of visual analysis and that those booklets have gotten thicker and thicker over the years has been interpreted by some as “the more pages of information you have, the better you are.” Book-bricks are being produced all over the world, which have pages and pages of “research” that consists of little more than thinly veiled Google searches. The research produced by AMO is not merely a collection of information: it’s a keen analysis of that information with the aim of offering design platforms (not solutions, but platforms).
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Rem Koolhaas – Sarah Whiting, »Spot Check: A Conversation,« Assemblage 40 (1999): 36–56.
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mm: In your conversation with Rem Koolhaas, 2 ---------------------------2
sw: Well, okay. That’s jumping to the issue of the distinction
Robert Somol – Sarah Whiting, »Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism,« Perspecta 33 (2002): 72–77.
you discussed recent OMA projects forming “a new whole,” as you named it. Does OMA’s transition to the architecture of “a new figurative whole” of image and object (or logo-figure unity) exceed critical practices? Or is it an affirmation of the decline and closure of certain modes of critical practices?
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between the projective and the critical, so let’s address that first, which means addressing the Doppler article 3 ---------------that Bob Somol and I wrote in 2002. I have made that distinction before, but it seems that people don’t necessarily understand that our point was not to say, “the critical project is dead”; it was to say, “the critical project has become rote, it has become predictable.” In order to shake the critical project out of this stagnation and move it to a new level (let me underscore that), it needs to abandon its complacency. For us it was so obvious that it felt like a rather dumb argument. We were extraordinarily bored by what the critical project had become: you would go to school reviews, and you could practically present the student’s project, because you knew okay, it was about the margins, it took a known approach and turned it exactly 180 degrees. The critical had become boring, because what was supposedly radical had become entirely predictable.
mm: But it also means that such a project wasn’t critical, in fact.
sw: Exactly, exactly. That’s a very important point, because
while many projects possessed the semblance of criticality, they weren’t really critical and criticality was becoming a dead-end term, let alone project. And so the idea