OMA to Design Melbourne’s MPavilion 2017

Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten of Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) will design the fourth annual MPavilion. Commissioned by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, the 2017 MPavilion will be OMA’s first completed project in Australia.
 

Located in Melbourne’s historic Queen Victoria Gardens, the MPavilion serves as a design and cultural laboratory that hosts talks, workshops, performances, and installations that are free and open to the public from October to February. The announcement of OMA’s commission comes shortly after the closing of the 2016 MPavilion—a wooden structure by Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai. OMA’s design details are still under wraps. This year’s pavilion will open on October 3, 2017.
 

“We are excited to design a cultural heart for [Melbourne]—a space of public engagement that will spark creativity and discussion, and that will act as a theatre for ideas,” Koolhaas and Gianotten remarked in a joint statement.
 

Koolhaas and Gianotten recently collaborated on the Taipei Performing Arts Center, slated for completion in June 2017, which will join OMA’s portfolio of large-scale cultural projects such as the Seattle Central Library, Faena District in Miami, London’s Design Museum, and Fondazione Prada in Milan. The firm also designed a temporary “ghost cathedral” for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s spring 2016 exhibition, “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.”