ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), placing particular emphasis on the early tears of Rem Koolhaas’s pedagogy and practice. In the case of OMA’s entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette, the central parameters for the design process were the frequency of the various activities, on the one hand, and their relationships, on the other hand. Despite the prioritisation of programme and its conversion into compositional device, it is essential to note that the elaboration of programmatic aspects in this project is based on the very explosion of the conventions of the modernist functionalist classification systems. At the core of the chapter is the intention of OMA to treat programmatic indeterminacy as the very potential of architectural design strategy. Their diagrams, as in the case of their project for the Seattle Library, instead of representing formal configurations, visualised the relationships between different parameters that were incorporated in the design strategy, turning programmatic indeterminacy into the very centre of the design strategy.
