The framing of the perspective is an act of architectural cunning in itself, as it manages to show a great deal by revealing very little. Consciously limited, and focusing on that part of the building where a deep slice in the surrounding ground level reveals a black pedestal, the view suggests a building with a glass and column structure that rests on a black base, half dug into the ground. It monumentalises both the hall and the content. The precision of the frame brings the argument, as presented by the perspective, full circle: the NAi as the self-declared endpoint of monumental modernism. Complete and complex, refined and self-centred, it sells the tropes of a fugitive modernism to Rotterdam, a city that personified by a modernist past it never quite got rid of.  As tradition prescribes, the perspective is where the story is told, but not where it happens. OMA’s NAI is a big box lost in the Netherlands. A building that ignores, from the outset, the place it was intended to populate. Not out of arrogance, but simply because it understands that place is not an important context for an architecture institute. The context here is not location, the context is Architecture. How to make a building about Architecture? For OMA (in 1988) there was only one way: a building that is “the least architecture possible” in order to contain the unavoidable; a receptacle for architec- ture, in perpetual conflict with its content. A big box born full: OMA’s NAi is a container of Form.

         The container captures maximum volume under a single tilted roof, carried by a simple structural grid, 6 by 6 m. The field of columns rigorously takes stock of the terrain. The grid seems both necessary and irrelevant. It is the perfect incarnation of the idea of the column as architectural device. This becomes clear in the project description: “In the exhibition space these columns play the role of bridge between the exposed objects and space itself. To enable larger installations (e.g. full-size reconstructions), one of the columns can be taken away”. The structure does not really care about its structural feats; it does carry, but fundamentally it organises the site visually. The grid is cut at the edges of the site: columns are taken away, one by one. The few columns left make up the three façades of the building: a colonnade that carries the façade or the cantilevered roof, defining a territory that coincides with the one defined by the grid. The sharp sloping triangle creates the volume of the big box. The three façades-glass with a slightly different colour and opacity-form another more or less autonomous perimeter, following its own rules. If the column is presented as a tectonic device rather than as a structural or technical element, the façade becomes autonomous in its own right: strangely immaterial, but fully conscious of its dividing powers. Perhaps to emphasise this, one of the façades is drawn in an elegant curve, subtly disconnecting itself from column and roof, where in the other two instances the glass simply joins the dots of the columns.

         This design is a set of overlapping perimeters, presenting different ways to define a precise territory, a space. The field of columns, the projection of the roof and the (almost) triangular perimeter of the façade are composed around the same point of gravity: the space they define together. Inside, in the gravitational centre of the space, one finds an accumulation of abstract forms. A huge, slightly tilted tower attached to a flat block with a patio that functions as a pedestal, filling up the middle of the building. The black tower evokes many things. From Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (the zero degree of painting) to the Kaaba (a volume so black it hints at the indescribable), it incarnates Form as a piece of relentless mass: only volume, no detail. The patio block seems to hint at form as type: a volume with an opening that organises everything unknown. Together, tower and block present the purest manifestation of architecture as form. Only a limited amount of space remains in the box, as if the triangular building was made to house and frame these strange forms. Not unlike the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which houses reconstructed monumental building parts transported from Turkey, this institute brings together fragments of architecture that start to mutate ambiguously with the very building that protects and contains them. The result is a confusing status of object and pedestal.

              In the end, there is so little room left for the “programme” of the institute that one can only conclude that the construction itself rendered the programme irrelevant. Everything that is supposed to happen, essentially happens on top of, in between, and somehow in the fringes of the projected architecture. Using this NAi is like appropriating a temple. Of course: there are exhibition halls, lobbies, a library and coffee places. But because of the looming presence of architecture (as it- self), all that becomes quite secondary. 
              Is that the endpoint OMA reached in 1988? If architecture is able to be both space and form, one becomes the “context” of the other. As sculpture and pedestal, both are intrinsically intertwined. One does not survive the absence of the other. Looking back at the particular detail of the zoomed-in collage reveals that all this is consciously on show. The cut, revealing the pedestal-like base of the envelope, also “creates” a bridge to enter the very building, and to leave Rotterdam. Cut and bridge show the power of obstruction. Inside the insti- tute everything is available, everything is shown. Curiously enough, this land of plenty is as oppressive as it is liberating. It turns into a container cut loose from every context, in order to indulge in the glorious presence of nothing but architecture. The demonstration of its powers is therefore simultaneously the mise-en-scène of its limits. Architecture becomes both exposition device and exposition material. It undoes itself of every possible criterion of success... an absolute architecture... a building that can only refer to itself: an institute for architecture that is impossible to build.