ABSTRACT
Accounting for the momentum in the practice of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (2001-4), this chapter offers an ethnographic glance at design. It gathers small accounts of different design trajectories, reminiscent of short stories. These are narratives I told many times while working in or presenting my work on OMA, but which I never wrote down separately.1 They are stories that deserve to be told. Written as such, they provide interpretations of the design process without drawing sequential linear storylines; nor do they rely on predictable narratives of events. Short stories, as a literary genre, revolve around the resolution of a conflict, a tension, a false assumption, an inversed expectation, and often have unexpected ironic or tricky endings. Similarly, concise ethnographic accounts rely on a fold in time and space to account for the distinctive features of design in this office; image patterns evoke a sense of the reality of design. The different stories follow often unconnected projects and events. Nevertheless, their sequence provides an extended story arc, progressing through accumulation. The common feature of all stories is that they all account for the nature of design invention; the latter is not reduced here to an abstract concept of creation or construction. Instead, I tackle it as something that resolves into concrete actions and practices: in collective rituals, techniques, habits, and skills ingrained by training and daily repetition, in reuse of materials and recycling of historical knowledge and foam chunks. It is also a very fragile process – when a building is in the making and as long as it exists as a scale model, its existence is very tentative, very frail. At any moment in the design process it can live or it can die, it can merge into something else, it can be reused, recollected. That is, a view of design as constituted from the inside; it stems from the experience of making.2
