The OMA enjoys an outstanding position in the Dutch and international architectural landscape. Most of the works produced by the agency can be regarded as research projects. Over and above its actual works, the agency is primarily an on-going laboratory concerned with finding new solutions to the problems of a society typified by over-population and instability. The OMA was founded in 1975, in London, by Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp. In 1978 the Rotterdam agency opened, and duly became the principal agency. As a journalist, writer, and scriptwriter, before becoming an architect, Rem Koolhaas, who in his youthful years was close to the Situationist movements, has taken up a position as an observer of present-day reality. For him, architecture and city-planning are more an extrapolation of what we perceive of reality than the projection of an ideal order or good intentions; there is no point in wanting to control the future, even though this is, paradoxically, what the architect does. The proposal he presents here shows how the project takes form through a process which combines "the subconscious with a kind of scientific investigation, and, needless to say, a certain number of other things that can only be described as opportunism". This project which has never left the drawing board, attests to the strangeness often present, in his view, in the creative process; it has given rise, through what Rem Koolhaas considers to be a strange alchemy, to the form of a concert place which fulfils all the functions one would expect of it: the "Casa da Musica" in Porto.	(NL)
	OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) Koolhaas (Rem) (1944)
	• Y2K Rotterdam, Holland, 1998