Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Tip of the Strip
Rem Koolhaas
Dutch, born 1944
Madelon Vriesendorp
Dutch, born 1945
Elia Zenghelis
British, born Greece 1937
Zoe Zenghelis
British, born Greece 1937
1972
A measured graphite-and-watercolor plan by Rem Koolhaas that imagines a speculative ‘strip’—a long infrastructural platform that corrals thousands of identical dwellings and choreographs movement and confinement.
It reads like a clinical aerial diagram: regimented rows of tiny, tilted box-houses arrayed around a pale, elongated gray platform, with fine pencil grids and small green and blue watercolor accents that make the scheme feel both architectural and eerily theatrical.
Part of Koolhaas’s 1972 ‘Exodus’ explorations, this drawing helped crystallize a new vocabulary of urbanism—using repetition, infrastructure, and programmed public platforms to critique postwar planning and imagine radical alternatives for city life.
Medium
Graphite and watercolor on paper
Dimensions
11 3/8 x 16 1/2" (28.9 x 41.9 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Takeo Ohbayashi Purchase Fund, and Susan de Menil Purchase Fund
Accession
367.1996
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
