OMA

Overview

OMA: An Architectural DNA in Constant Transformation

On the evening of Tuesday, May 12, DOMa hosted a lecture-event dedicated to the architectural office OMA, marking fifty years since its founding. The evening’s main speaker was Chris van Duijn, OMA partner since 2014 and member of the office since 1996, who currently oversees OMA’s work across Asia.

Before the lecture began, Giorgos Panetsos, representing DOMa, introduced the guest speaker with a brief reflection on OMA’s contribution to international architectural discourse over the past decades. Describing the office as a restless laboratory of architectural — and broader intellectual — thought, he noted that OMA, through its transformative reading of the city as a network of relationships and dynamics, shifted architecture from a profession concerned primarily with the design of objects into a wider mode of understanding and cultural production within the accelerated urban landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He also referred to AMO, the research platform founded in 1999 as an organic extension of OMA. Expanding its field of action beyond conventional building production, the office has contributed through research, exhibitions, publications, and strategic studies to opening architectural thinking toward questions of politics, energy, media, fashion, cultural identity, and geopolitics.

As head of OMA Asia, Chris van Duijn presented selected projects from the office’s work across the Asian continent, focusing primarily on China and later South Korea. The decision to expand into another continent — with an entirely different worldview and understanding of urban life — is closely tied to the conceptual concerns of the office itself: the need to constantly reposition architecture within unstable conditions as a process of renewal and reinvention of its own architectural DNA. At the same time, it reflects an awareness of the region’s economic growth and geopolitical importance, particularly in the case of China. Yet this choice also raises complex questions and contradictions.

Moving through examples ranging from institutional buildings and university expansions to large-scale urban projects, preservation strategies, and the reactivation of existing structures, Chris van Duijn traced a trajectory that included defining works such as the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, while also emphasizing moments of friction between each project and its unfamiliar context. Indeed, it became particularly interesting to observe that many of the projects developed across Asia conceal behind them a series of frustrations and contradictions. This acknowledgment revealed the vulnerability and uncertainty inherent in the architectural profession — especially when operating outside familiar territory — challenging the broader perception of the architect as an unquestioning and fearless professional figure. At the same time, it exposed the tensions, whether visible or underlying, that emerge from the encounter between two worlds shaped by different traditions and historical backgrounds: the European architectural gaze and the Asian urban landscape.

In projects such as Hangzhou Prism and the Hongik University Campus, among others, agency seemed to shift constantly between client and architect within a sensitive field of collaboration and negotiation, where the roles of commissioner and designer became increasingly intertwined. For this reason, van Duijn’s reference to the Axel Springer Campus in Berlin carried particular significance: beyond being the only European project presented during the lecture, it appeared almost as a moment of release from the intense cultural negotiations imposed by the Asian experience.

The lecture concluded with the Busan Slope Housing project in Busan, South Korea — an attempt to intervene within a shrinking city preparing for large-scale urban transformation. Bringing together fields such as demography, statistics, climate studies, energy production, and contemporary labor, the project seemed to provide the ideal framework for OMA’s way of thinking, where architecture operates in response to instability and imbalance. Through a characteristic gesture of self-questioning that runs through OMA’s practice, Chris van Duijn invited the audience to reflect on architecture’s own limitations as a “complete solution”: how can we design around absence, decline, and reduction, when architectural practice has historically been tied to growth, expansion, and the production of the new?

The second part of the evening featured a discussion moderated by Haris Biskos on behalf of DOMa, joined by Chris van Duijn, Giorgos Panetsos, and former OMA collaborators from Greece. Through reflections on their experiences within the office and the ways in which OMA’s working ethos and intellectual approach influenced their own practices, a layered conversation emerged around the office’s legacy and future.

Andreas Kourkoulas, who spoke first, addressed the decisive rupture OMA introduced into postwar urban design through its critique of the language of modernism, particularly as formulated by Le Corbusier. At the same time, he questioned the contemporary validity of OMA’s intervention within the Asian context, identifying the risk of relocating aspects of modernism into environments shaped by entirely different needs and conditions — an approach that OMA itself had once strongly criticized.

Konstantinos Pantazis of Point Supreme emphasized the significance of shifting the focus from the building as an isolated object toward the city as a generator of situations and relationships, while co-founder Marianna Rentzou noted that her experience at OMA transformed her understanding of the architect from that of an individual “author” into that of an orchestrator and catalyst. Andreas Karavanas highlighted how OMA’s distancing from the dominant idea of form led to the emergence of another architectural grammar based on methodology, analysis, intuition, and interdisciplinary freedom.

From DOMa’s side, Giorgos Panetsos agreed that this resistance — or even disregard — toward form ultimately produced a new understanding of form itself, while also discussing the distinct periods of the office and the extent to which it emerged from the dialectical relationship between Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis. At the same time, he stressed that significant transformations in the office’s philosophy and identity over time compel us to recognize that there is not one fixed OMA, but many different versions of it.

Finally, moderator Haris Biskos summarized OMA’s contribution to contemporary architecture by stating that “the office taught us to think less about what a building looks like and more about what it offers.”

The evening opened with a presentation by Michalis Mousmoulis on behalf of Alumil and also included the screening of an introductory video by Orama Minimal Frames.