Rem Koolhaas with Madelon Vriesendorp
1. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, “Exodus,” Casabella 378 (1973): 42–45. The OMA partnership includes Elia Zenghelis until 1987, when the Greek architect starts his own professional practice with Eleni Gigantes.
The axonometric view that represents The Square of the Captive Globe was
2. For complete information about the Exodus project see Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture, SMLXL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 2–21. See also Martin Van Schaik and Otakar Máčel, eds., Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations, 1956–1976 (Munich: Prestel, 2005), 236–253.
Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) [figs. 0 and 1].1 Their entry complements
originally designed in 1972 for Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture—the project that Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesen-
dorp, and Zoe Zenghelis submitted to The City as a Meaningful Environment competition and that marks the beginning of activities for their Office for Koolhaas’s recently finished diploma project at the Architectural Association
(AA) with some texts and additional collages. Its argument begins with the division of London into two parts: the Good Half, a continuous rectangular
band delimited by two gigantic walls that frame the space of new constructions, and the Bad Half, or London’s existing urban fabric.2 The Good Half is an area
3. Importantly, the representation is similar to the cover of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited. See Ingrid Böck, Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2015), 42.
of voluntary seclusion, inhabited by the citizens who wish to live in it, perma-
4. Böck, Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas, 42.
of spatial and social division that Koolhaas had discovered in his study of the
5. Böck, Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas, 42.
nently separated from those condemned to remain in the Bad Half. Dominated by the idea of voluntary confinement, the tone of Exodus is dystopian and cynical: it presents as a positive project the use of architecture as a means Berlin Wall (1970–1972). For the authors, it is only by accepting Exodus’s
architectural constraints that the real fruition of the possibilities of life and imagination can take place. Each of the transversal sectors that form the central band allows for a radical exploration of a form of life, experience, or social
relation. The one named The Square of the Captive Globe is the symbol of this vision of Exodus as an incubator of social and spatial possibilities. The drawing
depicts the terrestrial globe, confined within a sunken square and surrounded by a field of contrasting architectural images.3 This coexistence of architectural
visions represents the very theme of the project: “This square is devoted to the
artificial conception and accelerated birth of theories, interpretations, mental constructions and proposals, and their infliction on the World.”4 Later the text
presents the different architectures of the square as: “an enormous incubator for the World itself. They are breeding on the globe, changing it, adding something to its contents.”5
Exodus ends with an ironic negation of its status of unrealizable fiction: in the
project’s “Epilogue,” the authors affirm that its construction only presuppos-
es “a fundamental belief in cities.” The second life of the Captive Globe emphasizes the urban nature of the project. The design, now retitled The City of
the Captive Globe, reappears in the “Appendix” of Delirious New York (1978), 401