, though officially billed as an AMO plus collaborators project, is vintage Rem, almost a greatest hits collection.

There’s the iconoclastic personality, which comes through in a bracing first-person wall text that introduces the show. It points out the exhibition's intellectual origins – an observation that a Swiss village he liked to visit was changing. Pop culture is referenced in the magazine covers that paper the central column. The typical OMA/AMO research-intensive vibe can be seen in the first gallery offshoot, where four categories of books under glass vie for attention with a massive wall-printed text, courtesy designer Irma Boom. 

Throughout the show you'll read an endless series of questions Koolhaas asked himself as he thought about the countryside. A projected map of the world is the exhibition’s iconic image, where the red graphics show areas the exhibition contends with, featuring rotating typefaces of information graphically overlaid. There’s an alarming graphic that shows heat anomalies, and another that shows the sheer number of shipping routes, and, well, much of the show is inherently alarming.

Koolhaas’ argument, such as there is one (the show seems purposefully non-polemical), is that the countryside has been overlooked, largely because of the UN’s observation that, by 2050, two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. And that its being overlooked has caused it to be transformed from a bucolic land of peace and pleasure (how he remembered Switzerland) into a sort of weird and un-designed back office/storage room for the world’s cities.

The exhibition, put together with five generations of Harvard GSD students and a host of collaborators from Beijing, The Netherlands, and the University of Nairobi, offers a look into some of those back office mechanisms. Some – like a robotic bee and some lively greenhouses – feel familiar. Others – like a map of China’s political structure (extremely timely), and a look at how Qatar dealt with food insecurity caused by political blockades (also timely given our planet’s very real potential to experience global food insecurity) – offer some of that zing of excitement that we have come to associate with Koolhaas’, earlier in particular, contributions to the field.

Koolhaas, with his firm, made his mark with his book Delirious New York, which he brought up; then another book, SMLXL, and then the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, always staying just one step ahead of what the staid academy expected architectural historians and theorists to do. ‘Countryside, The Future’ feels like the next move in that direction, but it’s also, like his 2003 publication Content was, somewhat messier, a bit, perhaps, historically sloppier; the word ‘antiquity' is used frequently to refer, generally, to ‘the past,’ though it’s clear that the actual locus of this antiquity is only loosely imagined.

Still, that’s what’s on the menu now, in this era of ever-expanding museums and a lay public increasingly interested in understanding the seemingly infinite complexities of our world, whether expressed here through fish farm videos or a moving Stalin robot. It is likely that enterprising students of architecture and future historians will see this as something like a capstone to his career. It’s a bit cheeky, it has its intellectual moments, and – just like the tractor that sits right out front – meant to capture our attention. What the public – or the politicians involved in maintaining all the various orders the show alludes to – does with this attention remains to be seen.

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‘Countryside, The Future’ runs 20 February – 14 August 2020 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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In the hilly landscape of Brighton, set back from the main circulation axis and sat among rows of historical terrace houses, the new OMA-designed School for Science and Sports at Brighton College stands out, its volumes unmistakably modern, their sharp, orthogonal outlines painted black.

Yet within the college’s grounds (which include a quadrangle composed of Grade II listed buildings designed by Sir Gilbert Scott and Sir Thomas Jackson no less, in the 19th century) this is not the only contemporary building. Eric Parry and Hopkins Architects for example have created work for the private, co-ed boarding and day school, which has been hailed as one of England’s finest independents.

Sport is a valued part of the curriculum here and a new sports building was required in order to continue this tradition. The Science department also needed a new home, and OMA, who won a competition for the project in 2013, thought ‘why isolate the department of Science from the department of Sports?’ Now, they continue, ‘the two are merged into one linear volume, situated at the edge of the playing field.’ And indeed it is, nestled on the hill at the northern edge of the campus and standing on columns, the admittedly large volume slowly reveals itself as you walk up through the site’s main entrance.

The architects took special care to make sure the outline is stepped to follow the terrain’s natural slope and match surrounding volumes. And by blending the two departments in a single structure, OMA ensure, they say, that this will be a vibrant building, where pupils interact with each other, without the ‘imposed silence’ often associated with conventional education buildings.

The generous breakout areas and circulation space underline their approach. ‘Buildings can reinforce or break that silo mentality [often found in education],’ says Brighton College headmaster Richard Cairns, who seems pleased with the new addition. ‘Here it works beautifully.’

The sports areas are placed closer to the ground, creating a relationship between them and the playing field outside. The grand sports hall, in fact, opens directly onto it. The plan may appear simple, but make no mistake; these are highly specialised facilities with state-of-the-art equipment and an impressive amount of built-in flexibility (the sports hall for example is designed to accommodate a variety of sports, such as cricket and basketball). Further down the corridor are a running track, a dance and weight studio, and, a flight of stairs down, the school swimming pool (which Cairns calls ‘Lido’).

Views through and mirrored surfaces are created at strategic places. ‘This way you can see a reflection of terraced houses and historic Brighton everywhere,’ says OMA partner Ellen van Loon, who led this project; this is her first school and OMA’s first sports building altogether. ‘It’s always nice for an architect to do the first of anything,’ she adds.

The science areas are located above, within bright classrooms with bespoke workbenches, placed next to staff rooms and all organized around a central circulation corridor that turns into a staircase as you move up. Further facilities include laboratories, a greenhouse and a screening room (or ‘Kino’, as the school calls it), with old Italian cinema style chairs, the same ones OMA used at the Prada Foundation in Milan.

Natural ventilation is achieved through hidden windows and a high level of transparency is present throughout – a key requirement from the client and one that OMA responded to with flair. ‘Glass was probably the most expensive thing, but transparency was very important for us,’ says van Loon. It is true, views across levels and open plan spaces that flow into each other make for an interior that feels ample and organic.

At the very top, an accessible roof offers sweeping views of the North Sea, and is one of van Loon’s favourite spots in the project. There are green areas, seating, a kitchen for events and even a track, for al fresco training. ‘Here, you feel like you are in the roofscape of the campus, and then you see the sea,’ muses van Loon smiling. And even on a grey and overcast day, it is clear that the building’s overall sense of openness and generosity of space finds its ultimate expression up here.

