Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design

by Albena Yaneva

The book presents an ethnographic account of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Written as a collection of short stories, it shows how innovation permeates design practice, how everyday techniques and workaday choices set new standards for buildings and urban phenomena. In these stories of invention, the ‘Eureka!’ moments are generally missing. They are replaced by routine gestures of model making, recycling, assembling, recollecting, rescaling. This enquiry into architecture-in-the-making is based on participant observation in the office of Rem Koolhaas, extensive interviews with architects, and photo documentation on various the Seattle Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), la Casa da Musica in Porto, and others.

Genres: Architecture

128 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2009

About the author

Albena Yaneva is an anthropologist of architecture with a PhD from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des mines de Paris (2001). Her work spans the disciplinary boundaries of architectural theory, science and technology studies, cognitive anthropology and political philosophy. It has been translated in German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Reviews

[Wei Cho · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was really good. Amazing. It was like looking into the office of one of my favorite architects in the world. It was fun to follow the architects of OMA through the design process that happens in their office. So much model-making. It is actually very inspiring the way that they work and it has inspired some of my working process too.

It is nice to see that the"professional" architecture world is not dissimilar from what we do in studio. I wish I could collaborate with Rem Koolhaas! I wish I could work for him!!!