Rem Koolhaas/Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
Rem Koolhaas/Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
1995.
Softcover.
282 x220. 36 unnumbered pages, plus eight large folding plans. Diagrams and images throughout. Original buff covers, spiral bound with orange lettered label torn to open access to the inside. Edition of 35, this is copy number 26. Several minor pencil corrections to text errors. This is the Rem Koolhaas/OMA final proposal to convert Bankside power station into Tate Modern. In July 1994 an international competition launched to find an architect to redesign the Bankside Power Station into a gallery of modern art for the Tate. By November, 148 entrants had been reduced to a shortlist of 6: David Chipperfield; OMA/Rem Koolhaas; Renzo Piano; Tadao Ando; Herzog & de Meuron and Jose Rafael Moneo. In January 1995, Herzog & de Meuron won the competition. OMA probably supplied a copy of this to each of their 7 partners, to 13 more individuals listed in the credits at the back, Davis Langdon & Everest (3 partners) and Richard Gluckman architects, with 13 Tate Trustees, or to 37 in total. However, it states on the last leaf that it was limited to 35 copies only. It is exceptionally rare to find a copy for sale, this could be among the first and the last. None in COPAC. Rem Koolhaas said about Tate Modern The building offers space, but it is not suitable for art, it offers shelter, but it leaks and has to be repaired, it offers a location, but that is also problematic; it offers a beginning, a presence, which could be hard to organize working within contemporary parameters. The building, an object (abject) lesson in symmetry, will be the only museum in the world marooned on a mud bank, twice every 24 hours. It may need drastic strategies of dissociation; a Turneresque blur of brick from which strategies of dissociation will have to rescue / recuperate it. The Tower, strangely invisible in spite of its height, can be partly dismantled, liberated from its substance / mass, as could other sections of the building. In the City, the skeletal will be more noticeable than bulk. Danger: 66,000 volts It is significant that an institution about to enter an electric power station on the wrong site of a notoriously divisive river and needing an architect to help mastermind such a radical two-way transformation, to be financed so far with a virtual budget, is confidently casting on these still theoretical architects at the expense of a collection which as yet resembles, in its eccentricity and incompleteness, not so much a mosaic but an eccentric bubble diagram of the past century's artistic achievement. OMA are one of the most influential architects today. OMA s first UK buildings were Rothschild Bank s headquarters, City of London and Gartnavel Maggie s Centre, Glasgow. The Barbican put on a major exhibition of OMA s work in 2011-2 and OMA won Pritzker Prize 2000 and Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. OMA s work with art spaces went on from this 1995 Tate Modern competition to Prada Transformer (2009) a radical changeable tetrahedron; and design for the Fondazione Prada, St Petersberg s Hermitage Museum, and the Haus der Kunst, Munich.