Discussing OMA’s Diagrams with Fondazione Prada’s Mario Mainetti
In the first issue of our new books newsletter, a conversation about turning the exhibition into a book, working with Irma Boom, and architects who edit.
Welcome to the first edition of Book Review, a new monthly column from Scratching the Surface on books in and around design, architecture, and culture. Each month, we’ll do a deep dive into a new book or publication, either in the form of a review, an interview, or roundtable and share round ups of new books that arrive in the studio each month.
The first time I saw SMLXL, the massive monograph from Rem Koolhaas and OMA, designed by Bruce May, as a graphic design student, I was immediately taken with the opening spreads that showed a series of information graphics displaying data from the office. For me, my introduction to Rem Koolhaas was not through his architecture, or even his writing, it was through diagrams. Diagrams, of course, are so central to OMA, both in process and in communication, they became a core component of AMO, the firm’s research and strategy arm. It’s rare to see an OMA presentation without a diagram, a project on their website without a diagram, or to work with them and not communicate through diagrams.
Last year, Fondazione Prada staged Diagrams, an exhibition curated by Rem Koolhaas and OMA/AMO on the history of the form. Organized by major topics — environment, health, war, etc — the exhibition looks back on the earliest examples of using visual means to communicate complex messages. The show can be read, I think, both as a history of the diagram but also a family tree of sorts for OMA; the influences and forms that shape their communication. (There are a handful of AMO diagrams included in the exhibition.)
The exhibition is now being published as a book, published by Fondazione Prada and designed by Irma Boom. For this first issue, I spoke with Mario Mainetti, the head of public programs and publishing at Fondazione Prada about turning the exhibition into a book. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
This book, Diagrams, grew out of an exhibition at the foundation curated by OMA/AMO last year. Tell me about the origins of the show.
In recent years we’d done several exhibitions with a heavy presence of graphic design and visual communication. We did a series on neuroscience in which two of the shows were essentially about communicating scientific content through graphic means. We also did an exhibition in Venice, a few years ago, about the relationship between art and the climate crisis — not exactly climate change as a subject, but how you can read environmental content through artworks. A retrospective reading of Turner’s red sunsets in London as evidence of air pollution, for example, or artists who embedded actual pollution data into their work.
In those shows, the information panels weren’t secondary. They weren’t small wall labels; they were huge, freestanding or wall-mounted panels, maybe two meters high and one meter wide, where visitors sometimes spent even more time than they spent in front of the artworks. We also had documentation rooms with books to browse and videos on screens. I think that was the exhibition that most generated our interest in the diagram as a form. Because communicating scientific content through diagrams is, in a way, mandatory. But using diagrams to communicate environmental information inside an art show is not something you find very often.
We discussed this with Rem Koolhaas and OMA and he proposed a project about diagrams themselves. We got really excited about this.
It makes sense. I think diagrams are central to how OMA communicates in a way.
I wasn’t surprised. We’ve worked with OMA several times for our exhibitions at the Foundation but they’ve also worked with Prada on data, communication and fashion shows and they always use diagrams in their communication.. So if you work with them, you know that from the very first meeting they arrive with your content organized every possible way: chronologically, by size, by origin, by medium. All these diagrams that help curators see their content from a completely different point of view. We always laugh a little when we see the works organized by size. But then, they’re architects and works are real, they exist in space. Size is crucial information. You might not want only very small objects in one room and big ones in the following room. So those diagrams are actually highlighting a critical point in your checklist. For OMA, the diagram is one of their main tools for understanding. That’s why we did the project with them.
I remember the first time I encountered SMLXL as a graphic design student, and I was completely taken with the diagrams. My early interest in OMA wasn’t the buildings or the architecture, it was the diagramming.
The exhibition, and now the book, is organized by topic — war, health, environment — instead of typological categories like bar charts, pie charts, maps. Tell me about that organizational conceit.
