Rem Koolhaas and OMA-AMO

When she gave visitors bikes to cruise through the glass halls of Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in Berlin, Dutch artist Ann Veronica Janssen opened up new vistas on a sanctuary of modernism. But it was left to Rem Koolhaas to radically profane Mies’s temple by squatting in it with “CONTENT’s” chaotic and provisional exhibition design. This retrospective (covering Koolhaas’s and his Rotterdam firm OMA-AMO’s projects from 1996 to the present) looks like a Christmas fair, with wooden dividers marking out various sections and colorful objects jumbled together on tabletops. Apart from the treatise “Junkspace,” translated into a video installation by Tony Oursler, and Candida Höfer’s photographs of OMA’s new Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the presentations are surprisingly cryptic. Instead of showing documentation of completed buildings or offering, say, a didactic introduction to his ongoing Project on the City at Harvard, Koolhaas allows rough drafts and form-variation models to suggest the processes of conception and production. Accumulated detritus—piles of packing crates, a computer in a shopping cart—read as memento mori, alluding to what are, for Koolhaas, crucial issues of temporality, obsolescence, and the ways in which history is inscribed (or not) on urban space. It’s fascinating how pointedly “CONTENT” seems to address current developments in Berlin, where traces of the wall have all but disappeared while politicians channel tax dollars toward the reconstruction of mediocre Prussian castles.