PANDA, a project by OMA and Bengler, opened last week at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale – After Belonging.

At the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale, Rotterdam-based team from OMA and Oslo-based interaction designers Bengler showed PANDA, a startup that addresses the social and political implications of digital sharing platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, as well as their impact on the built environment.

In the middle of room a red plastic strip curtain demarcates a space that could have been teleported from an apartment of a hacker. A grid of sticky notes inscribed with the names of various sharing platforms on one wall, while on another a poster maps their global impact. On a desk a six-monitor computer displays various images of countercultural resistance, tagged and sorted by theme. Next to it sits a bottle of Provigil—a wakefulness medication commonly (ab)used for all-nighters by college students—and a stack of news clippings exposing the ills of the sharing economy.

Dubbed PANDA, the “counter-organizational platform” both critiques the sharing economy and, in classic OMA-fashion, wryly critiques that critique.

Description of the project by OMA and Bengler

PANDA investigates the accelerating influence of digital sharing platforms, their social and political implications, and pervasive impact on the built environment.

In the early 2000s, the democratic spaces of the web were greeted as an alternative to centralized commercial and social structure; in 2007, after the financial landslide, the sharing gospel gave hope to those struggling to make a living.

The boom of “sharing platforms” provided the private sphere with powerful market mechanics, enabling the fluid commodification of life. Flexible, web-scale human resourcing drew “app freelancers” into the gig economy — an unprecedented economic reactivation of latent human assets. A new labor force emerged, one obliged to hire itself out for ever-smaller jobs with no safety net, as companies profited handsomely.

While sharing platforms employ organizational tools of savage power, masses are atomized — strong-armed into unorganized negotiation.

Crowds attack taxis and block streets as services are banned in countries around the world. Unrest is staged against app-based, short-term accommodation platforms and the conversion of entire buildings into de facto hotels.

PANDA is a counter-organizational platform, providing a tactical disruption-as-a-service toolkit, empowering app workers with the means to mediate terms with the platforms and their algocrat masters.

That the service materialized out of Kinshasa is probably a fabrication. Skirting traditional venture capital cycles, it nevertheless emerged as a distributed, open source network of for-profit tactical nodes. Untraceable and decentralized, a system of vast data and self-regulating algorithmic control.

PANDA is at once an act of resistance and a business opportunity, conceived within the cultural framework and space of new digital economic realms. It is the antibody of metastasizing platform capitalism.

Within mere months, PANDA experienced dramatic expansion, crystallizing the masses in tactical just-in-time action groups: from intangible interventions to exaggerated physical transformations.

As software eats the world, as everything solid melts into air, PANDA recasts technologies of oppression into a machinery of individual empowerment. By providing tools to actively navigate the turmoils of new digital regimes, PANDA fosters a new sense of belonging and purpose.

PANDA has been led by OMA’s Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Bengler’s Even Westwang and Simen Svale Skogsrud. It is part of the On Residence exhibition, on display at the National Museum of Architecture.

Read more
Read less

More information

Label
OMA team
Text
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Paul Cournet, Giacomo Ardesio, Giulio Margheri, Laurence Bolhaar
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Bengler Team
Text
Simen Svale Skogsrud, Even Eidsten Westvang, Øyvind Rostad, Kristoffer Sivertsen
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Venue
Text
Universitetsgata 13, 0164 Oslo, Norway
--
Universitetsgata 13, 0164 Oslo, Noruega
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Dates
Text
September 08, 2016 12:00 am., until November 27, 2016 11:59 pm.
--
08 de septiembre de 2016 12:00 am., hastael 27 de noviembre de 2016 11:59 pm.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Client
Text
Pestellini Laparelli
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.

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.

Read more
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli joined OMA in 2007 and is based in Rotterdam. A partner since 2014, Ippolito’s work at OMA/AMO has a focus on preservation, scenography, and curation. Currently Ippolito is leading the transformation design of the 16th century Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, the renovation of Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) in Berlin and the design of Repossi’s flagship store on Place Vendôme in Paris. Recent work includes Monditalia, a multi-disciplinary exhibition focused on Italy, at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; scenography for the Greek theater of Syracuse in Sicily (2012); and the co-curation of Cronocaos, OMA’s exhibition on preservation at the 2010 Venice Architectural Biennale. Through collaborations with different brands including Repossi, Galleries Lafayette, Knoll, and Prada his activity extends to research, product design, temporary installations, and publications. Since 2010, Ippolito is responsible for a range of AMO projects with Prada, including the stage design for the brand’s fashion shows and special events, and the art direction of videos. He contributes to exhibition design for Fondazione Prada, with projects such as When Attitudes Become Form: 1969/2013 and Serial Classics (2015). Ippolito holds a Master of Architecture from the Politecnico di Milano.

 
Read more
Published on: September 13, 2016
Cite: "PANDA, a Project by OMA and Bengler" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/panda-a-project-oma-and-bengler> ISSN 1139-6415
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...