Déjà vu

OMA - Residential Complex Singapore (Copyright OMA) (click-2-enlarge)

Basically to empty my ‘Favorites’ list a bit, I decided to combine some of the projects that I came across in the past months in a single post. It’s a collage of projects that are coded with ever-stranger iconographies.

Whether the designers of the projects here put together are conscious about the images their designs recall is hard to say. The only case I am quite certain about is the project from Future Systems. I don’t think they have a JBL speaker system in their office. I could be wrong though.

Did the municipality of Rotterdam know they were in a sense referring to the Nazi architecture when they lighted their circle of beams to remember the fire a bombardment of the same Nazi’s caused? They must have known that Albert Speer used such beams to ‘elevate’ the yearly Nazi marches in.

Even more ironic is the just proposed residential complex in Singapore of OMA / Ole Scheeren. Its hexagonal layout echoes one of the marvels of Modernist architectures, the Bijlmermeer near Amsterdam. Or was the Bijlmermeer the moment Modernism backfired so hard, no slabs have been build in the Netherlands ever since? Oh, yes, that was it!

In their book ‘S, M, L, XL’ OMA shows a revitalization plan for the Bijlmermeer. It never happened; instead they are dismantling it flat by flat. But now Singapore gets a new version just like it. An even denser one! OMA’s view of Modernism is like the USA’s view on the War in Iraq: ‘The war itself is a good thing, it was just handled badly’.

Is there a way we can learn from the mistakes we made in the past, or can we only autistic repeat them?

I love all you Americans, and I love OMA. I especially love OMA’s redoing of a never realized design for a convention hall of Mies van der Rohe. OMA has a long history in Remixing Mies, and this time they have put Mies’ hall in the middle of a skyscraper proposed for Shenzhen, China.

A design I also adore is the giant ‘IKEA table’ MVRDV has designed for Rotterdam in the park OMA designed behind their Kunsthal. For more than a year now the municipality of Rotterdam is struggling to finish a giant underground parking garage underneath that same park. And what does MVRDV? They propose a giant building right on top of the place the parking garage just saved for the park.

It’s fantastic! Cars should not populate our public space and hovering building can perfectly cover our public space, at least pieces of it.

In this case the program is also really cool: It’s a fully climatized depot in which art-collectors can safely store their precious pieces. The table is actually a closet.

OMA - Residential Complex Singapore (Copyright OMA) (click-2-enlarge)