Even 23 East 22nd Street, a project I thought I knew very well, includes images of the sales center I somehow missed at the time, as well as the insertion of the tower between the Chrysler and Empire State buildings in Madelon Vriesendorp's Flagrant Délit from the cover of Koolhaas's Delirious New York. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the book's visual storytelling, which invites readers to follow the numbers, reading the captions to each image and piece by piece digest the process of design and realization. Many of the images are diagrams that OMA is known for, which are fine at stamp size, but the shrinking down of others in an effort to present more images rather than less is often frustrating I have not used my pocket magnifying glass to read a book as much as this one. In print, the thumbnail images are sometimes so small to be illegible, giving extra weight to the captions and encouraging readers to either fill in the blanks in their minds or find the appropriate images online. Although the two partners answered that the impetus for the book was to serve as a tool for clients and potential clients (previously they handed out S,M,L,XL or Content, clarifying that they didn't do any projects in them), I could easily see the backdrop of the entire book as akin to an interactive screen that would allow people to pan and zoom into the images to learn about the projects. At one point in the evening at Rizzoli, someone on the audience asked if a digital format would have been better than a book. The many pages with thumbnail images and captions clearly resembles a Google Image search or a Pinterest board. These images - the small ones between the full-bleed images at the start of each project and the drawings that finish them off - are what makes this monograph on OMA New York so unique and what lends the book its title. In lieu of pagination, the projects are found via the image numbers, something that is expressed as early as the cover, whose metallic linen surface is protected by a thick plastic sleeve. Speaking of pages, although the publisher's website indicates that Search Term is 676 pages long, I can only trust that is correct, since the pages are not numbered. The monograph ends with an alphabetical list of Search Terms: a visual index of common tactics (big model, cantilever, pixel, etc.) and other means of categorizing the work of OMA New York, all keyed to the numbered images rather than the project names or pages. Between each are interviews that the two OMA New York partners held with big names in art, fashion, and other realms, including Iris van Herpen, Virgil, Abloh, David Byrne, and others. Those projects are inserted into eight typological sections, from Institution and Museum to Residential and Public Realm. Even an unfocused glance at the backdrop revealed the ebb and flow of the book: each project starts with full-bleed images astride two pages of text, is followed by many pages of thumbnail images, and then ends with two pages of plans and other drawings. Shigematsu and Long presented the book a couple of weeks ago at Rizzoli Bookstore, where a large printout of every page from the book served as a backdrop for selfies and photos with the monograph's authors/architects. The 22 other projects in Search Term are a mix of built, temporary, under construction, and in-progress projects that are each documented with hundreds of images: an average of 241 images per project, in fact. Best I can tell, the latter project, which I called an "exciting diagram" when it was unveiled in 2008, is the only project in the new book that for certain will never happen - it "fell victim to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and financial collapse" in 2009. Those eager for contributions and/or projects by Rem Koolhaas will be disappointed though, given that the OMA founder was not involved in the making of Search Term and only two of the nearly two dozen projects list Koolhaas as a partner: Milstein Hall at Cornell University and 23 East 22nd Street in New York City. The first monograph to come out of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) since Content, the 2004 sequel to the iconic 1997 tome S,M,L,XL, is devoted to OMA New York, the branch of OMA run by Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long.
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