Maison a Bordeaux © Rem Khoolas / AMO
OMA/ progress at the Barbican Centre is fortunate to be curated by Rotor.
First, they inject some humour by showing Houselife, a portrait of Rem Koolhas's Maison de Bordeaux : the movie is narrated by Guadalupe Acedo, the cleaning lady, who tries to make sense of the house in her daily struggle as she washes oddly sized concrete panels, re-arranges furniture and gigantic curtains or carries the hover around awkward spaces.
© Beka & Lemoine
The house is known for being made of three rectangles topped above one another with a private room in the middle performing as a lift, changing the function of the room each time it moves : library, wine cellar, bedroom ...
© Beka & Lemoine
A found footage of OMA's educatorium building in Utrech also investigates sideway stories by showing people using the curved walls of the building for freestyle body windsurfing.
But despite Rotor's humour and recognising the scale of OMA's urban planning research and spatial organization, it is impossible to connect to its vision and give credit to its business strategies and political affiliations : OMA's architecture lacks of humanity because it is not architecture for all.
CCTV © OMABuildings currently under construction by OMA include : Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Beijing, China; a new headquarters for Rothschild Bank in London, the biggest welfare in the world history; and the new headquarters for China Central Television which operates under police watch and government regulations therefore boycotted by Chinese intellectuals for being a propaganda aimed at brainwashing the audience.
In the show, a project room that presents one of OMA's vision, an art-city-museum with its own parliament and embassy recalling an administrative mall, forces to observe that OMA is much concerned with manufacturing the city's architecture and with conceiving art as commodity for bankers.
Architecture as air - Cloud © Gallery Koyanagi © Junya Ishigami/ Photo © Yasushi Ichikawa
Happily, down the lower ground of the Barbican Centre, the Curve gallery is also showing work concerned with architecture and this time Architecture as air, an installation by architect Junya Ishimagi fills spatial environments with pure poetic lightness.
About the workers - see High culture and hard labour
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