www.quondam.com/37/3761.htm

dossier

transformations

1980

Court Gardner's House - Römischer Bäder, schematic plan.

Museum of Architecture, Venice, schematic plan.

...the development of one project, but which in the meantime and almost like a cell division has become two projects. . . . a kind of permanent dialectical confrontation between on the one hand the search for form and on the other hand the process of fitting program into this form. I also want to show some context and reveal some of the strange things that can trigger and inspire in architecture. It is a very strange process that combines psychology with a kind of scientific investigation and of course a lot of what I can only describe as opportunism.

. . . we simply thought that we could use the concept that we had thought up for the house, but this time for a concert hall.

In the beginning we were shocked and members of the office were shocked that we could be so cynical. And that what had seemingly been specifically for one aim could be suddenly turned opportunistically into something completely different. But the more we thought about it and the more we looked--because at this point the visual becomes the dominant force--the more appealing it became to simply shift scales and use all the earlier research as a form of immediacy and maybe it could be actually exciting to do it that way.
Rem Koolhaas, "Transformations" in OMA@work.a+u (1999.06.25).

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Court Gardner's House - Römischer Bäder (Potsdam: plan, 1833).

Stephen Lauf, Museum of Architecture (Venice: plan, 1980).

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