OMA: The Latest Architecture and News

Rem Koolhaas & David Gianotten / OMA’s 2017 MPavilion has found a permanent home at Monash University, Clayton, the Naomi Milgrom Foundation has announced. The news marks the fourth MPavilion to be gifted to the public by the Foundation.

“The relocation of Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten’s MPavilion to Monash University ensures it will continue to be a dynamic incubator, where ideas about architecture, design, and creativity are encouraged and nurtured. I’m extremely pleased that it will carry on inspiring our young practitioners,” said Naomi Milgrom AO, founder of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

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OMA has revealed plans for the renovation of the New Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val in Moscow that will increase the accessibility and visibility of the gallery’s four sectors. Led by Rem Koolhaas, the scheme will use color and material to create a new visual identity and to establish a new link to the Moscow River.

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Update 2/20/18: We've added a gallery of additional images to the post!

OMA has been selected as the winner of an international competition for the design of the new Palais de justice (courthouse) in Lille, France. Located on the outskirts of the city near the historic Vauban fortifications, the new courthouse will house the high court and district court of Lille within a colorful, expressive volume.

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With nearly 100,000 votes cast during the last two weeks, we are happy to present the winners of the 2018 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. This peer-based, crowdsourced architecture award showcases projects chosen by ArchDaily readers who filtered thousands of projects down to the 15 best works featured on ArchDaily in 2017.

British architect Amanda Levete has been selected as the recipient of the 2018 Jane Drew Prize, recognizing “an architectural designer who, through their work and commitment to design excellence, has raised the profile of women in architecture.”

Founder of London-based practice AL_A, Levete rose to promise as one half of Stirling Prize-winning practice Future Systems, which she ran with then-husband Jan Kaplický. Together, they completed paradigm-shifting and critically acclaimed works such as the Birmingham Selfridges and the Lord’s Media Centre, winner of the 1999 RIBA Stirling Prize.

Levete left Future Systems to form AL_A in 2009, where she found continued success designing cultural venues with bold materiality. Some of the firm’s best known works include the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, the Central Embassy Shopping Center in Bangkok, the 2015 MPavilion in Melbourne, and the recently-opened addition to the V&A museum in London.

The Danish pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale will demonstrate the power of collaborative innovation through large-scale installations. Architect and Head of Institute of Architecture & Technology at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Natalie Mossin was selected to be the Danish pavilion curator by several prestigious organizations including The Danish Architecture Centre, The Danish Ministry of Culture, Realdania and the Danish Arts Foundation.

AMO, the research and think tank wing of OMA, has completed a flexible new exhibition space for the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Named Stedelijk BASE, the bespoke display system is constructed from “very thin yet solid” free-standing steel partitions that interlock like puzzle-pieces to create an open-ended flow for viewing art from the late 19th and 20th centuries.

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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.”

The creative mediators of Manifesta 12 have revealed the concept for next year’s Manifesta 12 biennial in Palermo.

Entitled The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence, the concept will explore “coexistence in a world moved by invisible networks, transnational private interests, algorithmic intelligence and ever-increasing inequalities through the unique lens of Palermo – a crossroads of three continents in the heart of the Mediterranean.” 

The concept was derived from an earlier analysis conducted by OMA named the Palermo Atlas, which investigated the “social, cultural and geographical textures of the city.” The event will allow visitors to visualize contemporary global transformations through the lens of Palermo.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has announced a new research project exploring the “radical changes in the countryside, the vast nonurban areas of Earth” that will culminate in an exhibition at the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed New York home in Fall 2019.

Collaborating with Rem Koolhaas and his firm AMO, the think tank wing of OMA, the project will continue research already conducted by the Dutch architect and students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

New construction photos capture the progress of OMA’s Miami development, “Park Grove,” as the project’s details and finish begin to emerge.

Located next to the twisting towers of BIG’s recently completed “Grove at Grand Bay,” OMA’s trio of towers will consist of 1,000,000 square feet of luxury residential spaces with panoramic views of Florida’s Biscayne Bay.

