We began this project without much acquaintance with the work of OMA. Since they had already been working for months to prepare this exhibition, we felt it best to pick up where they had left off. With three months left to make the exhibition, we had to measure where to put our efforts. By now we were getting to know our way around OMA. We witnessed the birth, death and recycling of designs. We visited buildings and building sites worldwide. We struggled with the sheer quantity of OMA's production. A script we used to map the contents of the server produced an index that in itself numbered 17,000 pages. We realized that we would see most of the material we were browsing only once, and there would be no way to see it all. Having to select items without an overview, we operated on a cocktail of intuition and insiders' good advice. OMA/Progress is a portrait that consists primarily of found objects, materials that exist for reasons other than this exhibition. The show is likely to keep changing even after we send this text to print. Rather than deciding on design early in the process, we imagined strategies that would enable us to choose exhibits right up to the opening. We took the Gallery as we found it as the starting point for our own intervention, and proclaimed the generic office table the ultimate pedestal.
- Typology
- Exposition
- Status
- Construit
- Year of conception
- 2011