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K11 Musea, Hong Kong’s new art and retail complex known as Hong Kong’s Silicon Valley of Culture, has recently partnered with % ARABICA to open the coffee company’s sixth store in the region. The new store, % ARABICA at KUBE, is a golden kiosk designed by Dutch firm OMA’s David Gianotten and Rem Koolhaas, and stands beside the main K11 centre, with rare, uninterrupted views of Victoria Harbour.

While the KUBE has taken influences from Hong Kong’s many dai pai dong (open air food stalls), OMA has taken the traditional stall up a notch: its aluminium panels feature an anodised golden finish that changes colour, dictated by the reflection of lights from its hectic surroundings. A number of pleasingly-cubed marble chairs are arranged so as to encourage engagement between bleary-eyed commuters and excitable tourists over their first coffee of the day, courtesy of the fastest-growing speciality coffee brand in the world.

For large-scale events, a giant red balloon will serve as a physical Google Maps pin, visible across Victoria Harbour, to attract guests and encourage intrigued onlookers to enjoy a coffee by the bay. The KUBE itself has an enviable amount of outdoor space surrounding it, especially for a city like Hong Kong, and is ripe for future events and outdoor performances. David Gianotten has lofty ambitions: ‘The KUBE is a multi-function installation to connect people visiting K11 MUSEA and passers-by, who share a moment to be fully present to experience the city and [discover] possibilities of encounters.’ A bit more than your regular caffeine hit.

INFORMATION

k11musea.com

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ADDRESS

18 Salisbury Road
Tsim Sha Tsui
Hong Kong

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The Avery, a new residential tower, four blocks from the San Francisco Bay, has completed, bringing the neighbourhood a new laneway with retail spaces and green walls at ground level. Developed by Related, the team behind Hudson Yards, the building was designed by OMA and Fougeron Architecture and is part of a wider masterplan for the Transit Center District by OMA – further buildings by the likes of Foster + Partners and Studio Gang will be joining the neighbourhood over the coming years.

The tapering shape of the building responds to the surrounding city and the Bay beyond. Cantilevering, stepped projections open up opportunities for corner windows and orient the 548 residences – combining condos, market rate rentals and affordable rentals – towards the best views. For the OMA partners in charge of the project, Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long, the crenellations on the building were important parts of the design. At the upper level, layers of crenelations respond to the Bay Area, Bay Bridge and Downtown areas, while lower down the building, another set of crenellations match up with the low-rise scale of the immediate surroundings.

OMA’s tower sits upon a nine-storey podium designed by San Francisco based architect Anne Fougeron, who used materials such as brick, metal fins and Portuguese limestone to echo the surrounding historic industrial buildings on Folsom Street and SOMA. More texture is brought to the condo and rental entrances that are framed by bronze-coloured, anodized aluminum panels with a custom, lasercut pattern.

Within the podium OMA carved a new corridor, to connect Clementina and Folsom Street: ‘By introducing Avery Lane, a new passage connecting two major thoroughfares, and activating retail on the ground level and courtyard, the building will contribute to the street activities in the neighborhood and provide a new public space for the Transbay District,’ say the architects.

121 East 22nd Street’s compostition of two residential towers is OMA’s first ground up residential project to complete in New York.

Interior design firm Clodagh also looked to the neighbourhood and its architecture – Clodagh describes San Francisco as ‘a beautiful, demanding and moody city with no shortage of clouds and breezes and dark winters’. She chose interiors for the residences to reflect ‘authenticity', combining natural woods and stones, neutral colours and amber tones to connect inhabitants with nature. To acheive ‘holistic luxury’ inside, Clodagh dipped into a toolbox of modalities including feng shui, biophilia, chromatherapy, wabi sabi and radiesthesia. ‘We create balanced spaces where everyone who enters will feel as though they have arrived "at home" in a refuge of sorts from the frenetic world outside,’ says Clodagh.

‘Our lobbies both have massive fireplaces that offer a warm primeval welcome, abundant flowers and glowing light, and massive stone and wood reception desks – with massive slabs of solid wood behind the desks – for grounding,’ says Clodagh. Luxury amenities feature across the building and include indoor lap pool, community garden and pet spa amongst others – the design of the shared spaces was important to shape the social life for the residents: ‘For some fun at the Avery, it's my hope that everyone will enjoy the giant concrete bear (created by Terence Main) that makes its home at the pool!’ 

INFORMATION

oma.eu
clodagh.com

Straddling Gramercy and Madison Square – two neighbourhoods with respectively quiet and bustling atmospheres – OMA’s first ground-up complex in New York City wears the duality of its context on its sleeve. Headed by OMA New York’s Shohei Shigematsu and commissioned by developer Toll Brothers City Living, 121 East 22nd Street is composed of two residential towers articulated in an L-shaped site. On the corner of Lexington and East 22nd Street, the North Tower embodies said duality with two facades culminating in one sculptural, prismatic corner.

‘Part of the distorted corner is that you get these different angles reflecting different parts of the context and creating a collage of the different neighbourhoods,' says OMA project architect Christine Yoon. The corner’s punched window expression gradually realigns itself into a more traditional fenestration as the facades meet their pre-war neighbours.

In the same vein, the South Tower’s three-dimensional feature is articulated by an undulating grid of punched windows whose stepped pattern was informed by neighbouring Art Deco buildings. Echoing its counterpart, the tower is dressed in black pre-cast concrete panels with a sandblasted outer rim and acid-etched folds for smoother pleats.

The duality permeates inside, too. Designed by INC Architecture & Design, the interiors follow a ‘high-low' approach, as INC partner Adam Rolston puts it – defined by contrasting materials like marble and cementitious plaster in the bathrooms. The South Tower houses the main residential entry, which welcomes residents through a funnel-shaped lobby clad in 500 travertine tiles of alternating honed and polished finishes, applied to create a sense of direction inwards and towards the complex’s courtyard.

Mandated by New York City code and dubbed ‘The Valley’, the courtyard is an expression of the architects’ pursuit of inside-outside living, punctuated by sculptural balconies jutting out at every level and two amenity floors enclosing a landscaped courtyard below grade. ‘We thought there was a split identity to the site, but also, we were very interested in the potential of the internal courtyard,' says Shigematsu, who wanted to create an oasis akin to Gramercy Park.

