From a long collaboration between AMO and The Hermitage born "Display of Displays", an exhibition which conmemorates the museum's 250th anniversary. The exhibition, which was opened the last 6th of december in the Hermitage, has a collection of vitrines with more than 250 years, in a speces transformed by OMA for housing exhibitions and experimental events.

While exploring and studying the Hermitage in the early 2000s, AMO encountered, hidden beneath the dense mass of the museum, the former stables and manège of the palace complex, closed to the public since the 1950s and used to store furniture, carriages and other large items. Relatively free of decoration, these huge open spaces, located in the Small Hermitage, offer a radically different condition to the rest of the museum.

As part of OMA’s almost 15-year engagement with the Hermitage, the two halls, the Pergam Hall and the Manege Hall (the former stables and equine riding arena respectively), are now transformed into a Kunsthalle, offering a relatively neutral background for temporary exhibitions, events and experimentation. Located on the ground level of the Small Hermitage, the Kunsthalle will be directly accessible through its own visitor entrance along the Shuvalov Passage, closed off for decades and now open to the public. By opening the Shuvalov Passage, the Kunsthalle project restores an earlier urban model, in which each of the Hermitage buildings had a relatively independent life as a component of the city. The Passage also offers an alternative entrance to the eastern half of the Hermitage, rebalancing the flow of visitors.

The Pergam Hall, the former stables, renamed after the Pergamon Altar, which was stored and exhibited here in the 1940s, will open in early 2015, as the new visitor entrance zone to the Manège Hall and the museum. It is coupled with the museum’s art packaging facility, offering visitors a unique glimpse of the usually hidden mechanics. The Manège Hall is a key new exhibition space of the Hermitage.

The first exhibition in the this new space is “Display of Displays”: an unveiling and exploration of the Hermitage’s historic collection of display cases, exploring their significance as both historical records and works of art. The Hermitage collections of vitrines is probably the largest in the world, and covers a time span of 250 years, from the early imperialcollections under Catherine II to the Soviet era and the present. In this exhibition, the displays acquire for the first time the status of important collection items, with aesthetic and historical significance beyond their functional role.

“Display of Displays” and the architectural interventions to the Small Hermitage mark the first physical manifestations of curatorial and spatial proposals developed as part of OMA’s Hermitage Masterplan – 2014.

DATA SHEET.-

Partner-in-Charge.- Rem Koolhaas.
Team 2008–2009.- Chris Barley, Willem Boning, Ekaterina Golovatyuk, Talia Dorsey, Marieke van den Heuvel, Matthew Jull, Amandine Kastler, Tanner Merkeley, Anna Neimark, Henry Ng, Vassilios Oiknomopoulous, Chris Parlato, Rocio Paz, Anastassia Smirnova, Kyo Stockhaus, Boris Vapne, Olly Wainwright, James Westcott, Mian Ye
Team 2012–2014.- Janna Bystrykh, Alvaro Gomez-Selles, Bruno Gondo, Ricardo Guedes, Maria Kachalova, Minkoo Kang, Timur Karimullin, Cristian Mare, Barbara Materia, Gili Merin, Timur Shabaev.
Collaborators.-
Lighting concept.- Lichtvision.
Construction.- Beta-Kom.

Lighting.- Tochka Opory.
Construction.- Beta-Kom.
Status.- Display of Displays exhibition, Manège Hall and Shuvalov Passage completed December 2014. The entire project to be completed beginning of 2015.
Client.- State Hermitage Museum.
Location.- St. Petersburg.
Site.- Shuvalov Passage.
Program.- Public passage, exhibition spaces, visitor entrance zone, museum packaging facility, storage offices.

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Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944. He began his career as a journalist, working for the Haagse Post, and as a set-designer in the Netherlands and Hollywood. He beganHe frequented the Architectural Association School in London and studied with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University. In 1978, he wrote Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, which has become a classic of contemporary architectural theory. In 1975 – together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp – he founded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture).