We selected, with OMA, the topics we considered most urgent at that moment. The organization of the show was itself quite diagrammatic. Our main space in Venice is a classical palazzo room, about eight meters wide and thirty-three meters long, with all the other rooms arranged around it. What we did was place a series of vitrines in the main room, each corresponding to a topic, and then each surrounding room developed the content of a vitrine in depth. In the book, you can find the diagram of the exhibitions.
Tell me more about the relationship between the exhibition and the book. How does the content or the argument of the exhibition translate from exhibition to book. How did you think about that as editor of this project that was first curated by OMA?
At Fondazione Prada we’ve understood, over many years, that the best book for an exhibition is not always a catalog. Sometimes it is a catalog. Sometimes it’s a book that enlarges the content, another chapter of the project, another leg. Sometimes it provides the legacy of an artist’s career. For other projects, we commission essays about themes adjacent to the work, written by people who may not even know the artist directly. For the Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince show in Venice, the work of both artists is so heavily tied to American culture that we commissioned eight essays on topics like car culture, identity, spirituality. None of the writers were even speaking about the artists themselves. That content exists only in the publication.
For Diagrams, there are many great books already. You can find something on any aspect of the history of diagrams in Taschen, in Phaidon, in more serious academic presses. We looked at all of them as part of our research. So we said this book should be a catalog of what we collected. It should be organized like the exhibition but it should also somehow be new, not only thorough the content. We spoke with Irma Boom about using the book to speak about book design — to make something that was, in its navigation, itself a kind of diagram. She came up with this wonderful idea of the unfinished book. I said, okay, but then we need a box or something because it doesn’t have a cover. She agreed.
I want to talk more about the design in a second but I want to hear more about the essays first. These only exist in the publication; they weren’t in the show. How did you commission them? How does writing fit into the project?
The book is introduced by a conversation between Katya Inozemtseva, our current chief curator and Rem Koolhaas about the exhibition. All the other texts we commissioned and are present only in the publication but every image in the book, except the illustrations that open each essay, was in the exhibition. We selected authors, more or less, according to the thematic topics and we thought that it was better to have more voices than only two or three, and that those voices should be designers, or researchers of design, people working at the crossroads of information and representation. They are all designers in the book, or experts in the history of graphic design, or people who were working at that crossroads.
Because there are a lot of images in this book — it feels very OMA in its excess — but the essays in the book are fairly short. But it’s in the essays that I think the show’s argument really comes through in the text. Almost every essay hits on this idea that Rem describes the “aura of objectivity”, this idea that diagrams project this sense of authority. Was it important to you that that argument be explicit in the text, not just subtext?
We didn’t force any author to write about it but we discussed it with all of them while presenting the project and speaking about their own work, and it emerged naturally. What we wanted to communicate was that the diagram is never absolute. A diagram, like a text, always simplifies reality. It has a scope. It is useful in the specific moment in which it is made. And we should never forget, whether we are readers or producers, that this simplified form, however useful, is never the whole truth. It might carry a fiction unintentionally, as a side effect of the simplification. Or it might carry that fiction deliberately.
It was important to us to say that this is not new. Fake news is not new. It has always been embedded in communication. The fiction can be a side effect without any specific purpose, or it can be completely intentional. But Diagrams was not a project about fake news, or about highlighting the risks of infographics. It was more a project of awareness. It was about saying everyone should be aware of this.
Tell me about working with Irma Boom. You’ve worked with her a handful of times and she’s obviously a longtime OMA collaborator. What did she bring to the project?
Rem said he wanted to work with Irma and we agreed. She’s really fast but she’s also really attentive to the content. She’s very creative in the layout of each spread. We’ve worked with all kinds of designers and all sizes of design studios. With Irma, we’ll meet in person over three days, either she comes to Italy or I go Amsterdam, and those three days are extremely creative moments in which it is important to be there together to work on what I consider the crucial elements in a publication. And those are the pages that are least considered in general — the colophon, the page numbers, all what is somehow invisible to the eye but contributes enormously to the overall graphic design.
With Diagrams, for instance: you would imagine that we did a lot of work on the diagrams themselves, their placement on the page, their scale. While we were working on the main body of the book, we were also saying: this color, this rule, it should do something. Then at the beginning and end of the book, we did these diagrams of the content itself.