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Following her decision to abandon plans for an OMA-designed, upstate New York museum, artist Marina Abramovic has spoken out in response to allegations that her institute may have improperly utilized funds raised through a crowdsourced fundraising campaign.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic has ended plans for her OMA-designed upstate New York art institute, leaving questions about what happened to the $2.2 million she raised from a slate of celebrity patrons and nearly 5,000 Kickstarter donors.

When Abramovic first announced the project in 2012, she touted the plans as transformative for the town of Hudson, New York. To be known as the Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI), the facility was intended to create a new space for the “collaboration between art, science, technology and spirituality.”

Abramovic tapped OMA’s Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu to design the space, located within an old 33,000-square-foot theater. Early architectural concepts were daringly experimental – ideas included a theater with seats that could be individually rolled away if visitors were to fall asleep during planned hours-long performances.

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New technological developments in construction have given architects great freedom when designing. Innovations in construction materials and their properties allow for the creation of increasingly original and surprising facades. The buildings constructed as a result can even inspire people to travel thousands of kilometers just to see these masterpieces. This week, we present 15 of most ground-breaking facades through photos by prominent photographers such as Paul Ott, Peter Bennetts and Laurian Ghinitoiu.

The OMA-designed Qatar National Library has opened to the public in the Education City district of Doha, Qatar, giving residents access to a wealth of top-of-the-line facilities, including computer labs, group study spaces, a writing center, innovation stations offering 3D-printing tools and musical instruments, and of course, a massive library containing more than one million books, periodicals and special collections.

Some stunning shots of the library have already begun to circulate across social media streams, showing off the building’s striking form and expansive interiors, including the open rows of stacks, hanging seating lounges, interactive media walls, and central labyrinth, among other features.

Check out some first looks at the building below, and stayed tuned for professional photos next week.

In addition to their videos, #donotsettle’s Wahyu Pratomo and Kris Provoost tell extended stories about the buildings they visit through an exclusive column on ArchDaily: #donotsettle Extra. In this installment, the duo brings you to the newest design by OMA, Rijnstraat 8 in The Hague, The Netherlands. Saskia Simon and Kees van Casteren from OMA explained the architecture of Rijnstraat 8 to #donotsettle while touring the building.

This project, which houses a variety of Dutch government agencies, is an example of a spatial alteration that occurred as result of political and organizational changes. However, given the existing structure by architect Jan Hoogstad, OMA has transformed the architectural experience of the building from within.

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In this excerpt from Reinier de Graaf's new book Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession (Harvard University Press), the all-pervasive work and pedagogical practice of Ernst Neufert is put under the spotlight. Was he an architect, a teacher, or something larger than both? In examining Neufert's ardent pursuit of the "norm", De Graaf sheds light on the impact and enduring legacy of the author of Architect’s Data.

His built output—a few industrial complexes, some housing projects, and the Quelle Mail Order headquarters in Nuremberg—is not much to speak of, but his name is known to every practicing architect: Ernst Neufert, author of Architect’s Data, more commonly referred to as Neufert. [1] If the importance of an architect equals the extent to which his work lives on in others, Neufert is the most important of the twentieth century. There is probably no architect who has not used Neufert, whether as a didactic tool or as a volume of references. It contains all the necessary information to design and execute works of architecture. Neufert is enduringly popular. As of 2016, it is in its forty-first German edition, has been translated into seventeen languages, and has sold over 500,000 copies. [2] 

Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, both partners at OMA, have been tapped to design the recently-announced expansion of the New Museum in New York. OMA will design a new building adjacent to SANAA's tiered-box museum. The project is expected to break ground in 2019 and will give the New Museum an additional 50,000 square feet (4,650 square meters) for "galleries, improved public circulation and flexible space for the institution’s continued exploration of new platforms and programs." This will be Koolhaas' first public building in New York. According to the New York Times, the New Museum—the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art—has already raised 50 percent of the cost.