OMA/ Progress Exhibition

The first thing you notice upon entering the Barbican’s exhibition on Dutch architectural collective OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), led by famed architect Rem Koolhaas, is that everything has been reoriented: the reception and shop have been moved so that you have to walk through weird passageways, hemmed in by transparent walls and surrounded by plastic cut-outs of people, before you can reach them. It’s a disorientating way to start a disorientating exhibition. Along the way, you are assaulted by images of cities in flux and a mass of information – from designs for enormous museums in Los Angeles to endless skyscraper developments in Dubai. We see the familiar geographic/political map of Europe imagined along many different lines:  with energy grids highlighted rather than borders; the continent according to famous national brands; as ‘Eneropa’, a low-carbon continent; and the EU flag as a barcode. Images of zigzagging spaghetti junctions line the walls next to plans to build Amsterdam airport on an island, and thin slips of shiny paper hanging from a wire give the low-down about OMA’s various projects. Finally the shop appears, in the middle of everything, and the message is clear: it’s integral to the exhibition, as much a part of it as any of the exhibits, rather than being tacked on at the end.

Then there’s a flickering screen in the centre of the exhibition, going through image after image in a 48-hour slide show at lightning speed. Some 3.5 images, all apparently stored on OMA’s database server, rapidly flash before our eyes.  Like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, two cities that OMA/Koolhaas are fascinated by, it’s eye-popping, visually hypnotic stuff.

OMA themselves have quietly opened a new building in London itself – Rothschild Bank HQ in the City of London – and the Barbican has organised regular walks to it as part of the exhibition. But the main star in the gallery, if one construction can be said to take dominance, is the extraordinary 44-storey CCTV (China Central Television Headquarters) building in Beijing, which consists of two towers joined by an enormous horizontal section. The design and construction process is documented in lovingly minute detail.

The exhibition has been curated by Belgium-based collective Rotor, who have been allowed access to OMA’s vast archive, which includes blueprints for all kinds of grand ideas (not all of which came to fruition) and analysis of how chaotic cities such as Lagos, teeming with life and expanding populations, could be improved. The exhibition is not without its humour, such as a section of photos describing a break-down in communications with authorities in Kazakhstan over planned construction works there (something to do with translating the word ‘freedom’). But the photos also bring up the question: how does an organisation committed to freedom of ideas reconcile working with repressive Governments?  The answer is a difficult quandary that presumably all big international architectural practices have to deal with at some point or other, and for which there are no easy answers.

MOA/ Progress Exhibition
6 October 2011 – 19 February 2012
Barbican Art Gallery

Contributing Writer: Dominic Simpson