Rem Koolhaas confirmed as 2014 Venice Biennale curator

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has been officially confirmed as director of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. The board of the Venice Biennale, chaired by Paolo Baratta, met today in Venice to thank David Chipperfield for his achievements at the 2012 Architecture Biennale, and to congratulate Koolhaas on the appointment. Koolhaas said: “We want to give a new look to the basic elements of architecture - used by any architect, anywhere and at any time - to see if we can discover something new about architecture”. The board of the Venice Biennale described Koolhaas as “one of the greatest personalities of the architects of our time “.

Via bdonline

Proposal for City of Holland Central- Floriade 2022 by OMA

Floriade 2022 is the largest horticultural exposition in Europe, held in the Netherlands every ten years for a sixth-month period of green-fingered festivities. Holland Central is one of the candidate host cities for 2022, and the subject of a masterplan proposal by Rotterdam-based architect OMA. Spanning an area which contains 5 million inhabitants within a 50 kilometre radius, the design features five zones of technology, innovation, global market, leisure and culture for the fair's activities. Added to this are an outdoor 2,500 seat theatre, a land art installation, global village and cable car which connects across the district. It seems we have much to learn from the Netherlands, both in terms of masterplanning and green technology. 

Images courtesy of OMA

It's Showtime: Prada A/W12 Milan Fashion Week

It's always interesting to see what Miuccia Prada has up her sleeve for her collections, especially with the hype of the recent Prada Menswear A/W12 where models were replaced by a cast of actors, the likes of Adrien Brody, Jamie Bell and Gary Oldman. For the womanswear, the setting was just as opulent; this time with a vibrant geometric purple carpet contrasted with modern neon lighting. The showspaces of a Prada catwalk are always something to talk about and often set the theme of the season's collection. Designed by Rem Koolhaas' AMO think tank (part of OMA), the show sets are experimental; previous shows have played with a sea of blue foam seats for the S/S 2012 menswear, and the A/W 2009 shows were placed on an archipelago of timber islands. The catwalk has become just as much a spectacle as the model's walking down it, and with so much of a collection now seen online, designers have to catch the attention of their audience, whose concentration span is fast declining. This collection certainly made the eye stray and wonder over the clothes; models sashayed down the catwalk first in a uniform of black, but steadily towards the end of the show in retro, geometric, colourful patterns. You can see that the plush carpet was somehow an enlargement of these shapes, a nod to the mosaic prints adorning the military trouser suits. 

Images: Vogue Paris

Previous showspaces by AMO/OMA as mentioned in the text above.

A/W 2012 Menswear

S/S 2012 Menswear

 S/S 2012 Womenswear

 A/W 2011 Womenswear

 S/S 2011 Menswear and Womenswear

S/S 2010 Menswear

S/S 2010 Womenswear

 S/S 2009 Menswear

 A/W 2008 Menswear

Wallpaper have a timeline of more images: see here Wallpaper

OMA/Progress at the Barbican

An exhibition well worth a visit this autumn/winter, is OMA/Progress, curated by Belgian collective Rotor and held at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. The exhibition opened today and carries on till the 19th February 2012, celebrating the inventive buildings and daring, unconventional ideas of OMA and one of it's co-founders, Rem Koolhaas. The slightly unconventional set up in the gallery, depicts a portrait that primarily consist of found objects and materials from the OMA office and archive. These include humorous in-house emails asking employees to 'shut down Rhino if they are not using it', and small clay maquettes with a sign stating 'the production team did not know if these were left over material or models representing a building form'. Alongside these anecdotes are material samples, scale models and various tests that both work and don't work. This is part of this exhibition's charm; there are signs in the exhibition readily admitting to where things went wrong, where competitions were lost out to a competitor and where things didn't work after twenty years. This is architecture as a process as well as in progress. 

Images: Barbican