The User's guide to AMO (Bruce Sterling)

Summary

OMA is an architectural office that created a mirror-image office AMO dedicated to the virtual.

http://oma.eu/home

The reason for that is the existing less distinction in the two realms of practice: physical buildings and information. The Amo is interested in the virtual and informational but is also connected to the real physical structures, whose direct purpose is to make information flow in bulk, like the Libraries and the Chinese broadcast. Poor informational architecture has negative consequences related to the security, traffic jam and all the urban networks.

We can check the importance of these networks links when we think about the Station's information. If we take it off its physical structure will continue there but there will be no function.

This kind of a virtual office can work out of the architecture restriction and its probable origin was given by the Koolhaas encounter in 1971 with the Berlin Wall - the best example of a virtual architecture using the graffiti as communication in a brutal structure without any purpose of human service.

The AMO demolished the classical concepts about the Rome Empire finding a dynamic recast to it : the Roman Operating System, related to their diary urban operations and based on their networks considering the cities as nodes whose all roads leads to Rome. Very known about its temples and monumental architecture, but without any Roman Empire if the system is crashed. Thereby, don't try to built a rigidly structure to outlast milleniums, on the contrary, try to grasp the operations and design the structure to shelter them.

The voids and the removable chunks of architecture aren't a "nothingness" but an blissful absence of architecture.

The "smartening" concept of the enterprises have been failured due to their imperial impositions of a clumsy digital operating system onto the primal needs of architectural practice, because there's no innate needs of it and have to consider that the sistemic flows of water, fuel, electrical power, etc are in constant changing.

"The virtual architecture has reached its apotheosis as the everyday way of life!"