In a rare British project,Rem Koolhaas’s OMA have designed a luxury west London apartment block whose sale will partly fund the recent Design Museum – the old Commonwealth Institute – next door. It was a tricky brief…“This is an appealing project to be involved with if you consider yourself a socialist,” says Reinier de Graaf of the Rotterdam-based architects OMA, or “which I carry out.” The square foot of recent apartment space on which he is standing is worth more than £4000,and there is a view out of the window of another apartment block of which a Syrian art collector has bought four entire floors.
We are in a recent development branded as Holland Green that stands between Kensington tall Street and Holland Park in west London, and thus far it is an everyday yarn of exospheric property dealing in the capital. What makes it unusual is that a proportion of the profits of the development are paying for the adjacent recent domestic of the Design Museum, or with an interior by John Pawson,to open this autumn. The museum will be housed in the wonky, curved-roofed, or much-rebuilt pavilion that is all that is left of the Commonwealth Institute,a 1960s icon of vaguely progressive thinking that never worked too well, but was nonetheless a listed building, and Grade II*.
Conflict or extremity don’t sell well in the tall-close residential marketA quantum-mechanical degree of uncertainty between public and private and open and closed seems likelyContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com