“MOTIVATION AND MANIPULATION: INTERVENING IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND CHINA,” OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Kunle Adeyemi, The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Netherlands
Kunle Adeyemi joined The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in 2002. As a Senior Associate of OMA he is presently in charge of several ongoing projects: the Qatar Foundation Headquarters, the Central Library and the Strategic Studies center all in the Education City in Doha, the new Headquarters tower for the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in China, the Prada pavilion project in South Korea & most recently the 4th Mainland bridge & master plan project in Lagos, Nigeria.
In addition, Kunle has taught Design at Delft Technical University (The Netherlands) as well as been a visiting critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in America, the Architectural Association in London, and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. In 2006 he was a guest speaker at the ‘Impure Architecture’ symposium held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In order to successfully accomplish projects in the Middle East and China, the architect is increasingly confronted with a peculiar need to sensitively employ a variety of unusual strategies in order to negotiate the complex structure of various participants.
In the Middle East, architects who can promise to deliver uniqueness in an ever-congested culture of excess and hyperbole are proactively patronised and encouraged by ambitious clients to create environments limited only by the architects’ imaginations. Between ambition and imagination is an array of those dedicated to the process of interpretating and regulating the transformation of the former to the latter. So strongly is ‘process’ emphasized here – more so than the content – that it threatens imagination and all of the efforts committed to it.
While in the Middle East complexity arises from the process and not from the actual content of the project itself, rather the opposite tends to prove true in China. In China, the architect faces a reversed situation where complexity stems from a constant encounter of conflicting motivations; the ‘meaning’ in the content itself. China’s highly-complex social, cultural and political fabric challenges western architects’ preconceived ideas and motivations. Successful architectural collaborations are often futile without a considered understanding of the leadership’s own predispositions to the content or design, which is largely rooted in symbolism, metaphor & power.
Both China and the Middle East, however, share similarities in a desire for grandiosity and means. To overcome these challenges, the sensibility of an international architect working in the Middle East and China must be more strongly embedded in a deeper understanding of motivations and highly-strategic manipulations of human interactions, focused at bringing initial ambitions closer to the final accomplishment of great imagination.
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[...] WHEN CHANGE IS THE ONLY THING THAT IS CONSTANT, Christoph Böninger, Auerberg Design, Germany; Kunle Adeyemi, OMA, Nederlands; THE EXPERIENCE OF DESIGN: FROM LOW TO HIGH, Allan Chochinov, Core77, USA; [...]