Rockbottom: villa by OMA

(Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas' architecture) “. . . une condition trés . . . ahum, ahum, ahum . . . intéressante,” the voice booms in a big brick warehouse, between broken bodies swinging suspended from the rafters and immense steel spiders loitering around children’s bedrooms. Above, in the galleries surrounding the big space, are tight phalanxes of youth concentrating on television sets, themselves being watched over by severely dressed art femmes. This is not the new Metallica video. Rem Koolhaas is giving a lecture at the opening of the OMA exhibition “Living,” in the Centre d’Architecture Arc en Ríve in the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, which is currently running a show by Louise Bourgeois, the French artist responsible for some of the most unsettling images in contemporary art. A thousand people have shown up. A hundred are sitting in the actual lecture hall; the rest have to make do with televised Koolhaas. The exhibition features four villas and an apartment project, all of which have been built and are lived in. The main feature, the reason that the place is teeming with foreign critics and curators and French politicians, is to be found somewhere else.