Charrette Submission for The Museum of Modern Art Expansion, New York, NY (Perspective view of automated study center)
Rem Koolhaas
Dutch, born 1944
1997
A collage on paper by Rem Koolhaas proposing an automated study center for MoMA’s expansion, using photographic and cut-paper imagery to stage visitors, artworks, and industrial storage together in one imagined interior.
What hits you first is the uncanny juxtaposition of well-dressed, calmly posed people and floating paintings against a vast, mechanical racking system—a giant eye and cropped faces loom over the scene, making the human scale feel both observed and subsumed by infrastructure.
Made for Koolhaas’s 1997 charrette, the work crystallizes his idea of the museum as an infrastructural machine—anticipating conversations about automation, collection storage, and the museum as archive while showing how collage can argue architectural program visually.
Medium
Collage on paper
Dimensions
8 1/2 x 14" (21.6 x 35.6 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of the architect
Accession
476.1997.11
Palette
Exhibitions