Five years in the making, 121 E 22nd Street opens on the heels of OMA’s overhaul of Sotheby’s New York HQ, with a residential tower in Miami and San Francisco not far behind. As Shigematsu concludes: ‘I think that creating a neighbourhood is all about being somewhat contextual, but also giving a new breath. And I think that the balance was well developed here.' §

INFORMATION

For more information visit the OMA website

If you walk through a set of revolving doors on the corner of York Avenue and 72nd Street in Manhattan, and look across a recently-renovated white-walled ground-floor gallery space, you’ll come face-to-canvas with William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s painting La Jeunesse de Bacchus. It is, according to Sotheby’s, ‘an icon of French academic painting and the largest work of the artist’s career', and is estimated to go to auction for between $25 and $35 million.

It’s just one of a series of artworks currently displayed and directly accessible to the public for the first time at the recently-renovated Sotheby’s auction house. Sensitively reworked by OMA’s New York team, led by Shohei Shigematsu, the emphasis, says Shigematsu, was on a ‘diversity' of room types. Rather than go for the blank long expanse of wall favoured by museums, Shigematsu and team went for an astonishing number of smaller rooms of various types, layouts, and scales – including white cube, enfilade, corridor, cascade, octagonal, and L-shaped, as well as a few double-height ones.

That diversity leads to a Wrightian sense of constant expansion and compression, tension and relief, as the visitor moves from Rothko to Picasso, to Monet, to Bacon, to Krasner. Scattered throughout are massive concrete columns that, rather than detract, only add to the sense of history so embedded in this thoroughly modern renovation.

‘In conceiving the ideal dimensions of the rooms, it didn’t really match the column grid that the building originally had,' Shigematsu says. At first, then, OMA tried to hide the columns ‘because columns in galleries are known to be an evil thing to do.' Eventually, history won, and the team decided to keep the columns and see them as characters – so ‘you can see the patchwork of the history and the layers of activity that have happened in this building.' 

INFORMATION

For more information visit the OMA website

Due to be completed in 2023, Tokyo’s Toranomon Hills Station Tower will be one of the world’s largest urban hubs for transportation, hospitality, business and retail. Architect Shohei Shigematsu, director of OMA’s New York office, spoke on Tuesday at our Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore, introducing the vision of a building that responds sensitively to urban context.

‘Often this kind of conference is where architects present their work. That’s a one-sided [point of view]. So I’ve brought the client on stage too,’ he said. He refers here to Midori Omori, senior general manager at Mori Building Co., the leading developer in Japan. Mori has a track record of commissioning overseas architects - previously Cesar Pelli and Kohn Pedersen Fox – which Omori admits has baffled many people. Foreign collaborators can be ‘egoistical, stubborn, and out of control’, she has been told, so what makes them worth their while?

‘Discussion,’ she offers. OMA, who were awarded this project in 2016 following a design competition, stood out for their eagerness to converse with Mori and find out what exactly they are looking to achieve - in this case, a building that would complement its densely developed neighbourhood, rather than exist as an isolated entity. ‘An a la carte approach to architecture, rather than a bento box one,’ offers Shigematsu.

Having gone through multiple proposals that were sent back to the drawing board, both architect and developer agreed on a building with public space at its core (aligned along a vertical axis, and visible from many vantage points thanks to the building’s gently contorted form). A new metro station underneath spills into a grand plaza and concourse, the first of its kind in Tokyo. Adding to the building’s appeal is an infinity pool on the roof, with views of the Imperial Palace.

‘I shared the bento box analogy with [the Mori team] before we entered the competition - which is a bit risky, as it could have been taken as criticism,’ Shigematsu continues. ‘But this actually resulted in a shared take on how we can advance our design, by observing the changes in the world right now.’

From competition to completion, the Toranomon Hills Station Tower project will take seven years. Mori believes it is time well spent. ‘I learned from Roppongi Hills (another Mori project, by Kohn Pedersen Fox) that deep conversations lead to buildings that people really want to visit, work in and live in. Knowing people’s wishes and giving them form is the true power of design.’

For now, both architect and developer are continuing to find out people’s wishes. ‘We’re still hearing ideas about how to position its facility and programming,’ says Shigematsu. ‘It’s a work in progress.’

OMA and BIG’s new residential towers in Stockholm are pillars of modernity, efficiency, sustainability, luxury and, incongruously, affordability (apartments in both buildings start at around four million Swedish Krona, or about £345,000).

While Reinier de Graaf, partner at OMA, and Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG, pal around like dear friends – which they are, having overlapped at OMA as partner and protégé respectively of Rem Koolhaas – their respective journeys towards these projects were starkly different.

Oscar Engelbert, the passionate and prolific founder of Oscar Properties, endowed both architects with specific challenges to be solved: Ingels’ tower would have to embrace its surroundings; de Graaf’s would have to repel them. Both solutions remained remarkably true to their original brief.

De Graaf’s Norra Tornen, the first of twin showpieces awkwardly sited on a double roundabout, confronts Stockholm’s antipathy toward the cheap, ill-conceived brutalist towers of the last century by playing up the Corbusienne elements of the style and eliminating the bleakness. A bespoke terrazzo-effect aggregate spiked with Danish sea pebbles (‘worth fretting over,’ says de Graaf) introduces soulful, ‘un-Trumpian’ warmth to the corrugated façade.

Yet de Graaf unlocked the barrier to liveability in one bold move. The key was in the deep bays of sealed, triple-glazed panoramic windows, ‘like iPhone screens without the keys’. Pushing them out created sheltered recessed terraces where vented openings could bring in air but not noise. ‘That perpendicular façade allowed the whole building to coexist with its surroundings,’ says de Graaf. Once that was cracked, OMA could prefabricate each level north of the 16th floor, installing one every six days.

Where Norra Tornen rises above its location, 79th&Park opens up wide. Here Ingels has designed a 21st-century country cabin in composite, following the familiar cascading silhouette he has popularised since leaving OMA in 2000 and forming BIG, as a nod to the surrounding hills.

Experiencing it triggers the senses in a way Norra could not – the scent of the Canadian cedar that drapes the entire façade permeates the area.