The most important works by Koolhaas and OMA, from its foundation until the mid-1990s, include the Netherlands Dance Theatre at The Hague, the Nexus Housing at Fukuoka in Japan, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais of Euralille and Lille, the Villa dall’Ava, the Très Grande Bibliothèque, the Jussieu library in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Seattle Public Library.

Together with Koolhaas’s reflections on contemporary society, these buildings appear in his second book, S,M,L,XL (1995), a volume of 1376 pages written as though it were a “novel about architecture”. Published in collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer, Bruce Mau, the book contains essays, manifestos, cartoons and travel diaries.

In 2005, with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman, he was the founder to the prestigious Volume magazine, the result of a collaboration with Archis (Amsterdam), AMO and C-lab (Columbia University NY).

His built work includes the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Foundation Headquarters (2018), Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris (2018), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015/2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003). Current projects include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester.

Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and is a professor at Harvard University, where he directs The Project on the City, a research programme on changes in urban conditions around the world. This programme has conducted research on the delta of the Pearl River in China (entitled Great Leap Forward) and on consumer society (The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Taschen Verlag has published the results. Now is preparing a major exhibition for the Guggenheim museum to open in 2019 entitled Countryside: Future of the World.

Among the awards he has won in recent years, we mention here the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000), the Praemium Imperiale (2003), the Royal Gold Medal (2004) and the Mies Van Der Rohe prize (2005). In 2008, Time mentioned him among the 100 most influential people of the planet.

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Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is an international practice operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism. AMO, a research and design studio, applies architectural thinking to domains beyond. OMA is led by eight partners – Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Ellen van Loon, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, Chris van Duijn, Jason Long, and Managing Partner-Architect David Gianotten – and maintains offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Doha, and Australia. OMA-designed buildings currently under construction are the renovation of Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) in Berlin, The Factory in Manchester, Hangzhou Prism, the CMG Times Center in Shenzhen and the Simone Veil Bridge in Bordeaux.

OMA’s completed projects include Taipei Performing Arts Centre (2022), Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Los Angeles (2020), Norra Tornen in Stockholm (2020), Axel Springer Campus in Berlin (2020), MEETT Toulouse Exhibition and Convention Centre (2020), Galleria in Gwanggyo (2020), WA Museum Boola Bardip (2020), nhow RAI Hotel in Amsterdam (2020), a new building for Brighton College (2020), and Potato Head Studios in Bali (2020). Earlier buildings include Fondazione Prada in Milan (2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), De Rotterdam (2013), CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (2012), Casa da Música in Porto (2005), and the Seattle Central Library (2004).

AMO often works in parallel with OMA's clients to fertilize architecture with intelligence from this array of disciplines. This is the case with Prada: AMO's research into identity, in-store technology, and new possibilities of content-production in fashion helped generate OMA's architectural designs for new Prada epicenter stores in New York and Los Angeles. In 2004, AMO was commissioned by the European Union to study its visual communication, and designed a colored "barcode" flag, combining the flags of all member states, which was used during the Austrian presidency of the EU. AMO has worked with Universal Studios, Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, Heineken, Ikea, Condé Nast, Harvard University and the Hermitage. It has produced Countryside: The Future, a research exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, including Public Works (2012), Cronocaos (2010), and The Gulf (2006); and for Fondazione Prada, including When Attitudes Become Form (2012) and Serial and Portable Classics (2015). AMO, with Harvard University, was responsible for the research and curation of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and its publication Elements. Other notable projects are Roadmap 2050, a plan for a Europe-wide renewable energy grid; Project Japan, a 720-page book on the Metabolism architecture movement (Taschen, 2010); and the educational program of Strelka Institute in Moscow.

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Published on: December 12, 2014
Cite: ""Display of Displays" exhibition at The Hermitage by OMA" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/display-displays-exhibition-hermitage-oma> ISSN 1139-6415
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