OMA: The Latest Architecture and News

OMA and Inside Outside have collaborated on the design of a vast monument in Dubai, titled “Ethar – Honoring Generosity.” The installation consists of a field of 1,680 triangular-shaped recycled aluminum columns arrayed like a magnetic field, engraved with stories from Arabic scholars, scientists, and thinkers.

The installation was designed to celebrate the “unique culture of charitable giving in the United Arab Emirates with a physical installation that is part of the urban landscape of Dubai.” Designed for a site on Jumeirah Beach, the monument’s character can also be adapted for various contexts, whether dispersed throughout the city or appearing in key urban locations as a symbol of Emirati culture.

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For this year's Women in Architecture Awards, The Architectural Review and the Architects’ Journal have selected Sheila O’Donnell as Architect of the Year and Xu Tiantian to win the Moira Gemill Prize for Emerging Architecture in the 2019 Women in Architecture awards. The Architect of the Year award recognizes excellence in design specifically in the context of a recently completed project and the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture is awarded to women designers under the age of 45 who show design excellence indicative of a bright future.

Renowned auction house Sotheby’s has unveiled a dramatic OMA/Shohei Shigematsu-designed expansion and re-imagination of their New York City headquarters. Together with OMA Associate Christy Cheng, Shigematsu has redesigned the headquarters to include vast new exhibition galleries for fine art, precious objects, luxury goods, and more. Comprising 40 galleries of varying size across four floors, the new space will increase Sotheby’s exhibition space from 67,000 square feet to 90,000 square feet.

In the proposal, nine galleries will facilitate discreet private sales for dedicated small objects such as watches and jewelry. Three two-story spaces will be set aside for exhibitions, along with a 150-foot-long space for full collections, according to The New York Times. The new space will include “dynamic repertoire” of "spatial conditions", including a white cube, double height, enfilade, corridor cascade, octagonal, and an L-shaped space.

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The OMA / Reinier de Graaf-designed Nhow Amsterdam RAI Hotel has topped out at its 91-meter height. The main hotel for the RAI Amsterdam convention and exhibition center, the scheme will offer 650 hotel rooms across 25 floors. Formed of three shifting triangular volumes, the scheme draws from a triangular advertising column on the Europaplein that once stood prominently on the site.

OMA was chosen ahead of eleven practices to design the project, which will operate as a hub for business travelers, tourists, and Amsterdam locals. The project has been 15-years in the making, as a larger 800-room proposal was once rejected by the city a few years back.

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Farshid Moussavi Architecture has won a competition to design the first Ismaili Center in the United States. To be built in Houston, Texas on an 11-acre site along the Buffalo Bayou, the project will be completed with with AKT II, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects and DLR Group. The team beat out a shortlist including David Chipperfield Architects, OMA and Studio Gang. As the seventh center built worldwide, the building will be a cultural and religious space for Houston’s Ismaili Muslim community.

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They say diversity is key for a strong portfolio. Now OMA's Rem Koolhaas can add “featured artist on a musical album” to his resume. New York-based duo Tempers, in collaboration with German artist Katja Eichinger, feature Koolhaas in a mall-themed concept album.

New photographs have been released of OMA’s Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), as construction continues in Taiwan. Consisting of three theaters, each functioning autonomously of each other, the OMA scheme seeks to depart from the traditional consensus of performing arts centers as simply containing a large auditorium, medium-sized theater, and small-size black box.

OMA sees “no excuse for contemporary stagnation,” using the TPAC as an opportunity to experiment with the inner workings of theaters, leading to a dynamic external presence. Hence, the TPAC’s three theaters plug into a central cube combining stages, backstages, and support spaces into a single, efficient entity, allowing stages to be modified or merged for unforeseen scenarios. 

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OMA has released images and plans for the new Feyenoord Stadium at the Maas. Feyenoord will set up a new multi sports club for the residents of Rotterdam Zuid, as OMA designed the masterplan after reaching initial city approval in 2016. The 63,000 stadium will rise along the river as the largest football stadium in the Netherlands. The stadium features a perfect bowl shape formed by continuous curved tiers in close proximity to the pitch, and will feature a main concourse with views into the stadium across the Rotterdam skyline.

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OMA will be breaking ground on their new design for Wilshire Boulevard Temple's expansion next month. The groundbreaking for the new Audrey Irmas Pavilion is scheduled for November 11. The $75-million project was designed by OMA partners Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas. The three-story expansion will include space for the temple congregation, surrounding neighborhood and supportive services.

The history of Venice’s architecture, as seen today, is a semblance of styles centuries old. A destination rich in culture, many of Venice’s existing buildings, from homes alongside the thin interior canals to the grand domed churches of Palladio, have remained stagnant in their overall design and layout since the 16th century. Once a hub of Byzantine and European trade, the city now thrives on a steady stream of tourism and a foundational group of local residents.

The structures that make up the city’s compact matrix, once integral to its function as a commercial empire, have come to take on new functions through architectural intervention; notably, architects such as Carlo Scarpa, OMA, and Tadao Ando have had a large hand in this process.

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Rem Koolhaas, Dutch architect and founder of the Rotterdam-based firm OMA, has been announced as the closing keynote speaker at the World Architecture Festival. The event will take place in Amsterdam at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre on from 28-30 November.

UNStudio and Cox Architecture have officially been announced as the winners of Melbourne’s landmark Southbank Precinct overhaul. Selected from a range of high-profile offices, including BIG, OMA, and MAD, UNStudio's vision for the $2 billion project includes a pair of twisted towers called Green Spine. As the largest single-phase project in the history of Victoria, Australia, the Green Spine is designed as a state-of-the-art, mixed-use environment centered around innovation in architecture and design.

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What does the Parisian park look like? For many, the answer to that question comes in the form of a painting: Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, in which the well-dressed bourgeoisie leisurely enjoy a natural oasis on a verdant island within their industrializing city.

OMA's research and design practice AMO has opened True Me, the studio's first exhibition design in China. Built in the 798 Art Factory in Beijing, True Me explores modern selfie-culture and modes of self-representation through art and media. Organized by App developer Meitu and the Beijing Contemporary Arts Foundation, the exhibition features artworks by Hou Ying, Lu Yang, Maleonn, Xie Haiwei, Ye Funa, Chen Tianzhuo, teamLab, and Theodore Bradley. Celebrating the launch of Meitu’s new logo, the exhibition extends AMO’s interest in studying visual culture.

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