Each unit rotates 45 degrees from the last, so the complex from one vantage point seems to be entirely wood and from another entirely glass, reflecting the sky. A central courtyard, cloistered from the open landscape, emits a dewy stillness. Greenery sprouts from cedar beds at staggered levels – even up on the rooftop, where they flank terraced gardens.

The standard ceiling height in Stockholm rises 2.4m. Inside these 164 units, they vary upward from 2.7m and the doorways rise to the top: ‘a small step for mankind but a huge leap for the people living here,’ says Ingels. The variety, he says, creates character, as does the appearance, here and there, of the raw steel tectonics holding them up. ‘Like a converted loft, the pragmatism of the steel structure provides some quirkiness', he adds.

Both buildings are, in de Graaf’s words, ‘aggressive, confident manifestations of modernity’ that the architects hope defy convention enough to deter absentee investors. Oscar’s modus operandi is championing contemporary solutions for city living, after all. These buildings bring it to life.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the BIG website, the OMA website or the Oscar Properties website

When it comes to landmark architecture books, Rem Koolhaas' literary output is as iconic as they come. The celebrated Dutch architect – and famous co-founder of international architecture firm OMA – has been known to produce some of the most widely referenced and treasured publications in the field. Now, the master's latest offering, the hefty – at some four kilos heavy – Elements Of Architecture has just hit the shelves. 

From 1978's Delirious New York, a unique insight into the Big Apple, to 1995's S, M, L, XL, where the author explored the expansion of the architecture office through his projects, arranged by scale, and his more recent foray into Japanese Metabolism, with 2011's Project Japan (written together with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist), Koolhaas is a master in taking one strong theme and digging deep, meticulously exploring his subject. True to form in his new publication, Koolhaas takes the material from his widely acclaimed 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibition and expands and updates, delving further into the use and meaning of building detail.

Including chapters such as ‘window', ‘facade', ‘balcony', ‘corridor', ‘fireplace', ‘stair', ‘escalator' and ‘elevator', the book (which draws on research from the Harvard Graduate School of Design) follows up on the Venice show's structure, including however added material, such as essays from Stephan Trueby, Manfredo di Robilant and Jeffrey Inaba, and an exclusive photo essay by Wolfgang Tillmans. Koolhaas collaborated on this book with Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom. ‘Every book is a collaboration', said Koolhaas of their work together at the book's launch. ‘We are neighbours and she is an artist and is the best editor, with the best radar for great content'. 

Koolhaas' own essay and each chapter aim to ‘excavate the micro-narratives of building detail', he explains. The publication goes back to the very basics of architecture, painstakingly examining each individual element through its history, from origins to current technological advances. At 2,600 pages long, this is not a book for the faint hearted; yet it's one that will reward its reader with valuable insights and information from one of architecture's most important contemporary proponents. 

INFORMATION

For more information visit the Taschen website

The 12th iteration of Manifesta — the nomadic European biennal of contemporary art — has opened in Palermo, capital of the island of Sicily in southern Italy. Subtitled ‘The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Existence’, it casts the garden as a place of diversity and adaptation, and a metaphor for both Palermo and the planet as a whole.

For the first time, this Manifesta was mediated by an interdisciplinary team: architects Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Andrés Jacque, filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak and art curator Mirjam Varadinis. The result is an event that, though still recognizably an art exhibition, is oriented towards research-led projects and documentation.

The leaping-off point is the Palermo Atlas, an urban study by OMA, where Laperelli is a partner. Gathering photographs, illustrations and demographic studies, the Atlas elucidates some of the Sicilian capital’s complexity as a historic site of cultural exchange and a contemporary loci for issues including migration and climate change. It posits Palermo as a node crossed by ‘flows’ of people, goods and capital, and hopes to catalyse projects with genuine long-term impact.

Whether Manifesta 12, which runs until 4 November, succeeds in this remains to be seen. Events such as Marinella Senatore’s Palermo Procession at least inculcate short-term engagement with the locals. But Palermo has certainly made its mark on Manifesta. The labyrinthine alleys of its historic centre abound with architectural and artistic wonders. Venues include crumbling palazzos and deconsecrated churches, a palm-filled botanical garden and an archive whose centuries-old records are too laden with dust to prise open.

Much of the art has a socio-political bent, and would have fit snugly in last year’s Documenta 14. The Cuba-born Tania Brugera’s Article 11 uses newspaper clippings, illustrations and film to track the protest movement around a US navy remote warfare centre in Niscemi, southeastern Sicily. Irish artist John Gerrard’s Untitled (near Parndorf, Austria) utilises computer graphics to replicate the location where, in 2014, a lorry was discovered containing the corpses of 71 migrants. And the Spanish artist Christina Lucas’ horrifying, strangely compelling video installation Unending Lightning, housed in the fascist-era Casa del Mutilato, chronicles every single civilian bombing from its invention in 1911 to the present day.

Manifesta’s projects stretch far outside central Palermo. On the Pizzo Sella promontory in the city’s northern extremes the Belgian design group Rotor transformed an unfinished house into a viewing platform, while the locally-based architect and photographer Roberto Collovà has created a bridge-shaped installation, made from the illuminations used during religious holidays, across the Oreto river on Palermo’s disorderly, debris-strewn Costa Sud. Here, Manifesta 12 makes a virtue of visitors’ willingness to explore unfamiliar surroundings, highlighting not only the finished projects but the journey required to discover them.

INFORMATION

Manifesta 12 runs until 4 November in various sites and venues across Palermo. For more information, visit the website

For most architects, leaving university means kissing the crazy ideas and impossible designs goodbye and buckling down to pragmatism and compromise; not for Ellen van Loon. The Dutch architect, a partner at Rem Koolhaas’ OMA since 2002, approaches her projects with the same ambition, uncompromising passion and conceptual rigour she had when she was a student back at TU Delft. And what’s more, she is extremely adept at bringing those ‘crazy’ projects to life. Following a strong concept is at the core of van Loon’s work, a quality that makes her buildings both very easy to explain, but also, often, pretty challenging to actually build.

