It could be argued that the recent obsession with the term ‘iconic architecture’ has simplified our understanding of what makes good design. We take it for granted that serious or celebrated architects create architecture of quality even though the sources of their creativity remain elusive and hidden. In some schools of architecture the author’s credentials seem key to defining and owning a good idea, while others prefer to promote a way of working that demands constant reinterpretation, where the building remains an unfinished product of an aborted process of repeated investigations.
In her book, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Albena Yaneva reveals how an interest in the latter, the processes of making and the mechanisms by which ideas and models can migrate within an office environment, has informed some of the most influential architecture of the 21st Century so far. Yaneva worked for OMA from 2002 to 2004, a period when it was designing the Seattle Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the China Central Television (CCTV) building in Beijing, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the La Casa da Musica in Porto. These were described as the ‘new swoosh line’ (after the Nike logo) of buildings. Focused on pragmatic operational issues they were designed by escaling and inverting blue foam block models roughly cut and displayed on a project table for discussion and assimilation or rejection. Here, a process of creative-selection took place that allowed and indeed promoted the cross-fertilisation of ideas from other project teams. A true survival of the fittest ideas.
The most famous of these OMA legends was the story about how the new Porto concert hall, La Casa da Musica (picture above), came to fruition. The design originated in a commission for a house in Rotterdam for a client ‘obsessed by order and tidiness’ who dropped the project just as OMA entered the competition for the Porto concert hall. The abandoned model of the private house lingered on the model tables for months ready for recycling and reuse and still held traces of the earlier design process ripe for reinvention. In this case the house model was blown up in scale, ‘the core became the main auditorium, with the foyers, rehearsal halls and offices packed into the left over space around it’, reports Yaneva.
The writer explores this notion further to find the essence of OMA design that clearly does not start from scratch and necessitates the keeping of all models for future design recycling and to maintain a prolific ontological milieu for design invention and reappropriation. ‘Even the schemes that are abandoned, hundreds of models, can be recognised within the process. They are just different steps in the process’.
Yaneva’s insight into the working of the OMA office reminds me of a myth from the office of SANAA, designers of the New Museum in NYC, when in a fallow period of work principle Ryue Nishizawa decided to cut the desks in half, the concept being that this would double the number of desks and with more workstations in the office more work would follow. It can be no coincidence that the two most influential offices in the world, SANAA and OMA are products of a constant desire to reinvent the way in which architecture is made and to find innovation in new processes of design.
