Today marks the opening of Maggie’s Gartnaval, a new center for the charity located on the ground of Gartnaval Royal Infirmary in Glasgow, Scotland. Designed by OMA, the center aims to provide emotional and psychological support to those affected by cancer in the greater Glasgow area.
Rem Koolhaas commented, “We were touched to be asked to design a Maggie’s Centre, and invigorated by the opportunity to work on a completely different scale, with different ambitions, and in a different environment. Maggie’s is so unique and urgent among the projects we are working on.”
In this video from Cities of Opportunity 2011, architectural superstar and OMA founder Rem Koolhaas shares his views on the contemporary evolution of the city and his vision for the future of urban centers. Produced by accounting giant PwC (a.k.a PricewaterhouseCoopers before their 2010 re-branding) and the Partnership for New York City, Cities of Opportunity 2011 “analyzes the trajectory of 26 cities, all capitals of finance, commerce, and culture and through their performance, seeks to open a window on what makes cities function best.”
The emergence of China on the global economic stage has been discussed at nauseum in myriad publications. But this emergence has had an impact on the world of architecture, providing a testing ground where architects can experiment with new ideas about sustainability and urban growth. These new ideas have been realized in recently completed structures, and more are just beginning construction or have been proposed for the future. More on these new buildings after the break.
Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman, two of the most influential architects these days, discussing the current the issues which, for them, represent the most critical in architectural discourse today.
Rem Koolhaas will provide the Keynote Address for the upcoming Festival of Ideas for a New City on Wednesday May 4th at 7:00pm held at the Rosenthal Pavilion at the Kimmel Center. Tickets are currently available for purchase.
Chef Fre Peneau’s new restaurant, Le Dauphin is an 80 sqm ‘obsession in white’. OMA‘s Rem Koolhaas and associate Clement Blanchet received the Fooding 2010 award for their interior design of the restaurant that opened December 2010. Predominant materials of marble, mirrors and wood enlarge the space through reflection, and blur the boundary between interior and exterior.
Continuing our coverage of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SSE), OMA recently shared the latest photographs of the building while under construction. The building, located in the downtown area of Shenzhen, China, is expected to reach completion in April 2011. The SSE, a new headquarters for China’s equivalent of the NASDAQ, is 132,000 sqm of offices, registration and clearing house, accessory area, securities information company, SSE office area, trading floor and technical operations. The floating podium design, which is suspended 36 meters over a public plaza, projects 54 meters from the base of the tower. The building broke ground in November of 2007, Rem Koolhaas along with local government and the officials from the SSE were in attendance. Check out our previous coverage here.
Follow the break for the latest photographs of SSE.
Today, the design for the Broad Museum has been released. Situated adjacent to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the museum has become a key part of the Grand Avenue redevelopment project that has been losing steam.
This past week, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority of Hong Kong unveiled OMA’s conceptual master plan for a new arts district (Koolhaas’ plan is one of three competing proposals). Divided into three villages, the 40 hectacre waterfront site places strong emphasis on the quality of the street life and the “cultural production where all aspects of the creative process are nurtured and made visible.” The master plan has been years in the making, as Koolhaas established an office in Hong Kong to better understand the culture and context, as well as collaborate with financial and culture experts to design a feasible plan to positively affect the communities involved. Rem Koolhaas commented, “Using the village – a typology every citizen of Hong Kong is familiar with – as the model for our plan allows us to absorb the massive scale of WKCD’s ambition into manageable portions and forge deep connections with Kowloon, whose vital urban energy will be the lifeblood of WKCD.”
Images and more information about the master plan after the break.
