Goodbye to Hollywood
After some complex foreplay, Edgar Bronfman Jr. asked us on December 15 1995,
to design a new headquarters for Universal Studios Hollywood, a compagny he had recently acquired. Edgar was the grandson of Samuel, the founder of the « Seagram Compagny » who had in'54 asked Mies Van de Rohe to design his Headquarters on Park avenue, reputedly at the urging of his daughter Phyllis Lambert, an architect herself. To position the building in the right location on the Universal City site-a hybrid of Film Studio and Theme Park-Bronfman also asked OMA to look at the huge property as a whole…A large team spent six weeks in an office on John's Jerde's City Walk- a mixture of purgatory and fascination. It soon became apparent that the commission was less straightforward than it seemed. Where in'54 Seagram was a single entity that would be relatively stable during the five year minimum that any architectural enterprise takes from beginning to end, that was no longer the case : by the mid-nineties, the substance and nature of any corporation was in constant flux, if not turmoil.
Where in'54 a building could be a « portrait »of a known entity, forty years later it needed to be a device that was able to create a degree of wholeness from a permanently changing cluster of ingredients and latencies. A building was no longer an issue of architecture, but a strategy.
That insight triggered the birth of OMO-OMA's mirror image- a new organization that proposed, given a situation where built architecture was simply too slow to capture mutating organizations, to explore the possibility of applying architectural thinking in its pure form-liberated from the need for realization. If we could not build a building for an organization that was in an absolute state of flux-from the share value to the permanent buying and selling of its components and the constant imminence of mergers and acquisitions, we could at least imagine a conceptual model of a « structure » that could, if not anticipate, at least accommodate almost any eventuality and actually exploit the given instability to define a new territory for architecture…
The trajectory was a sobering confrontation with architecture's most inconvenient demands- time and money-and a first glimpse of a distant, seductive hint of its return as a purely conceptual medium. REM KOOLHAAS Content ed.Taschen 2004
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