Rare and original poster edited on the occasion of the first OMA exhibition in Europe in 1978.

Zoe Zenghelis
OMA in der Städelschule
Office for Metropolitan Architecture: The City of the Captive Globe
Rem Koolhaas u. Zoe Zenghelis
1978
Offset
67,5 x 83,5 cm
Edition of 100
All posters are signed, dated and numbered by the artist.

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The City of the Captive Globe Project, which Koolhaas produced with Zoe Zenghelis, focuses on New York's urban fabric: the relentlessly uniform grid that paradoxically supports a multiplicity of functions and desires. The rendering of each block as a fantastic city-within-a-city creates a virtual catalogue of OMA's self-proclaimed influences: Salvador Dali's Surreal Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus (1933–35), Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin towers, and El Lissitzky's Lenin Stand all frame the captured globe, a metaphor for Manhattan's status as an "enormous incubator of the world."

Excerpt from an essay by Terence Riley in Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art.

The City of the Captive Globe
Rem Koolhaas

This project is for a city which is devoted to the
artificial conception and accelerated birth of
theories, interpretations, mental constructions,
proposals and their infliction on the World. It is
the capital of Ego, where science, art, poetry and
forms of madness compete under ideal conditions
to invent, destroy and restore the world of
phenomenal Reality.
Each Science or Mania has its own plot. On
each plot stands an identical base, built from heavy
polished stone. These bases, ideological laboratories,
are equipped to suspend unwelcome laws,
undeniable truths, to create non-existent, physical
conditions to facilitate and provoke speculative
activity. From these solid blocks of granite ., each
philosophy has the right to expand indefinitely
towards heaven . Some of these blocks present
limbs of complete certainty and serenity; others
have chosen a soft environment of tentative conjectures
and hypnotic suggestions.
The changes in this ideological skyline will be
rapid and continuous, a rich spectacle of ethical
joy, moral fever or intellectual masturbation. The
collapse of one of these towers can mean two
things : failure, giving up, or a visual Eureka,
a speculative ejaculation:
A theory that works.
A mania that sticks.
A lie that has become a truth.
A dream from which there is no waking up.
On these moments the purpose of the Captive
Globe, suspended at the centre of the City
becomes apparent: all these Institutes together
form an enormous incubator of the World itself ;
they are breeding on the Globe.
Through our feverish thinking in the Towers,
the Globe gains weight. Its temperature rises
slowly. In spite of the most humiliating setbacks,
its ageless pregnancy survives.