Architect: OMA

Protected: L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

Protected: L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

Fabrizio Gallanti

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The Captive Globe

The Captive Globe

Reinier de Graaf

This essay is about a drawing—or rather, about the insight embedded within that drawing and the life it has taken on in the forty-five years since it was made. The drawing in question is The City of the Captive Globe. It was created in 1972, first published in 1978 by… Read More

Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables

Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables

Sarah Hearne

The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Despite predictions of the… Read More

I AND WE

I AND WE

Richard Hall

Construct

Construct

Richard Hall

In 1975, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) produced two projects for Roosevelt Island (formerly Welfare Island), in New York’s East River, between Manhattan and Queens. The thin sliver of land—historically treated as ‘a storehouse for “undesirables”’ [1]—was undergoing a process of redevelopment under the New York State Urban Development… Read More

In the Archive: de la Fuente, Unknown, OMA, Ellwood and Ponis

In the Archive: de la Fuente, Unknown, OMA, Ellwood and Ponis

Sarah Hearne

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. I first found myself at Drawing Matter to view the voiles produced by the Chilean… Read More

The City of Design

The City of Design

Emilio Ambasz

Italy has remained a federation of city-states. There are museum cities and factory cities. There is a city whose streets are made of water and another where all streets are hollowed walls. There is a city where all its inhabitants work on the manufacture of equipment for amusement parks, a… Read More

Opportunism

Opportunism

Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford

While declaring explicitly architectural intentions (especially in the beginning), the enthusiastic appropriation of technologies and techniques peripheral to architecture has been a constant theme in OMA’s work. In 1976, Elia Zenghelis commented on the role of the telephone in their design process. [1] The photocopier and commercial printing would open up… Read More

Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? The Work of Zoe Zenghelis (2021) – Review

Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? The Work of Zoe Zenghelis (2021) – Review

Richard Hall

During the spring and summer of 2021, a two-part exhibition of the work of Zoe Zenghelis was shown in London. The first show was an enjoyably intimate immersion at Betts Project in Clerkenwell. The second, a more extensive review at the Architectural Association. Later that year a thick, crisply designed… Read More

Exhibition Design: Charging the Void

Exhibition Design: Charging the Void

Claire Oster

Last year at Cornell University, five students in Alessandra Cianchetta’s design studio Global Artscapes worked on designs for a gallery in the valley at Shatwell. For this, they used photographs and videos in default of a site visit. The brief was for an exhibition space to accommodate the display of… Read More

Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids

Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids

Rebecca Siefert

The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid is loaded with symbolism and history: it is emblematic of origins, order, systems, utopias and dystopias, and the inevitable susceptibility… Read More

Two Early Paintings with OMA

Two Early Paintings with OMA

Zoe Zenghelis

Here, Zoe Zenghelis, painter and founding member of OMA, recalls the making of two paintings now in the Drawing Matter collection. The first, pictured below, is an aerial view of the unbuilt Hotel Therma, and the second is a version of OMA’s entry to the Parc de la Villette competition.… Read More