Translator Needed: Moinjk !!

Give them what they Need; or give them what they Want?
Review by Pat Darnell


OMA
The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is a leading international partnership practicing contemporary architecture, urbanism, and cultural analysis.

The office is led by partners – Rem Koolhaas, Ole Scheeren, Ellen van Loon, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu and Managing Partner, Victor van der Chijs – and employs a staff of almost 300 of more than 35 nationalities. Architects, researchers, designers, model makers, industrial designers and graphic designers of multinational origin work in close collaboration. Expert consultants are intimately involved from the beginning of the design process.

Since 2003 OMA has completed numerous projects including the Zeche Zollverein Historical Museum and master plan in Essen (2006), the Seoul National University Museum of Art (2005), the much acclaimed Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), the Prada Epicenter in Los Angeles (2004), the Seattle Public Library (2004), the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (2004), the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003) and the IIT Campus Centre in Chicago (2003).

The work of Rem Koolhaas and OMA has won several international awards including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000, the Praemium Imperiale (Japan) in 2003, the RIBA Gold Medal (UK) in 2004 and the Mies van der Rohe – European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture (2005).

To accommodate a diversity of projects throughout the world, OMA maintains offices in Europe (OMA*AMO Rotterdam), North America (OMA*AMO Architecture PC New York), Asia (OMA Beijing) and soon in the Middle East (OMA Dubai).
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Okay, all right, that covers the "who done it..." Peking is a Boom Town, with major resource of People; people who need work.

Therefore, in total anti-boom-ist-ism is the USA. Americans are now swept back into their agrarian roots -- going GREEN, and all that jolly rot, good show, shovel manure and turn it into free fuels....

Meanwhile, after centuries of oppressive government telling Chinese to stay agrarian, like Amish do, China is quickly pissing away its agrarianism's to build improbable industrial structures.

I get it. I really do get it. Do you hear that huge BUT coming?

But, in Boom time is no room time. Projects that have been put aside during slow times, suddenly come alive.

Why? Because some primeval motivated people want to leave a gravity defying legacy. It so happens I grew up in Houston which is a sort of Peking on the Gulf. The Hoosier's who promoted Houston from the 1960's on have long gone from Houston, and probably too just started leaving the planet. In case you ever blow through Downtown Houston on the elevated freeways at 79 miles per hour, look at the mess that is the "skyline." Sort of a testimony to the molars in your mouth, with cavities.

Not lucky for Houstonians that they depart leaving behind a legacy of "We built it because We can."

The only real architectural legacy that makes any sense in Houston is found on the East side along the Ship Channel. There you will find the absolute most brutally accurate examples of Boom Town Architecture. Similar to the photo above that documents the outlying area of Peking, a rather dank hodge-podge of indigenous [housing?] in the Brutalist style?

This Peking thing is ten degrees off plumb, and its weight is some huge number that I am not going to try to calculate right now.

It is a design job that I might compare to the Chicago Tribune Tower. And I might look at the book by Douglas Hofstader front cover to see the Escher-ist drawing of Godel, Escher and Bach for his book of the same name. I am not going to go Ruskin on you right now... followup is warranted.

Now I get it.

[Oh, you are thinking Leaning Tower of Pisa?] Forget about it. All those Byzantine structures are falling, bulging, sinking, and reacting to seismic pressures in the only way known to us dusty farmers, they are falling.