Over the weekend you may have noticed the New Museum’s white cube space invading a neighboring restaurant supply store. The walls are, appropriately, covered with the work of Rem Koolhaas and his architecture firm OMA, foremost theorists of urban phantasmagoria, Junkspace, and now the paradoxes of preservation. Cronocaos inhabits the New Museum’s 3,600-square-foot ground-floor space at 231 Bowery, half preserved as a former restaurant supply store, the other half converted to standard museum space.
Cronocaos at the New Museum (installation view). Image courtesy of OMA.
Delirious New York. Cover illustration by Madelon Vriesendorp.
On the basis of his writing and theoretical projects, Koolhaas was a prominent architect before he finished a single building. His books almost parody theory, inventing vague terms ("Junkspace is a Bermuda Triangle of concepts, an abandoned petri dish…”) and following them with grandiose proclamations (“The cosmetic is the new cosmic…”). Political philosopher Antonio Negri has called Koolhaas’ “Bigness” and Delirious New York “basic texts for reading and critiquing architecture today.”
Koolhaas founded OMA (The Office for Metropolitan Architecture) in 1975 and has since completed a long list of recognizable buildings, including the Seattle Central Library and the CCTV building in Beijing, while maintaining a theoretical bent (OMA’s rejected submission for the new MoMA included the line, “Ceci n’est pas un design…”). Along the way, Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize in 2000 and made Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2008.
OMA’s Seattle Central Library, 2004.
CCTV Headquarters, Beijing, 2002. Courtesy of OMA.
First presented at the 2010 Venice Biennale, Cronocaos sits squarely on OMA’s theoretical side as an analysis of urban preservation, renovation, and the resulting paradoxes. Examples veer from Berlin to Beijing to Ivy League architecture. One caption reads, “History as fake? History as farce? Most of harvard’s historical buildings have been gutted and entirely made over, many more than once during their ‘lifetimes’…”
A timeline of OMA’s own projects is on display, including their 2001 proposal for the Whitney Museum and their curatorial master plan for The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The firm’s study on preservation for the Beijing planning bureau suggested replacing the traditional historic urban center with wedges or grids of preservation, creating a record of architectural changes.
Bad taste or bad ideology? From Cronocaos. Image courtesy of designboom.
The exhibition title refers to the “time chaos” OMA observes in the synthesis of construction, preservation, and demolition. The firm estimates that twelve percent of the planet falls under systems of natural and cultural preservation and suggests that this is a new development requiring new approaches to architecture and urban life. “We are trying to find what the future of our memory will look like,” Koolhaas says.
Interview with Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010.
