Videos

Two months after the opening of the 2017 MPavilion in Melbourne, its designers, OMA’s Rem Koolhaas & David Gianotten, have returned to discuss the commission and design process, as well as their reactions to its use thus far.

“The opening was an opening with many formal obligations and many excellencies, and that was exciting,” said Koolhaas about the pavilions opening events. “But frankly more exciting was this morning, when the thing performed really wonderfully spontaneously in terms of raising a lot of issues and having from the very first second a really animated discussion about a whole range of issues. And that’s exactly we intended it go.”

Facebook has announced plans for a new mixed-use neighborhood adjoining their existing headquarters in Menlo Park, California to be led by the New York office of OMA and Partner Shohei Shigematsu. Known as Willow Campus, the campus masterplan seeks to further invest in Facebook’s home community, joining the original campus designed by Frank Gehry.

“It’s exciting to collaborate with Facebook, whose innovation in networking and social media extends to urban ambitions for connectivity in the Bay Area,” commented Shigematsu. “The Willow Campus masterplan creates a sense of place with diverse programming that responds to the needs of the Menlo Park community. The site has the potential to impact the future of regional transportation, housing, and environment.”

Communicating ideas through imagery are central to the design process. In client presentations, site visits, or public exhibitions, we are required to represent important aspects clearly to the receiver, who is often not an architect. Furthermore, producing detailed architectural drawings can allow us to identify and modify certain aspects of the design. 

Diagrams and charts, because of their non-spatial characteristics, are often neglected until the last moments of the design process, however, they can be a useful tool for analysis and organization. Taking the time to think and articulate these elements yield positive results, from understanding and organizing a design process to providing an unexpected change of idea.

In an effort to enhance the graphics and diagrams in architectural representation, check out this series of case studies to help you boost the visual, analytical, organizational power of your work.

With a majority of architecture schools in the Northern Hemisphere ending and the official start of summer fast approaching, architects across the globe – whether fresh out of school or with years of experience under their belt – are playing jobs musical chairs. And with the AIA’s Architecture Billings Index continuing to show growth in the profession, firms of all sizes are looking to add valuable members to their teams.

One of those firms is OMA, whose Jobs site has seen a bounty of positions open up in recent months to keep up with the continued success of their seven offices across the globe. While many of the openings are given ambiguous descriptors, more than a few have titles that can speculatively be connected to projects announced over the past few years:

"Architect with Stadium/ Arena Experience – Rotterdam," for example, likely concerns the recently planning-approved Feyenoord Stadium and Masterplan, while "California Licensed Senior Architect – New York" will probably be involved in either their San Francisco tower or their mixed-use development scheme in Santa Monica, or both.

What other projects might need some help? Check out the full list of job openings, below. 

A large-scale masterplan for Feyenoord (or Feijenoord), a suburb-city of the Dutch city of Rotterdam, has been approved by Rotterdam City Council. The successful concept design from OMA, led by Partner David Gianotten, incorporates a historically-important football stadium—for the nationally significant Feyenoord football club—which "no longer fulfills modern demands." Aligned with the football club's "expanding ambitions" both in the Dutch and European football leagues, this proposal is the latest in a string of plans to expand, but the only one to have been accepted.

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OMA, in collaboration with local architects ECADI and landscape architects West 8, has developed a new mixed-use masterplan for Columbia Circle in the center of Shanghai. Layered with rich history, the site contains preserved colonial monuments, former industrial buildings and 1920’s country club buildings by architect Elliott Hazzard – these elements will be renewed and transformed by the master plan to return Columbia Circle into one of Shanghai’s most prominent public spaces.

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Videos

The Naomi Milgrom Foundation has selected Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten of OMA for the design of Melbourne’s 2017 MPavilion. The announcement comes after this weekend’s closing of the 2016 MPavilion, designed by Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, which welcomed more than 94,000 visitors to over 287 free events in its 139 day run. Now in its 4th year, the MPavilion program invites architects who have yet to completed a project in Australia to design and construct their first structure in the country.

As editors on the Projects Team at ArchDaily, we wanted to reflect on the projects published in 2016—and, based on those submissions, to consider what we hope to see from the submissions we will publish in 2017.

During 2016, the projects we published had a high level of visual impact. Axonometric views were part of the vast majority of our publications, democratizing understanding by creating easily accessible views which closely resemble reality. Secondly, the development of immersive video technology has allowed us to publish full 360-degree tours through the interiors of works of different sizes, generating images which are increasingly representative of the physical reality of the work in question.

OMA has released images of their masterplan for Feyenoord City, Rotterdam, after the plan was approved by city’s mayor and alderman. Developed for the Feyenoord football club, the project will consist of a redeveloped mixed-use district centered around a new 63,000 seat stadium for the team located along the Maas River.

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Two weeks ago, Herzog & de Meuron was announced as the winners of the international competition to design the new Museum of the 20th Century to be located adjacent to Mies van der Rohe’s seminal Neue Galerie in the heart of the Berlin Cultural Forum in Berlin, Germany.

We’ve now received additional proposals for the competition, including honorable mention-awarded entries from OMA, Staab Architekten, and Aires Mateus e Associados, and a finalist proposal from REX, that show alternative strategies for the site.

OMA has won a commission to design their first project in the United Arab Emirates. The winning proposal will transform four warehouses on Dubai's Alserkal Avenue into a new multi-purpose venue that will connect local architects and artists, and highlight the role intelligent design plays in the city.

“The main strategy for the design of the event space is to blur the boundary between interior and exterior by bringing view and daylight into the space and extending the action and events to the public space outside," said Iyad Alsaka, OMA's MEA Partner in Charge.

China has become home to some of the world’s most outlandish architectural landmarks of the 21st century. Hangzhou is home to a replica of the Eiffel Tower, located in a luxury real estate development, and Shanghai’s World Financial Center is often referred to as “The World’s Largest Bottle Opener.” However, all of these zany designs may soon come to a halt following a directive issued by the State Council, China’s cabinet, and the Communist Party’s Central Committee on Sunday, reports the New York Times.

The directive says “no” to any architecture considered “oversized, xenocentric, weird, and devoid of cultural tradition.” In their place should be buildings designed as “suitable, economic, green, and pleasing to the eye.”

A new exhibition, opening later this month in London, aims to examine the varying ways that cities and communities have been re-imagined in the aftermath of natural, or man-made, disasters. Including work by Yasmeen Lari, ELEMENTAL, OMA, Shigeru Ban, NLÉ, Toyo Ito, Metabolism (Kenzo Tange and Kurokawa Kisho) and Sir Christopher Wren, who redesigned London in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666, the exhibition will primarily explore contemporary responses to earthquakes and tsunamis. Posing questions about the fragility of architecture, our relationship to nature, and the power of architects to instigate change, it will ask whether we are facing a paradigm shift in the way that cities and communities recover from destruction.