Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) created AMO in the late 1990s. Conceived as a creative think tank, AMO endeavors to transfer architectural thought to other fields. Defining new ways -from the conceptual to the operative- of addressing the full potential of the contemporary condition, the office applies architectural thinking to questions of organization, identity and culture. By combining AMO and OMA Rem Koolhaas is seen as one of the most important thinkers of the last decades. Currently AMO is working for the State Hermitage Museum and fashion house Prada as well as composing a preservation study for Beijing. AMO’s resume includes work for Universal Studios, the European Union, Harvard University and Condé Nast. Since last year, AMO focused on analyzing the accelerated pace of development in the Arabian Gulf, much in the same way it has pursued research in China’s Pearl River Delta and Singapore. The publication Al Manakh documents this work up to date.
THE GULF
We live in an era of completions, not new beginnings.
The world is running out of places where it can start over.
The Gulf is the current frontline of rampant modernization: a feverish production of urban substance, on sites where nomads roamed unmolested only half a century ago.
Since it is the site of greatest urban production and because it occupies territory where there was no previous (urban) occupation, The Gulf represents the essence of the current city in its pure form.
Gulf Cities are in construction now. This means they are, inevitably, based on the repertoire of current urban prototypes - communities (themed & gated), hotels (themed), skyscrapers (tallest), shopping centers (largest), airports (doubled) - cemented together by Public Space, extended soon with boutique hotel, museum franchise and masterpiece.
In its current state, it is a landscape of vast means and ambition, translated with gargantuan effort into ambiguous and sometimes disappointing results, a kind of farewell performance of the ‘Urban’ that has become threadbare through sheer age and lack of invention.
If you want to be apocalyptic, you could construe Dubai as evidence of the-end-of-architecture-and-the-city-as-we-know-them; more optimistically you could detect in the emerging substance of The Gulf -constructed and proposed- the beginnings of a new architecture and of a new city.
This burgeoning campaign will export a new kind of urbanism -to places immune to or ignored by previous missions of modernism. This may be the final opportunity to formulate a new blueprint for urbanism. Will architecture grasp this last chance?
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