Luis Fernández-Galiano   The late Koolhaas is not a Koolhaas lite. Having turned seventy, and forty years after founding his Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975, the Dutch architect and writer has given his vital and intellectual path a new turn. Architecture, howev

Luis Fernández-Galiano   This monograph was begun twenty years ago, started to take shape ten years later, and finally comes to light now, when all of us involved in it have changed, and so has the world. An explanation of the delay is in order, along with some information o

United States   The New York Prada Epicenter is a conversion of a space in SoHo previously belonging to the Guggenheim. The Wave – a curving space scooped out of the ground floor and opening it up to the basement – is the main element facilitating experimentation in

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United States   The Guggenheim Las Vegas and the Guggenheim Hermitage, at The Venetian Hotel-Casino of Las Vegas, opened in 2001 and closed in 2003 and 2008, respectively. The first one, a ‘large box’ of 6,000 square meters, with a stately central staircase in a lim

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Germany   After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, planning guidelines for the reconstruction of Berlin demanded that new buildings reflect the local 19th century architectural style. Located in Mitte, in the old East section and by the Spree, the project proposes a

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United States   The aim of the project was to reinvigorate the IIT Campus, planned by Mies van der Rohe in the 1940s. Over the years the campus had sprawled but lost half its population, and was separated by elevated railway tracks. The competition called for a new

United States   Within a city plan to extend and modernize the public network of reading centers, the project sets out to redefine the concept of archive, creating a civic space for the circulation of knowledge in all media, and an innovative organizing system for a

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   South Korea   Defined by its location on the side of a hill and close to the entrance to the university, the building’s form was conceived as a basic rectangular box, with a diagonal cut that adjusts to the incline of the hill. The form is then raised over a centr

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Portugal   Despite the attempts to escape the shoebox-shaped auditorium, experience shows that this type of concert hall offers the best acoustics. In this case, the design chosen reinterprets the type, redefining the relationship of the concert hall with the e

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United Kingdom   Each summer since the year 2000 London’s Serpentine Gallery raises a temporary pavilion by its building in Kensington Gardens. The Serpentine commissions experimental pieces to internationally acclaimed architects. Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Toyo

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Germany   The Zollverein mine was closed in 1986 and had become since then a sanctuary of industrial architecture, which Unesco declared a World Heritage Site in 2001. OMA was hired to develop the master plan to give the complex a contemporary use. The largest

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas   South Korea   Located in the gardens of Gyeonghuigung Palace in the Korean capital, the Prada Transformer pavilion was conceived as a lightweight and adaptable piece that could accommodate a broad range of fashion, art and movie events during 2009, and whose image

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture, REX, Rem Koolhaas   United States   Una configuración escénica flexible es la protagonista de este prisma de aluminio estriado, cuyo interior acoge una serie cajas apiladas de diferentes alturas que contienen el programa.

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United States   Milstein Hall is the first new building to go up for Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning in a hundred years. Without succumbing to stylistic mimicry but at the same time avoiding isolation in the environment, the building i

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United Kingdom   Settled in London since 1809, when Nathan Meyer Rothschild left Manchester and established residence in the city, Rothschild’s premises are located in an urban area with a rich architectural heritage, in the heart of the City of London, adjacent to S

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   China   Located in the Central Business District, the 473,000-square-meter building houses the production and control phases of over 250 channels. The complex also includes a public cultural center with a hotel and the Media Park, a gardened area for filming

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Singapore   On an eight-hectare plot in Southern Ridges, the residential complex rounds off a nine-kilometer green belt filled with parks and recreational facilities. Thirty-one apartment blocks, each six stories high and of the same length, are stacked in a hex

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   China   With its rigorous prism of offices on a podium floating 36 meters above ground, Shenzhen’s new stock exchange mirrors the no less afloat nature of financial capital. It rises 254 meters and 46 floors with a usable area of 265,000 square meters (85,00

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Netherlands   De Rotterdam is conceived as a vertical city: three interconnected mixed-use towers accommodating offices, apartments, a hotel, conference facilities, shops, restaurants, and cafes. The towers are part of the ongoing redevelopment of the old harbor d

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Netherlands   Situated in an industrial area southeast of Amsterdam, the new headquarters for G-Star Raw will consolidate disparate facilities into a single building that aims to stimulate interaction between various departments. The 27,500-square-meter horizontal

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Russia   El Museo Garage en Moscú da cuenta del interés de Koolhaas por el patrimonio, y sugiere un modo desacomplejado de trabajar con las ruinas de la arquitectura moderna.

