A major concert hall space in Porto, Portugal designed by  Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas  and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. It is located on a plaza between a historic area of Porto, the Rotunda da Boavista and a newer working-class neighborhood.

As a result of Porto being selected as one of the two cultural capitals of Europe in 2001, the Minister of Culture and the city of Porto founded Porto 2001, an organization which was to initiate and prepare different urban and cultural interventions for the city of Porto. In this context five international architectural practices, amongst which was OMA, were invited to participate in a restricted competition for a new concert hall to be positioned in the historical centre of Porto, the Rotunda da Boavista.

Image courtesy of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)

Here is another innovative project by dutch architects of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. CCTV will be one among many towers in Beijing’s new Central Business District, all striving to be unique – all different expressions of the vertical dimension.

The tragedy of the skyscraper is that it marks a place as significant, which it then occupies and exhausts with banality… This banality is twofold: in spite of their potential to be incubators of new cultures, programs, and ways of life, most towers accommodate merely routine activity, arranged according to predictable patterns. Formally, their expressions of verticality have proven to stunt the imagination: as verticality soars, creativity crashes.

© All photographs courtesy of CCTV/OMA Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren photographed by Iwan Baan.

The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), in collaboration with Werner Sobek and engineers ABT, has won the competition for Rotterdam's Stadskantoor, a new building for the city hall that will accommodate municipal services, offices, and residential units. The winner was announced this morning by city alderman Hamit Karakus.

The Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, a reimagining of a conventional theatre building, with a ground-level performance space and auditorium visible from the outside, opens in Dallas this week.

The Wyly Theatre, part of the city’s new AT&T Performing Arts Center, is designed by Joshua Prince-Ramus (partner in charge) and Rem Koolhaas (founder of OMA).

Unlike a typical theatre, the Wyly accommodates back-of-house and front-of-house areas above and beneath the auditorium rather than wrapped around it, liberating its perimeter – a glass façade with optional blackout blinds – for direct contact with the urban surroundings. Passersby have the chance to glimpse the action inside; the theatre itself, which seats up to 575, can offer views of the city of Dallas as a backdrop.

Ole Scheeren of OMA introduces a new residential typology to Singapore with The Interlace, a large-scale complex of interconnected apartment buildings stacked in an innovative hexagonal arrangement, developed by CapitaLand and Hotel Properties Limited.


The Interlace is located on an elevated eight-hectare site, bounded by Alexandra Road and the Ayer Rajah Expressway, amidst the verdant Southern Ridges of Singapore. With about 170,000m2 of gross floor area, the development will provide 1,040 apartment units of varying sizes with extensive outdoor spaces and landscaping. The site completes a green belt that stretches between Kent Ridge, Telok Blangah Hill and Mount Faber Parks.

De Rotterdam, a complex of three interconnected mixed-use towers designed by OMA, will go under construction in December this year, the developers MAB and OVG announced today.

The project is located in the old harbour district of Wilhelminapier, next to the iconic Erasmus bridge. The three stacked towers reach 150 metres high, producing a gross floor area of approximately 160,000m2, making De Rotterdam the largest building in the Netherlands.

The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is proud to announce the opening of the Prada Transformer pavilion, a pioneering temporary structure that will be picked up by cranes and rotated to accommodate a variety of cultural events. The pavilion was opened in Seoul today by the Minister of Culture of South Korea and the Mayor of Seoul in the presence of Miuccia Prada and OMA founder Rem Koolhaas.