Tearing up the rule book

OMA might be a successful global brand but that doesn’t make it conventional. It’s still asking difficult questions and coming up with the solution you least expect – who else would see a library as a refuge for the homeless?

Words Hugh Pearman

OMA is having a UK moment. What with its exhibition ‘Progress’ at the Barbican, a Maggie’s Centre just opened at Gartnavel in Glasgow, its HQ for Rothschild in the City all but complete, and design development under way on its ‘Parabola’ scheme for developer Chelsfield around the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, the practice seems finally to have crossed the North Sea. Five years ago, all it had to show was the curious inflatable chef’s hat of Rem’s temporary Serpentine Gallery pavilion.

Of course OMA is still synonymous with Koolhaas – he’s the one with the Pritzker Prize, after all – but he’s never been the only name on the letterhead. Kicking off fresh out of the AA in 1975 it was a master-pupil kind of operation: Koolhaas and his wife Madelon Vriesendorp, who so memorably illustrated ‘Delirious New York’ in 1978, were junior to their former AA teacher Elia Zenghelis with his wife Zoe. The Zenghelises quit in 1987. Today OMA is a collaborative partnership of seven directors, with staff spread across offices in New York, Beijing and Hong Kong as well as Rotterdam.

OMA sometimes seems like a training camp for the best and brightest of the world’s architects, occasionally spinning off stars like Zaha Hadid (in the early days), Ole Scheeren (RIBAJ, November 2010), who oversaw the building of the gargantuan CCTV building in Beijing and Joshua Prince-Ramus in New York. These last two have also established their own solo practices, but OMA, which has had its share of hard times, seems scarcely to have missed a beat. It is run on businesslike lines, complete with a managing partner, Victor van der Chijs, whose background is not architecture but finance and law.

And it’s Ellen van Loon who emerges blinking into the daylight on Cannon Street in the City of London when I drop in on OMA’s site office there: the project team (including executive architect Allies and Morrison and fit-out specialist Pringle Brandon) has taken over a dingy, demolition-earmarked 1962 office building for the duration of the Rothschild project, a few yards north up the narrow St Swithin’s Lane. ‘The first time we visited the former building, we couldn’t believe that this could be the main entrance to the Rothschild bank,’ she recalls. ‘The tight site was the most appealing thing for us, it forced us to rethink things.’ The site office turns out to be the building with the mysterious, Roman-origin ‘London Stone’ embedded in its facade behind a grille at pavement level: another indicator that OMA is now right at the heart of Old London.

Van Loon has been with OMA since 1998, when she joined from Foster and Partners’ Reichstag team, and has been a partner since 2002. If you had to open your UK account with a bang, then a City HQ for one of the most respected names in finance, on the spot it has always been, is surely one of the best ways to go about it. Adding to the pressure, it is a singularly awkward site with extremely restricted access, right behind the Wren church of St Stephen Walbrook and beside the early 1950s Queen Anne-style former offices – and now a city dining club – of developer and Pritzker Prize juror Peter Palumbo. Beside the new Rothschild building, the Palumbo building looks more like a doll’s house than ever. ‘That contrast is quite beautiful,’ remarks van Loon. OMA’s Rothschild HQ replaces the 1960s New Court, the previous HQ by Fitzroy Robinson. 

This is, let’s be frank, OMA gone smoothly corporate. From the outside at least, gone are the provocations one associates with the practice: here is an assortment of cubic elements, climbing to a tower behind the church, with a roof garden. However, things get a bit more interesting at this point as the inner sanctum, the most prestigious part of the Rothschild organisation, is expressed as a freestanding pavilion sprouting out of the roof garden. With three double-height floors and an outward-leaning panoramic window, this is anything but generic office space, though that outwards cant is too slight really to register from the street down below.  Overall, the building’s milky finish is such that it dematerialises against a typical London grey sky: it’s not a groundscraper, but it might well be put into the ‘stealth building’ category.  Oddly, it shares this characteristic with the small, groundhugging Maggie’s Centre outside Glasgow, a circlet of linked rooms around a garden which tries to fade into the landscape. Inside there’s a clear distinction between the generic office spaces fitted out by Pringle Brandon, and the more bespoke areas for top management by OMA.

There is a different strand of OMA’s work to be teased out, however, and it is libraries. First came the carved solid cube of its 1989 entry for the French National Library – an honourable mention. The cube form was developed in its competition-winning ‘Two Libraries’ design of 1992 for the 1960s Edouard Albert-designed University of Paris complex at Jussieu. This campus is a network of buildings perched on slender pilots over a parvis: OMA took a square of the parvis and pulled it upwards into a spiralling ramp that became the interlocking floors of the library, contained within a cube that also sank into the ground. This would have provided a much-needed focus to the endless network of Albert’s floating faculty. It remained unbuilt. A 1996 entry for the Japanese national library fared no better. Apart from a tiny study centre in a Rotterdam house, it was not until 2004 that OMA actually got to complete a library, and this was the Seattle Central Library, a prominent civic building, with sharp angles and diagrid walls.

Now the pace is quickening. OMA’s competition-winning municipal library in Caen, Normandy – officially the Bibliothèque Multimedia a Vocation Regionale or BMVR – takes the two-cultures split apparent in many libraries – science versus arts – and resolves it by laying two wings over each other to make an X-plan. There’s a memory of that first French National Library competition in that a large area of double-height public space is visually scooped out of the solid form, but the idea of the cube has now vanished: shallow-plan wings such as these provide better daylighting.

And finally, Qatar: as part of the ‘Education City’ campus there, OMA has designed a 42,000 m2 central library, appreciably larger than Seattle and more than three times the size of Caen. Design studies so far show only a flattened rhomboid, taking its place on a spine-route of significant new buildings.

Van Loon reflects on the typology. ‘Public libraries are of course very appealing for us because they are almost like exterior space that you design inside. I think that’s the success of Seattle. The interior space is not just a library, it’s a kind of public forum. People with sleeping bags come in and lie in the corner, especially in winter. Homeless people use it as shelter.’

Van Loon seems to see this as positive, but she’s right: traditionally public libraries have had this secondary function of shelter, though sleeping bags are normally discouraged. ‘What we try to do with libraries is make them really pleasant spaces. We don’t feel many libraries are pleasant to be in, especially university ones. They’re very dull, like giant storage areas.’

OMA remains interested in the book as object, she avers – not for them the idea that it’s all just a place to plug in your laptop. ‘We are intrigued by the idea of re-showing books. The tendency is for everything to become digital. But still people like the book, like paper. And we like the idea that you can wander around in libraries and find things you didn’t go there for. You pick up the wrong book, and go – wow! Digital searching doesn’t give you surprises.’

The Caen library is now at detailed design stage while the Qatar megalibrary – which began as a university facility and acquired a public function later – has just started on site. Given the practice’s interest in the typology over all these years, we can expect some wrong-book-style surprises. In the meantime, there’s the Barbican show. ‘Exhibitions are always difficult,’ she reflects. ‘We appoint an external curator. They look at us, we look at them.  Exhibitions make you look critically at your own work. You can deal with the story.’

As ‘Cronocaos’, OMA’s exhibit at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, demonstrated, this is a practice with a famously inquiring mind, keen to rethink everything – in that case, conservation and preservation, presented in a disarmingly accessible fashion. You were looking at a practice in the process of working things out for itself, and presenting that process to the public. OMA may be a bit more mainstream these days, but it will never stop asking questions, or giving unexpected answers.