Signs in Circulation: On OMA’s Image Politics

Anne Elisabeth Toft offers a reading of OMA’s use of representations as it appears in the production of the architectural office – in its architecture, graphical material, writings, and more. The article puts into perspective the analytical-programmatic method and design approach of OMA, which seems to be anchored in a surrealist concept – the “PCM” or “Paranoid-Critical Method” – for which, according to Toft, photography could be read as a strategy. By this she means that the PCM, which was conceived by Salvador Dalí in the 1930s, might be determined by the specific mediality of photography – by a special photographic mode of representation and perception. This assumption, which is pursued in the article, leads to discussions about possible relations and similarities between architecture and photography, about the notion of the “optical unconscious” in photography and architecture, and about displacement and de-contextualisation as defamiliarising strategies that are appropriated by both disciplines.