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Italy   Cobijada entre los muros de una vieja destilería, la nueva sede milanesa de la Fondazione Prada da lecciones inesperadas sobre cómo intervenir sin complejos en el patrimonio.

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   China   The Taipei Performing Arts Center takes on an innovative role as cultural container for big events. While the world of theater and the performing arts has evolved a lot over the last century, the design of performing centers maintains the traditional

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Denmark   Bryghusprojektet is a mixed use building that takes up a strategic position in the historic waterfront of the city, between the culturally rich Slotsholmen district and the city center. The project creates new links between these areas, respecting tr

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Netherlands   The Stadskantoor is a new building for the city hall that will accommodate services, offices, residential units, shops and parking in the center of Rotterdam. Attached to another municipal building from 1953, the new building wishes to adjust to its

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   China   On a verdant hill overlooking Castle Peak Bay in Hong Kong’s New Territories, the new campus of Chu Hai College comprises three faculties (with ten departments), two research centers, staff housing and education facilities for students such as librar

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Canada   The extension of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec sits amid the other three existing buildings, already belonging to the institution, and that make up a complex on the edge of the park. The project tries to establish new relationships betw

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   France   Located on one of the docks over the River Orne as it flows through Caen, the Bibliothèque Multimédia à Vocation Régionale (BMVR) sits at the tip of a peninsula historically devoted to the port activities and that is now undergoing a redevelopment pr

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   France   The new Parc des Expositions of Toulouse, known as PEX, sits on a 60-hectare site of agricultural land at the edge of the city, near an international airport and one of the largest and economically important Airbus factories. This area on the outskir

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   France   Located on the outskirts of the French capital, the École Centrale Paris is one of the oldest and most prestigious engineering schools in the country. Within an internal restructuring program, the school called a competition in 2012 to build a new sc

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Germany   The German publishing group Axel Springer is currently shifting from print to digital media. To launch this move the company decided to call a competition to extend its Berlin headquarters with a new building that would act both as a symbol and as a

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United States   The competition for the design of a garden bridge over the park at Anacostia Crossing, bordering on the river of the same name as it goes by the urban center of Washington DC, aimed to promote sustainable urban transit and to connect the green areas

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The cynical lucidity of Rem Koolhaas is fascinating and perverse. An apologist of urban chaos and metropolitan congestion, this Dutchman born in Rotterdam in 1944 has placed a sharp pupil and a muscular mind at the service of a cruel mission. The Lil

Luis Fernández-Galiano   This enormous book is small when compared to the ambition of its author. Its nearly three kilograms will sprain the reader’s wrist, and its 1,400 pages of mental, graphic, and typographic torment will tax his patience, but forms and ideas which are s

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Jiang Zemin was cheered on Wall Street and jeered at Harvard University. But the New York Stock Exchange had that same week suffered its greatest shock of the past ten years on account of the drop of share prices in the old British colony of Hong Kon

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The controversial Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas received the year 2000 Pritzker Prize in front of the ciclopean walls of the city of Jerusalem.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   These are times of toxic talent and bitter heroes. The French novelist Michel Houellebecq and the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas fall under this category of mediatic figures who practice social criticism through extreme integration in a landscape they

Luis Fernández-Galiano   History will absolve RobertVenturi.The great American architect and theorist preached, back in the sixties and seventies, a pop architecture that was more attentive to the ordinary than to the heroic, more sensitive to common tastes than to the refin

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The new art museums of Koolhaas in Las Vegas eloquently express the commercialization and trivialization of high culture in the contemporary world.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   And New York in the distance. The results of the Ground Zero competition were announced on 27 February, and the next day The New York Times graciously divided its front page between a picture of an ecstatic Daniel Libeskind beside the model of his pr

Luis Fernández-Galiano   I'am glad it’s all over. This joint venture between Rem and Jacques was doomed from the start. — You mean to say you were hoping it would fail. Mixing fire and water never appealed to you. — On the contrary! Rem thought that many were waiting to be d

Luis Fernández-Galiano   With the exhibition and book Content, Rem Koolhaas strikes again. The provocative Dutch architect sums up the past seven years of his career with a show in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie that scatters 300 objects and models in the interior of Mies van

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Jacob will never forget the day Rem Koolhaas introduced him to the pleasures of meat. The son of the director of the Seattle Public Library had decided to give up his vegetarian diet and the architect treated him to dinner at Wild Ginger, ordering al

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Porto now has an icon. The Casa da Música of Rem Koolhaas will soon appear in tourist brochures and attract the usual flux of architecture-savvy visitors. The enthusiasm for emblematic constructions that the ‘Guggenheim effect’ has awakened in polit