Conclusion At the outset of the present study, the question was formulated whether the work of OMA should be read with the figure of Rem Koolhaas as a unifying condition, what Foucault calls the author function. The application of the concept of author to the production of buildings is particularly problematic in that large building projects, from Gothic cathedrals to contemporary skyscrapers, have always been collective enterprises. Instead of one intention animating the entire project—as one might imagine to be the case in music, literature, or painting—architectural and urbanistic decisions reflect a multitude of limitations (legal, financial, logistical, topographical) and a compromise of various interests (client, users, authorities, architects, engineers, consultants). Large architecture offices, such as the OMA, are even more collective in nature than smaller ones. Instead of seeing himself as the original genius whose touch imparts an aura to designs, Koolhaas defines his role in the office as “a lamination, a bonding between layers.” [1] The design process in the office is organized rather like an architectural school, where the students (the team members) first collect datascapes and statistical diagrams about the specific design brief, the program, and the context, and then they go on to develop a large variety of design studies. The project designers present their ideas to a “jury” made of Koolhaas, other office members, and guest critics, who reviews proposals, assesses the potential, and chooses those that should be worked out further. This architectural practice makes use of the existing knowledge and archival material of models and drafts, no matter for what purpose they were previously used. What may appear as a bricolage or mixture of elements, fragments from the field of art and architectural history, works rather like a laboratory for processing knowledge. Despite the collective production method and the need for an avant-garde practice to adjust its operations to issues that are promoted in the discourse, the previous chapters have demonstrated a remarkable degree of consistency in OMA’s work. Certain ideas that may have been originally formulated in Koolhaas’s early design projects or in Delirious New York keep coming back, adjusted for new sites and briefs. A case in point is the Casa da Musica in Porto, a “recycled” design that was originally planned as a private house for a Dutch family in Berlin next to Koolhaas’s embassy. [2] As there were only two weeks left for a competition entry for a concert hall in Porto and the process with the first client had slowed to a standstill, undoing his initial agreement, the design for the family house was sim [1] [2]
Arthur Lubow, “Rem Koolhaas Builds,” in The New York Times Magazine, (July 9, 2000). Koolhaas, AMOMA et al., Content, 302.
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CONCLUSION