Program, diagram and experience. An inquiry on OMA’s architectural images

This paper proposes a classification of OMA’s envisioning models as a contribute to a deeper comprehension of relationships between representation, communication and the actual building. In the past decades Rem Koolhaas has played a central role in producing innovative models for the architectural communication. His interest in urban dynamics and popular mass-media had a fructuous consequence in innovating analytical and synthetic representations that, thanks to the ever-changing design team and an uncommon (self-)critical aptitude, have been both re-interpreted and hybridized by features borrowed from visual arts and other extra-architectural sources. Inspired by a central consideration of a moving person’s experienced space, Koolhaas and his collaborators have programmatically deformed and retouched the canonical orthographical and perspectival views to achieve a number of communicative goals such as an intrinsic congruence with the architectural concept, a transmission of attached