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.
