Madelon Vriesendorp review – sex-crazed visions of skyscrapers copulating
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- Madelon Vriesendorp is showing "Mind Games" at Sir John Soane's Museum, anchored by her 1975 drawing Flagrant Délit ("caught in the act"), depicting the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in bed together with the Statue of Liberty's arm on the bedside table
- Vriesendorp co-founded OMA in 1975 with Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis; her Flagrant Délit also served as the cover of Koolhaas's 1978 book Delirious New York, and OMA went on to design Euralille and the Beverly Hills Prada Store
- Vriesendorp won the 2025 Soane Medal, awarded to figures who have "furthered and enriched the public understanding of architecture," prompting the Soane show
- The exhibition's second half shifts to recycled-material sculptures tackling the climate crisis — egg cartons become monster masks and plastic milk bottles become dragons
- A separate installation recreates a surreal Freudian tableau Vriesendorp plays with visitors, where two people move symbolic objects around a model room surrounded by oversized versions including a stripy snake and patchy dog
- The review notes Vriesendorp's art is "too relaxed to stir the unconscious, too rational to tap the irrational," and that viewers unfamiliar with Delirious New York may be "nonplussed by all the high-rise rumpy-pumpy"
Why it matters: The show reframes a foundational figure in late-20th-century architectural theory: Vriesendorp's satirical drawings gave OMA its radical visual voice before the firm became a global practice. Her Soane Medal and this retrospective confirm her long-overlooked status as a co-architect of post-modern urban thinking, not merely Koolhaas's illustrator.