Chaired by Paolo Baratta, the Board of the Biennale di Venezia has awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Rem Koolhaas. The much deserving architect has produced dozens of thought-provoking and inspirational works that constantly push the limits of the current state of architecture. His strength lies in his buildings’ strong conceptual nature that is carried through to ideas about circulation, structure and programmatic organization. ”Rem Koolhaas has expanded the possibilities of architecture. He has focused on the exchanges between people in space. He creates buildings that bring people together and in this way forms ambitious goals for architecture. His influence on the world has come well beyond architecture. People from very diverse fields feel a great freedom from his work,” explained the board.
Eli Broad, an American philanthropist, is getting ready to design the newest home for his extensive art collection. For his latest museum project, on the corner of Grand Avenue and 2nd Street in Los Angeles, Broad invited six of the professions’ leading minds to compete. Resting across the street from Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Arata Isozaki’s 1986 Museum of Contemporary Art, Broad’s museum with include approximately 40,000 square feet of top-floor exhibition space, along with offices for the Broad Art Foundation.
The City of Rotterdam held a competition for a mixed-use extension for the City Hall, accommodating public and administrative facilities and a residential program. The competition requests that the mixed-use building becomes “the most sustainable in the Netherlands”.
Five designs were presented by the City, and they will be on public display at the NAI until Sept 13th to receive public feedback, which can also be made through the website. The teams will present to the jury on Septh 23th, and the winner will be announced sometime in October.
The 5 finalists are: Claus en Kaan Architecten, Mecanoo Architecten, Meyer en van Schooten Architecten, OMA and SeARCH.
OMA shared with us their finalist entry, in collaboration with ABT and Werner Sobek Green Technolgies. The project adheres to the highest energy efficiency requirements, and it also considers a sustainable approach in terms of speed of construction and future flexibility of the building through a repeated and flexible structural system.
Images from the other proposals will be featured on another article. Rem Koolhaas’ statement and more images after the break.
Rem Koolhaas’ latest project -The Prada Transformer- is not just a building, but also a statement on today´s state of architecture. Dubbed the anti-blob, this “object” rejects all common blobby shapes we have seen lately. Simple geometrical shapes (a circle, a cross, a rectangle and an hexagon) enclose a space that depending on its rotation results on different spaces suitable for fashion exhibitions, cinema, art exhibitions and other special events. Each face is the platform on which these activities take place, while also being served by the other faces enclosing the space.
A few weeks ago, we presented the Transformer at Position 1 (Fashion Exhibition) with photos by Iwan Baan . Now, he sent us his photo set for the Transformer at Position 2: Cinema.
From June 26th to July 5th, the Transformer used a center piece on one of the faces to project “Flesh, Mind and Soul”, a film festival co-curated by Alejandro González Iñárritu (director Babel, 21 Grams). Please note that the interiors are now almost all black.
As of now, the Transformer is going through some changes to debut on its new position on Jul 30th to host “Beyond Control”, an exhibition by the Prada Foundation.
More photos by Iwan Baan after the break and the complete photo set on Iwan’s website:
We just received this from OMA: After almost 12 years in the boards, OMA announced that the De Rotterdam complex will enter construction during December 2009, expecting completion in 2013.
Tree stacked towers with a total height of 150m, will result on a gross floor area of approximately 160,000m2, making De Rotterdam the largest building in the Netherland, with a total cost of €340m.
The mixed-use program (offices, apartments, a hotel, conference facilities, gym, shops, restaurants, and cafes) and the resulting density make this project a vertical city, located in the old harbour district of Wilhelminapier, next to the iconic Erasmus bridge.
CNN's Talk Asia just featured an interesting interview with Rem Koolhaas. At the beginning of the video we see the Prada Transformer in action.Highlights of this interview are Dubai, which lead to Koolhaas talking about the public sector and the stimulus, and his views on the Generic City.When talking about influence (Rem was on the 100 most influential people list by Time magazine in 2008) and "star architects", Koolhaas sentences the term to death:"I think it's a name that is actually degrading to the vast majority of people it is applied to. And it really is a kind of political term that for certain clients is important because they use star architects. My hope is that through the current complexity that title will exit discretely and disappear".
