Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design

This book presents an ethnographic account of the design rhythm in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Written as a collection of short stories, it draws on the mundane trajectories of models and architects at OMA and shows how innovation permeates design practice and everyday techniques and workaday choices set new standards for buildings and urban phenomena. In these stories of invention the 'Eureka!' moments are missing. They are replaced by routine gestures of model making, recycling, assembling, recollecting, rescaling. This enquiry into architecture-in-the-making is based on participant observation in OMA, extensive interviews with architects, and photo documentation on various projects: the Seattle Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Casa da Musica in Porto, and others.