Madelon Vriesendorp is best known as one of the co-founders of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in the early 1970s, and her paintings and drawings from this period (published in Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York, 1978) are widely acknowledged as beguiling and beautiful masterpieces. Images of Vriesendorp's idiosyncratic collection of drawings, paintings, postcards and paraphernalia are combined in this volume, alongside texts that illuminate her work. Charles Jencks ruminates on Vriesendorp's cosmology of symbols; the novelist and artist Douglas Coupland writes on the pathology of collecting; Beatriz Colomina re-treads the 'delirious' 1970s in New York; and Rem and Charlotte Koolhaas reframe the domestic environment that has been both the family home and Vriesendorp's studio archive for 30 years.
Madelon Vriesendorp was born in 1945 in Bilthoven, Holland. In 1964 she moved to Amsterdam to study at the Rietveld academy and later worked on the restoration of old frescoes and as a designer of stage costumes, books and jewellery. Five years later she enrolled at Central St Martins School of Art in London and after graduating moved again to Ithaca and then New York with her husband Rem Koolhaas. While in New York Vriesendorp co-founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture with Koolhaas, Elia and Zoe Zenghelis. Paintings she produced at the time were used for book and magazine covers, and were exhibited at the New York Guggenheim and Max Protatch galleries, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Berlin's Aedes Gallery and the Gallery Ma in Tokyo. In 1976 Vriesendorp returned to London to work on numerous OMA competitions and, together with Teri When-Damisch, an animated film for French television. From the mid 1980s she taught art and design at a number of schools, including the Architectural Association and the Edinburgh School of Art. Over the last ten years she has worked in collaboration with Charles Jencks, producing drawings and models to accompany many of his publications, and with her daughter Charlie on several books and art projects. Most recently, Vriesendorp has produced illustrations for Built, Domus and Abitare, while working on costumes, built objects, paintings and short stories.
