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Strategy of the void: Building the model of OMA’s Très Grande Bibliothèque

May 20, 2012 by Fosco Lucarelli Leave a Comment

“Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue… Its subtext is fuck context.”
– Rem Koolhaas

The CCA in Montréal just opened a retrospective exhibition on the famous OMA entry for the 1989 French National Library competition. A cubic 100 meters tall building characterised by the distinction between book storage (solid) and public space (voids). “A building that marks the beginning of the ‘big’ period and the shift from urbanism to conceptual formalism that Rem Koolhaas would retroactively name in his infamous remark on context.”

The exhibition features the four original anonymous panels, hundreds of working drawings showing design process moving through different media, digital and physical models.

The following is the timelapse of the plaster model construction for Très Grande Bibliotheque.

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