To shift gears as we wrap up, tell me more about your position as Head of Public Programs and Publications at the Foundation. What’s your role look like?
I started at the foundation in 1997 as an intern. So I did intern, researcher, curator, chief curator. When I was chief curator, my title was Head of Research and Publications, because I was leading a team of curators and researchers working on the content of the exhibitions and the publications and the public program. Then, two years ago, after my last exhibition as curator, the team was reorganized and divided into different groups. Now I’m responsible for the public program and the publications.
My involvement with books goes back to around 2003. We’ve had external editors come in and out, but I’ve been consistently responsible for the content. And I’ve always been drawn to the layout side as well, partly because I trained as an architect. In Italy, there is a long tradition, at least in the twentieth century, of architects doing graphic design, because the first proper schools of graphic design are quite recent here. At the university level, there wasn’t much before this century. So the boundary between architecture and graphic work was always permeable.
I feel like there’s also an Italian history of architects working as editors. What did that move look like for you, from architecture to graphic design to editorial and content work?
I actually spoke about this with Michael Rock when he did a series of conversations he called “Lost Architects,” about people who studied architecture and ended up not doing it. What I told him, I can repeat now: my feeling is that I’m still doing architecture. When you study architecture, at least in Italy in the nineties, you learn to develop a project. It’s a lot about ideas and creation, but also about consistency — a lot about decision-making, about what is the best path to go ahead and realize your project. So at the end, the work is more or less the same. I’m just not building or restoring apartments anymore. I don’t see a huge difference in how I act in my job. Until two years ago, when I was also responsible for the content of exhibitions, I was maybe a little more architect than I am now. Maybe I miss it, but I have no time to think about it.
Studio Arrivals
A roundup of books that arrived in the studio this month. Links direct to Bookshop.org, where if you purchase through our links, we get some money back to help support the show!
Monsters and Mutants: Explorations in the Architecture-Nature Continuum
Monsters and Mutants presents a provocation for a new approach to reverse the consequences of the Anthropocene, by learning from plant intelligence. New York-based design firm Archi-Tectonics' recent research on climate change opened up a field unknown to architecture so far. By emulating organic intelligence, Winka Dubbeldam and her team created a series of new architectural taxonomies: Hybrids and Earth Buildings, part nature, part architecture. Appropriating organic intelligence, these structures are at once resilient, resource-efficient, and beneficial for humans and non-humans, capable of healing our ecosystem.
Antifascist Architecture by Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Jonas Roche
Antifascist Architecture collects a kaleidoscope of diverse architects who heroically aligned themselves with antifascist struggles around the world. It is written for students and practitioners of architecture, but also activists and scholars in the social sciences who are interested in antifascist history, theory, and practice.
BIG ATLAS
Spanning a rich variety of typologies, scales, and materials, the featured projects are brought to life through more than 600 photographs, plans, and drawings. Presented together for the first time, they trace BIG's transformation into fully integrated design, synthesizing the fields of architecture, interiors, landscape, engineering, planning, and product design to advance more sustainable ways of living within our environments while simultaneously raising the quality of our lives. Beautifully designed, oversized, and spanning more than 500 pages, this definitive monograph captures the groundbreaking work of a visionary firm.
Observations, Research, and Design by Todd Bracher
The first monograph dedicated to acclaimed American industrial designer, Todd Bracher, this book showcases his collaborations with leading international brands such as Georg Jensen, Cappellini, Fritz Hansen, Herman Miller, Issey Miyake, and 3M. Accompanied by a rich selection of images, Observations, Research, and Design introduces readers to Bracher's distinctive practice and theory of design, highlighting how design can translate scientific discoveries into urgently needed solutions that align both with business goals and the need to build a better world.
Earth Works: Houses by Byoung Cho
Earth Works: Houses by Byoung Cho offers a unique glimpse into the residential buildings of one of Korea's most influential architects. The monograph presents this lesser known aspect of Cho's work through stunning photographs, plans, drawings, paintings, and models.