European Central Bank Icon
When European Central Bank launched an architectural design competition in 2003, they asked architects to design a building complex that symbolizes the European Union and its currency, the Euro.
Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) proposed the design above. In their proposal they say:
“The European Central Bank is a bank without tradition, presiding over a currency with no history. The Euro is the only currency not backed by a state. Like Europe itself, the ECB is modern by default, simply because it is unprecedented in its effort.”
OMA’s icon for European Central Bank was the direct translation of the finance graph to a building form. It seems that this default form has no ideological reference, but it is clearly a perfect reference to the ideology of statistics.