Immensely large yet perfect in every last detail: OMA has created impressive architecture in Toulouse with a seemingly uninspiring infrastructure project.
The new MEETT Exhibition and Convention Center in the French city of Toulouse once again demonstrates how a seemingly dull, functional task results in striking and refined architecture if the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture OMA and its mastermind Rem Koolhaas take care of it. The vast structure, covering ca 618 by 246 yards of ground, makes for a spectacular spatial experience in its main exhibition hall that offers 484,376 square feet of column-free floor space. OMA also took an unusual path with regard to the configuration and transport connection of the entire complex. Rather than sealing even more ground with tarmac for endless car parks, it concentrated them into a compact multi-storey parking garage at the heart of the complex that also serves as a general traffic hub for MEETT Toulouse.
The book offers impressions of MEETT Toulouse’s enormous dimensions and the vast spaces it provides through images taken by Italian photographer Marco Cappelletti. The volume is rounded out with selected plans and concise texts on the particulars of the project.
Dominique Boudet lives and works as an architecture critic and publisher of AMC architecture magazine in Paris. He is the editor of the book New Housing in Zurich. Typologies for a Changing Society, published by Park Books in 2017.
Immensely large yet perfect in every last detail: OMA has created impressive architecture in Toulouse with a seemingly uninspiring infrastructure project.
The new MEETT Exhibition and Convention Center in the French city of Toulouse once again demonstrates how a seemingly dull, functional task results in striking and refined architecture if the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture OMA and its mastermind Rem Koolhaas take care of it. The vast structure, covering ca 618 by 246 yards of ground, makes for a spectacular spatial experience in its main exhibition hall that offers 484,376 square feet of column-free floor space. OMA also took an unusual path with regard to the configuration and transport connection of the entire complex. Rather than sealing even more ground with tarmac for endless car parks, it concentrated them into a compact multi-storey parking garage at the heart of the complex that also serves as a general traffic hub for MEETT Toulouse.
The book offers impressions of MEETT Toulouse’s enormous dimensions and the vast spaces it provides through images taken by Italian photographer Marco Cappelletti. The volume is rounded out with selected plans and concise texts on the particulars of the project.
Dominique Boudet lives and works as an architecture critic and publisher of AMC architecture magazine in Paris. He is the editor of the book New Housing in Zurich. Typologies for a Changing Society, published by Park Books in 2017.
