The exhibition OMA/Progress opened last week at London’s Barbican Art Gallery: a retrospective on the office’s work, but not the end of OMA.
The work of the Rotterdam and New York based Office of Metropolitan Architecture is on display at the Barbican Art Gallery in London until February next year: The exhibition OMA/Progress is the first major presentation of OMA’s work in the UK and the largest up to date.
The curators of Rotor, a Brussels-based collective, who was also responsible for the Belgian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, created an exhibition's with a trashy aesthetic and transgressive spatial organization that are closely aligned with OMA's work. The objective: To show a portrait of the office, its working methods and obsessions.
On display are 450 objects depicting built and unbuilt projects as well as conceptual work that Rotor found in OMA's archives and organized according to different themes: One room of the Barbican Gallery shows for example things that move – like a prototype of a retractable lecture seat or the models of the Prada Transformer, a building that can be turned over to provide a new configuration. Another room is devoted to OMA’s concern with transparency and thus displays a mock-up of the 8m-high glass tubes that will form the walls of the Rotterdam Stadskantoor,
A 1:1 footprint of OMA’s design for the Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow is installed on the Barbican Gallery’s Sculpture Court, challenging the visitors to imagine the building themselves.
As part of the public program, on Tuesday 25 October the event “OMA: Show & Tell” will bring together all seven partners from OMA for the first time in public, to examine and debate the nature of society, progress and the built environment across the world today.
OMA/ Progress
6 October 2011 – 19 February 2012
Barbican Art Gallery
Silk Street,
London EC2Y 8DS
Open daily 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Wednesday: 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Thursday: 11:00 a.m. – 10pm
Closed on December 24, 25 & 26, 2011
Tickets online from £8, on the door £10.
More information:
www. barbican.org.uk
