The week of worms?also known as the Festival of Ideas, a four-day sequence of art, speeches, and a street festival all imagining the city's future?fast approaches, and with it some details about the event. We already knew that starchitect Rem Koolhaas would be kicking things off with a May 4 keynote. But that won't be the Dutch Pritzker winner's only contribution to the festivities. Koolhaas and his firm, OMA, will also be putting on "Cronocaos," a New Museum exhibition "about the increasingly urgent topic of preservation in architecture and urbanism." The exhibit, open from May 7 through June 5, involves another creature from the Curbed archives, 231 Bowery. That's the former restaurant supply building purchased for a little more than $16 million as a New Museum annex. Amid Bowery 2.0, it seems a fitting site for an exhibit on preservation, no?
And our man Rem does seem to have some rather definite opinions on the subject, as he's quoted in the New Museum press materials: "'Through our respect for the past, heritage is becoming more and more the dominant metaphor for our lives today, a situation we call Cronocaos,' said Rem Koolhaas. 'Our obsession with heritage is creating an artificial re-engineered version of our memory.'" This very phenomenon can be shown...through the work of Rem Koolhaas!
"Cronocaos" will include historic objects and photographs...and a timeline of OMA projects that have confronted the issue of preservation over thirty-five years of practice, including the 2001 proposed extension to the Whitney Museum of American Art ...Each project within the OMA timeline will take the form of a postcard for visitors to peel off the wall and take home. By the end of the exhibition, preservation and depletion will be evident in the exhibition itself. Reflecting the exhibition's themes, the former restaurant-supply space will be visually transformed into two very different areas: one side will remain "preserved" as it was while inhabited by the restaurant supply store; the other will be minimally renovated. · Official website: Festival of Ideas [festivalofideasnyc.com]
· Neon Worms, Festival of Ideas to Take Over the Bowery in May [Curbed]