‘I have always been driven by concepts; things like mood boards and styles came much later for me,’ she says, sitting in a nondescript Rotterdam café, having come straight from a seven-hour meeting in The Hague about the Dutch parliament renovation that she is working on there. Anyone else would probably be nursing a throbbing headache at this point, but van Loon seems completely unaffected, full of energy and happily reminisces about her university days.

‘My initial drive is the conceptual take on a project,’ she explains. ‘I was always in the model shop of the university, trying to find new shapes, new ways of organising buildings. I remember a moment in my studies when Rem gave a lecture about the library in Paris [Très Grande Bibliothèque, OMA’s competition entry for a new national library] and I was totally flabbergasted. I remember thinking this was the first architect I’d met that could really think conceptually.’

Van Loon graduated in the early 1990s and, seeking international experience, as well as the chance to cut her teeth on larger-scale public buildings (designing single family houses was never going to be enough), she went to Berlin. With the Wall having just come down, this was an exciting time for the German capital, full of positivity and architectural promise. ‘I was planning to stay for one year but I stayed five,’ she recalls. She was soon given more responsibility on bigger projects, which is exactly what she wanted – working, among other things, on Foster + Partners’ iconic Reichstag building.

When van Loon returned to the Netherlands in 1998, she was offered a job at OMA and it seemed a perfect match in many ways. ‘In terms of working conceptually, OMA was the right place to be. But I was also happy that, by now, I had a bit of experience in practice. This was a moment when OMA was gaining a lot of momentum; we got many commissions for new projects and international work. It was the perfect moment to start.’

The architect was a young mother at the time, but working with Koolhaas was enticing and the studio had an ‘exciting’ project for her, the headquarters of Universal Studios in Los Angeles. ‘I was a bit hesitant, as I was going to an office that is 24/7 and the light is always on, and I thought, “How on earth am I going to manage that with a private life and a baby?”’ she remembers.

It didn’t stop her. In fact, it seems not many things do. By all accounts, van Loon is not a quitter. She describes her breakthrough moment, the commission for the Casa da Música in Porto, as a ‘crazy concept’. It was completed to wide acclaim in 2005 and remains one of OMA’s most recognisable works. She is currently working on The Factory, a performing arts complex in Manchester, OMA’s first major public project in the UK, on the site of the former Granada TV Studios. ‘I like making things happen,’ says van Loon. ‘I like challenges and risks. I like projects that everybody thinks are absolutely impossible. That is where my drive comes from – to make impossible things possible. I will fight for what I believe. And if I don’t win the fight on day one, I just keep on repeating it until I do. I never give up.’

This desire sees her revel in big and complicated public projects – of which OMA has an abundance. It is also what drew her to her latest built work, the design for a mixed-use building in Copenhagen, called BLOX – a commission by local philanthropic organisation Realdania to house the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC), which it funds, along with further offices, housing, underground parking, leisure and retail.

One of Copenhagen’s main ring roads goes right through the site and a new pedestrian bridge is planned next to it, opening in autumn. This meant that the design had to negotiate some heavy circulation and, together with the slew of different functions to be included, made for an extremely challenging and complex brief. But van Loon was not fazed. ‘I like complexity. Not as a main goal, but I like complex interactions between programme parts, or certain elements in a design. It’s like solving a puzzle, but also creating new relationships,’ she says.

Her solution involved locating the DAC at the heart of the design and arranging all the different functions around it, creating a kind of solar system of mini-worlds that allows the traffic to run undisturbed beneath. Van Loon draws an apt parallel between the centre’s operations and its placement within the building: ‘From the core you can see all the functions the centre deals with daily, everything that matters in a city – bicycles, cars, people. It’s like a mini-city in a box.’

This overarching concept is enriched by meticulous design details at every scale, such as the children’s playground that was incorporated to replace an existing one on site (a first for OMA, and one of the trickiest parts of the project, says van Loon, only half-joking); and a ‘golden room’, a high-security, brass-lined exhibition hall for sensitive art pieces. The building is a composition of different ‘boxes’, stacked on top of each other, but each with its own identity, explains the architect.

It all seems very rational, but van Loon begs to differ. ‘We are good at branding our work as being extremely rational, but in reality it is, of course, quite emotional. For the Casa da Música, for example, I made so many emotional decisions. I like that combination of emotional and rational decisions. You can’t always explain everything.’

That may be so, but the result is sure to become a major destination for Copenhagen. With its public spaces, the DAC’s programme, and BLOXHUB – its own urban innovation hub – exciting times await this seafront scheme come May, when the official opening takes place; not least thanks to the spirit of its enterprising architect, the mastermind behind its intricately balanced ecosystem. §

A version of this article was originally featured in the May 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*230)

INFORMATION

oma.eu

Construction is well underway at the Taipei Performing Arts Center designed by OMA, which is shaped as a sphere nested inside a cube. Wallpaper* took a ride with photographer Julien Lanoo around the building, seeing the construction interacting with the city from all perspectives and all hours.

When designing this new icon for Taipei, the OMA team questioned how, in the last 100 years, the most exciting theatrical events have often happened outside the spaces designated for them. Believing that there is no excuse for stagnation, the team decided to veer away from the classic auditorium/theatre/black box trifector; TPAC consists of three flexible theatres, that ‘plug into a central cube’ inside which stages, backstages and supper stages support the whole: ‘The design offers the advantages of specificity with the freedoms of the undefined’, say the architects.

TPAC has many different faces – as seen in Lanoo’s vibrant shots – each defined by the individual theatre spaces that express themselves on the corrugated glass-clad exterior facade as ‘mysterious dark elements’. The building sucks in visitors walking by at street level – the main cube floats above ground level and cantilevers into the public space and interior passageways lead people into the heart of the building, intuitively to the main theatres.

One of the theatres, the Proscenium Playhouse, ‘resembles a suspended planet docking with the cube’ and can shape shift into any form imaginable, say the architects. To access this theatre, the audience circulates between an inner and outer shell which allows the public to view what is going on inside the planet even without a ticket – this circulatory space is called the ‘Public Loop’. This trajectory flows from the street into the theatre infrastructure, weaving through the production and choreography spaces that are typically hidden, but equally as impressive.

