Office For Metropolitan Architecture - History

History

Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis started working together in the early 1970s at the Architectural Association, the London-based architecture school, where Koolhaas was a student and Zenghelis an instructor. Their first major project was the utopian/dystopian project Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (1972). This project proposed a linear structure, cutting through London like a knife. Other projects included City of the Captive Globe (1974), Hotel Sphinx (1975), New Welfare Island/Welfare Palace Hotel (1975–76), Roosevelt Island Redevelopment (1975), all "paper" projects that were not (intended to be) built, and all located in Manhattan, the subject of Rem Koolhaas’ famous book Delirious New York, A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1975).

The founding of OMA coincided with the firm's entry in the architectural design competition for a new Dutch parliament building in The Hague in 1978, with Zaha Hadid. OMA was one of the first-prize winners (among some 10 others), and the project was widely discussed and published. The commission, however, was given to an architect who did not participate in the competition. The entry for the Dutch parliament competition was the first of a series of controversial and successful international competition entries by OMA in the 1980s that were not built by OMA.