Poche. The Innominate Evolution of a Koolhaasian Technique

Within the arsenal of architectural techniques that OMA applied, poché takes a unique position, as Christoph Lueder argues in his essay. The concept originates in the history of architecture, as opposed to, for example, the paranoid-critical method of the cadavre exquis. Yet neither Koolhaas nor Zenghelis mentioned the use of poché during the 1980s. Lueder describes how the traditional application of poché was radically reversed by OMA: an instrument for urban contextualisation turned into an instrument for internal lobotomy, and instead of the antithesis of the free plan it became the facilitator of the free section.