Another one of the theatres at TPAC is the Super Theatre, a massive, factory-like environment formed by coupling the Grand Theatre and Multiform Theatre. This space allows existing conventional works to be re-imagined on a monumental scale, and new, experimental forms of theatre to take place with no limitations.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the OMA website

Bucking the trend for digitalisation, this project, a large-scale library complex for Qatar, is one of OMA’s most striking works to-date. The scheme is impressive in scale and ambition, comprising within a single building the National Library, the Public Library, the University Library, and the Heritage Collection – a selection of valuable historical texts and manuscripts related to Arab-Islamic civilisation. Providing a home for over a million books and thousands of readers, the Arab country’s new Qatar National Library spans an area of 42,000 sq m and has just opened its doors to the public.

Led by Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon, Lyad Alsaka, Vincent Kersten and Gary Owen, the project was conceived as a ‘single room’, explain the architects. Here, both people and books can coexist, in a building, where book storage and circulation spaces create a unique internal topography. Accessed from a large, triangular open space at its heart, the library interior is defined by three large aisles that are flanked by shelving, and serve as socialising, resting and reading areas, offering views across the library and out towards the surrounding environment.

‘We designed the space so you can see all the books in a panorama’, says Koolhaas. ‘You emerge immediately surrounded by literally every book – all physically present, visible, and accessible, without any particular effort. The interior is so large it’s on an almost urban scale: it could contain an entire population, and also an entire population of books.’

At the heart of the building and built on a six-metre deep lower ground level, in the style of an archaeological excavation, sits the Heritage Collection. Here, in a special section clad in beige travertine stone, is the library’s rich selection of historical documents, symbolically placed at the complex’s very core.

The library, which is only the third of its typology to be completed by OMA ever, forms part of the Education City, Qatar’s new academic campus, which is the home of a wealth of university and institution buildings – aiming to highlight the country’s leading role, globally, within the sector.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of OMA

Architects often talk about flexible buildings, interiors that can easily adapt to different needs, ready to accommodate several functions. But you’d be hard pressed to find one that took the meaning of this as literally as Rem Koolhaas’ practice OMA did in its most recent project in Paris, Lafayette Anticipations, its first finished building in the French capital.

Faced with a 19th-century industrial structure on a relatively modest site in the Marais, and a brief from Fondation d’Entreprise Galeries Lafayette to create an art centre fit to host three to four annual shows, plus performances and workshops, the architects approached the design with a truly open mind.

The result, Lafayette Anticipations, is a ‘curatorial machine’ of a building, with an adaptable interior that gives spatial  exibility a new meaning. ‘Paris is replete with prestigious collections, yet no place is absolutely dedicated to the work of artists or to the production of their pieces,’ says Guillaume Houzé, president of Fondation Galeries Lafayette.

‘There was thus an opportunity to establish, in the heart of the city, a toolbox giving creators the chance to multiply their capacities and actions, prompting the emergence of new forms and ideas, then sharing them with the greatest number. Within the 9 rue du Plâtre building, OMA made these aspirations a reality.’

In order to achieve this, OMA completely gutted the existing structure (built in 1891 by French architect Samuel Menjot de Dammartin for Xavier Ruel’s Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville), keeping the interior simple and uncluttered, while transforming the courtyard at its heart into a glass ‘exhibition tower’ composed of four mobile platforms.

‘We were asked to accommodate an institution that offers carte blanche to artists in a building entirely protected by heritage regulations,’ says OMA project architect Clément Périssé.

‘Only a machine could solve this. By inserting a moveable mechanism into its courtyard, the only space open to intervention, we activated the entire existing building and gave it the potential to serve this ambitious project.’

The gallery now spans 2,200 sq m and includes 875 sq m of exhibition space, as well as production workshops, visitor engagement areas, an organic, vegan, gluten-free café-restaurant, and a store, within one beautifully composed, well-oiled ecosystem clad in timber, concrete, anodised aluminium, galvanised steel grating and limestone.

The gallery’s holistic vision also allows for artwork to be made on site, with its facilities open to professionals from a wide variety of disciplines, including fashion, design, visual arts and performance.

Referencing the opening show by American artist Lutz Bacher, Houzé says, ‘Numerous pieces presented in the show will have been produced in the Lafayette Anticipations workshop. Here, the diversity of the artists and their work will encourage new opportunities for spatial cohabitation within our modular environment.’

As originally featured in the July 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*232)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the OMA website and the Lafayette Anticipations website

ADDRESS

9 Rue du Plâtre
75004 Paris
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When the Fondazione Prada opened its doors in Milan to critical acclaim in 2015, the fashion, art and architecture worlds found a natural home in the OMA-designed complex. The site, a former distillery dating from 1910, has been widely covered and lovingly visited since, but behind the scenes, further works have been quietly underway. Now, the foundation and its architects have just announced the completion of the complex’s next phase – its imposing tower. 

Fittingly named ‘Torre’, this new element brings height to the campus, which is composed of seven structures in a calculated mix of looks and sizes. The completed design, headed by Rem Koolhaas, with Chris van Duijn and Federico Pompignoli, also marks the completion of the Milan venue. 

A soaring 60m of white concrete, the tower unfolds across a total surface of approximately 2.000 sq m and nine levels. Six of these are exhibition spaces, with a restaurant, a panoramic terrace with a rooftop bar, and further visitor facilities occupying the remaining floors. 

Each floor is designed to host specific environmental conditions, according to the type of art displayed within. The height varies accordingly too. Glass opening are cut out of the concrete form, making the most of the Italian sun. The irregular shape allows for the variations in sizes and needs, cantilevering gracefully over the public spaces.

‘Torre is the final section of a collection of different exhibition conditions that together define Fondazione Prada’, says Koolhaas, going on to focus on the tower’s own, varied exhibition spaces. ‘Together these variations produce a radical diversity within a simple volume – so that the interaction between the spaces and specific events or works of art offer an endless variety of conditions…’ One thing, points out Koolhaas, brings it all together. ‘The staircase is the one element unifying all irregularities – its complexity lifts it beyond the typical pragmatic element, the staircase has become a highly charged architectural element.’

The Torre is scheduled to officially open its doors to the public on the 20th April 2018.

