OMA, AMO, MAO
Tokyo (Photographer: nadar/Flickr)
“The latest plan is to set up a third branch in addition to OMA and AMO. That third branch shall distribute plans without copyright or ego. Anonymous projects by the world-famous architect Rem Koolhaas, it seems like a contradiction in terminus”.
The remark is put occasionally at the end of a lengthy article celebrating the career of Rem Koolhaas. The setting: the new glossy for boys called ‘JFK’. With a heavy spillage of words like ‘world-famous’ it is hard to take the statement seriously. Did the author made this up, or is it real?
How should we call this third branch? After ‘OMA’ and ‘AMO’ there are only four other configurations of the letters ‘O’, ‘M’, ‘A’ left: OAM, AOM, MOA and MAO. I opt for MAO.
In various lectures Rem Koolhaas has stated his resentment of iconic architecture and his love for the ‘background’ architecture of cities like Tokyo. In that light it would be a bold statement to actually start building that architecture.
What would it look like, an ego-free and copyright-free architecture? Would it generate a more humble architecture? Would it appropriate the Minimalist style? Would it therefore come in ‘every color you want, as long as it is white’? Would it result in building masses constituted by pragmatic boxes? Would that predictability be its virtue?
Rem Koolhaas would say so. The anonymous architecture would result in a return to the normal. It is the architecture you already know. Stripping architecture from (the artist’s) ego and (the artist’s) copyright would mean a return to the core of building: providing shelter.
Without copyright on their way, the owners of the ‘background architecture’ could alter their buildings as they please. What would be left of architecture will disappear in a formless fabric. What would be left is a slum.
It seems like a suicidal strategy. And not only for OMA, for the whole discipline. Killing off the artist in the architect would finish off architecture as a cultural activity. Architecture would end up as a pragmatic middling of marketing, contracting and engineering.
In the nineteenth century the emerging architectural scene in the Netherlands had achieved to exclude contracters and engineers from the architect title. With reason: in his artistic role the architect could translate the ‘zeitgeist’, culture, into build form. No other discipline could do that.
An architect is (in part) an artist, with an ego and a copyright. Rem Koolhaas is an artist too. Here we should probably regard the creation of the third branch next to OMA and AMO as the artistic move. It certainly includes a massive amount of ego and certainly aims for a copyright: we did it first!
I suspect Rem Koolhaas hopes that with killing off the old architecture, a new architecture can emerge. But I wonder if that’s possible. The mythical Fenix alternatively dies and lives, but never changes.
There is something hypocritical too about the whole undertaking: only with a decent background architecture, the monuments in the city can shine once again. Obviously designed by Rem Koolhaas too.
In a different context the Dutch historian Bernard Colenbrander two weeks ago argued that everything we now, at this moment, consider ugly in time changes into something we love: “It grows on you.”
If we would stretch that notion we could argue that most of the buildings that are now called ‘iconic’ really aren’t iconic and will prove so in time when they progressively turn into new background architecture. In that sense OMA is already building the background architecture of tomorrow. Some of the early projects by OMA, like IJ-plein in Amsterdam, has already turned into background architecture.
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