INFORMATION
For more information visit the OMA website

Five years after its reopening, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum today reveals Stedelijk BASE, a much-anticipated new presentation of the museum’s permanent collection, which marks the finale of the museum’s almost decade-long revitalisation. 

Located in the basement of the ‘bathtub’ (the nickname of the new wing designed by fellow Dutch architect Mels Crouwel), its new display has been designed by AMO architects Rem Koolhaas and Federico Martelli, who envisaged an innovative exhibition system specifically for the space. Most notably, the 1340 sq m lower level gallery is made of 180 tons of steel, supporting a number of specially developed, ultra-thin freestanding walls on which some 700 highlights from the collection can be mounted. 

For almost two years Koolhaas and Martelli worked closely with the museum’s team of curators, researchers and technical staff, delving into the archives in search of a propitious representation. The result is a hybrid arrangement that is both chronological and thematic. The new display is laid out in an open-ended route, which allows visitors to see the modern and contemporary art and design from 1880 until 1980 in unexpected combinations. The perimeter walls in the rectangular room present a history of the developments in art and design while the freestanding walls display thematic zones. ‘The design responds to new ways of absorbing information,’ says Martelli, ‘Viewers have become capable of focusing on many things at the same time and a multiplicity of information stimulates our curiosity.’  

The peculiarities of the design space required high standards of building in regard to stability, vibration and security. AMO worked closely with Tata Steel Nederland and ARUP engineers in order to achieve the solid yet elegant solution. At one end of the room a pavilion houses Gerrit Rietveld’s Harrenstein Bedroom (1971) and its accompanying balcony doubles as a dedicated showcase of the master’s furniture works and a lookout from which visitors can admire the architecture of the space.  

Amsterdammers share a profound attachment to the Stedelijk collection, and the challenge of the new presentation was to reward seasoned museumgoers with a new experience while providing one-timers from around the globe an entry to its world of creation. ‘At Stedelijk BASE we want to show the icons of the collection. Curators from different disciplines – contemporary art, graphic design, industrial design and photography – worked together to find out what people are interested in,’ Margriet Schavemaker, head of collections and research, explains. ‘We started with a very different vision on how to present artworks: not as a list of autonomous objects presented without a context, but as part of a network of connections and associations. It is such a major experiment in thinking how to curate in the 21st century.‘

In the new presentation, Dutch masters like Piet Mondrian, Ed van der Elsken, Constant and Jacqueline de Jong are the spotlights, of course; international names like Kazimir Malevich and Marlene Dumas are in the mix, too. Engaging and nonconformist, AMO’s design epitomises the Stedelijk’s traditionally bold, experimental spirit, and will become a permanent constituent of the institution. 

OMA/AMO has already been experimenting in the world of displaying art; recent examples are Elements of Architecture at the Venice Biennale in 2014 and the exhibition display of Serial and Portable Classic for the Fondazione Prada in Milan and Venice in 2015. However, Koolhaas is particularly sentimental about this project – he frequented the museum in his formative years and says that the Stedelijk was his university and shaped his sense of aesthetics. ‘I live around the corner, and our office is around the corner, too, so we had a physical presence throughout the project that made it such an unique and organic collaboration', he says. 'In my own experience, there are very few comparable situations where the aim is so clearly articulated, so collectively supported, and so technically elaborated.’

INFORMATION

For more information visit the AMO/OMA website and the Stedelijk Museum website

Inspired by ancient amphitheatres and nestled within the greenery of the historic Queen Victoria Gardens, the newest iteration of the MPavilion landed in Melbourne earlier this month. Promising to make a fitting home for a rich, 4-month long program of events, this structure is also the latest, albeit one of the smallest, finely tuned performance spaces by OMA.

The international architecture firm is no stranger to building for leisure, culture and entertainment – the Taipei Performing Arts Center and Porto’s Casa da Musica are just two of their many notable contributions to the genre. In comparison, this temporary summer pavilion seems positively petite, yet no less thought has gone into its design, than in that of its larger counterparts.

Conceived as an open air platform to house events of all shapes and sizes, the structure appears deceptively simple; two grandstands, one fixed and one moveable, are arranged under a floating roof, fixed on a hilly landscape of native plants. The canopy is clad in aluminium; within it is embedded all the necessary equipment to support different types of activities.

Rem Koolhaas, together with the firm’s managing partner David Gianotten, headed the design team. The pair shares its insights and vision for the structure’s use in a newly released short film, revealing how this project was designed not only as a modern event space, but also a hub for debate about architecture and Melbourne’s urban needs.

'The amphitheatre is a place for debate, and that’s very often not public,' says Gianotten. 'And there is debate about the city needed, especially because everybody praises Melbourne as the most liveable city in the world, but that doesn’t mean there are no issues.'

In order to cover all bases, flexibility was key, so the architects’ clever technical planning, including the adaptable nature of the stage and seating, means that this small but perfectly formed structure can easily respond to unexpected needs and impromptu programming.

Being able to accommodate different scenarios may be a good way to measure the pavilion’s success, yet it is not the only one. 'For me the success will also be dependant on what people do inside the pavilion,' says Gianotten. 'It would be super exciting if we also get that feedback and to be inspired by that use.'

With the MPavilion's first month about to come to a close, and three more months' worth of activities planned ahead, there will no doubt be plenty of food for thought coming from this multi-tasking structure’s relatively short life.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the MPavilion and OMA websites

Originally designed by Jan Hoogstad and completed in 1992 for the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment in The Hague, this glass-enclosed, 140m long structure was one of the Netherlands’ first sustainable buildings. Its distinctive floorplan, resembling a two-sided comb, incorporated a series of glazed atriums that helped the air circulate to regulate internal temperature in the style of a concervatory. A recent redesign by OMA, highlights Rijnstraat 8’s original intention, while bringing it to the 21st century.

When major organisational changes in the Dutch government structure meant a renovation was necessary, OMA won the contract to refresh Hoogstad's innovative, budget-savvy design. Now known as Rijnstraat 8, this will be the new home of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Infrastructure, Public Works and Water Management, the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The project builds upon the original design while upgrading its performance in more ways than one, working with Hoogstad's intention for a more spacious, better lit and insulated, and naturally ventilated offices. Some 20 per cent of the structure was demolished to make way for a number of improvements, yet the architects made sure that 99.7 per cent of the original materials are reused. The new layout replaces standard corridors with spacious walkways that boast panoramic views of The Hague and beyond, offer additional space for conversations, rest, or more informal work, and help wayfinding. A concrete side wall was removed in favour of a glass facade that dramatically increases daylight.

In Rijnstraat 8, OMA partner and project architect-in-charge Ellen van Loon, drew on her experience in designing government facilities and theatres. The building feels open and visitor-friendly, while being protected by 'invisible security' systems. From the walkways one can observe, as if in a theatre, the busy life of alternating double- and single-height office floors. Glazed atriums look particularly breathtaking from the hanging stairways, intended as a healthier alternative to elevators.

The idea of giving back to the city is key to the project. The first five floors now act as semi-public meeting areas shared with the neighbouring ministries. Situated just in front of The Hague’s Central Station, Rijnstraat 8 incorporates a 'pedestrian highway' used by thousands of people on a daily basis. This was created by enlarging an existing pedestrian passage through the building to the size of a plaza.

Hofhaus, a cluster of cafes within the building, acts as a 'city lobby'. Opening early in the morning, it will soon extend its working and partying hours to 2am, making Rijnstraat 8 available to the public for even longer.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the OMA website 

A rapidly evolving technology cluster competing for the status of Europe’s Silicon Valley, Paris-Saclay will cover 385 sq km and is set to accumulate 20 per cent of France’s research capacities by 2020.

Part of this enormous project is the new campus for CentraleSupélec, focused on engineering and systems sciences and welcoming 4,200 students this school year. This is possible thanks to a 40,000 sq m facility designed by OMA and a 25,000 sq m building by Swiss architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer. Planned cooperatively, the two structures host educational and research spaces, but also a few shared areas – from a sports hall and a theatre, to a language centre and a canteen – to be used by the entire campus.

For OMA’s team, led by Ellen van Loon and Rem Koolhaas, this was an opportunity to demonstrate how architecture can ‘contribute to a new educational, social and civic dimension’. Named Lab City, their project steps away from the conventional idea of a massive, introverted box within an urban area and proposes instead a small, animated city within a city.

Manhattan’s gridded block system comes to mind when one finds themselves under a gigantic transparent roof, in the midst of classrooms, labs and offices designed as separate ‘buildings’ and connected by a network of alleyways. Each space has large windows facing the ‘streets’, while the rooftops of these mini-buildings provide an additional 2,000 sq m of ‘outdoor’ space intended for more informal use, from lounges to improvised classrooms. The diagonal ‘main street’ continues outside, connecting the campus with the upcoming station of the Grand Paris Express.

Through mixture and openness, the project enables interaction between students, researchers and administration. The director’s area, for instance, is made largely accessible; shared facilities can be leased to external users. Besides, the layout includes two ‘plazas’, with an open-space cafeteria filled by a snacking and laptopping population throughout the day rather than being isolated and open for a few hours only. Classrooms have entire walls acting like whiteboards; one can write on the outward-facing glass walls as well. The large amphitheatre, divisible into three separate segments, serves as both a conference space and an extra classroom. A transparent ETFE roof with a sunshading pattern above the ‘plazas’ and ‘rooftop terraces’ floods the Lab City with light even on rainy days.

By 2019, the campus will have new neighbours: Renzo Piano’s design for École Normale Supérieure and a telecommunications school by next year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture curators, Dublin-based Grafton Architects. Further away, but still within Paris-Saclay, a Sou Fujimoto-led team of French and Japanese architects will deliver the future learning centre for the École Polytechnique.

INFORMATION

For more information, vistit the OMA website

Alserkal Avenue – the Dubai arts district filled with galleries, hip eateries, a black box theatre and design shops – was once the site of a marble factory. Now, it's home to Concrete, the first building in the United Arab Emirates designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. When OMA received the commission a few years back, they were given a simple directive: 'To make that space multipurpose, to enable that building to live multiple lives, because today no space serves only one purpose,' recalls Vilma Jurkute, the director of Alserkal Avenue. 'A museum is not just a museum, a gallery is not just a gallery. They all accommodate so many other initiatives as part of their program. The idea was to create that space for Dubai.'

OMA delivered, transforming an existing warehouse into a 1,250 sq m multipurpose venue. 'We took a shape that was already existing, and then we looked at the behavior of what can happen in that building. We focused on that,' said Rem Koolhaas, the co-founder of OMA. Concrete can be used for everything from a museum-quality exhibition to a yoga studio to a concert hall where multiple events can be held at the same time thanks to a series of rotating walls. 'There is four of them and they have the ability to divide the space into two, three, or four and conduct four different events at the same time,' said Iyad Alsaka, the lead architect on the project.

Unlike the flashy buildings of Dubai – the most famous being the Burj Khalifa and the Burj Al Arab – Concrete takes a more minimal approach in tune with the architecture of the surrounding warehouses of Alserkal Avenue. 'The development of shape was not a very productive future, and it made the office switch to performance,' said Koolhaas. A translucent double polycarbonate was used for the facade, which features four enormous pivoting walls that double as entryways. The three other exterior walls consist of a sprayed concrete with integrated mirrors for a sparkly finish. 'The front was very intentional; we wanted to achieve a continuation of the inside space to the outside,' said Alsaka. The interiors feature sweeping 8m high ceilings, walls composed of concrete cladding and skylights that bring natural light into the space. Tucked away in the back is a green room that takes the concept quite literally by covering it in green velvet, and prayer rooms.

The space’s inaugural exhibition is 'Syria: Into the Light', a survey of Syrian art presented by the Atassi Foundation, on view until 3 April. 'It’s about showing that the region has art history, has talent,' said Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, patron and founder of Alserkal Avenue. Expect to see a myriad of other happenings, exhibitions, talks and concerts over the next few months.

'Over the last decade, Alserkal Avenue has grown and evolved organically with the arts and culture scene of the United Arab Emirates,' said Alserkal. 'The introduction of Concrete marks a new milestone as part of the cultural advancement of the region.'

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the OMA website and the Alserkal Avenue website

ADDRESS

Concrete
1 Street 8
Dubai

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