Barbican Art Gallery chooses Epson Stylus Pro 7700 and EB-Z8000WU

10th April 2012 - When the OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) celebrated four decades of architectural design, engineering and cultural ideas at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, 6th October 2011 – 19th February 2012, it turned to Epson to provide the onsite large format printer to produce its iconic designs for display in the exhibition and for sale in the Art Gallery shop.

OMA, founded by Rem Koolhaas, is recognised as one of the most influential architecture practices working today and celebrated as much for its daring and unconventional ideas as well as its inventive buildings. The OMA/Progress exhibition showcased the work of OMA and its think tank AMO and was curated and designed by Belgian collective Rotor. They had unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to OMA’s archives and offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong and Beijing and the collection of materials, designs, papers and ideas they displayed were testament to the artistic process. Most of what OMA produces that doesn’t go to its clients is amassed in their archive, which now consists of more than 10,000 works on paper and 3,700 boxes of models, samples and other objects.

Following a thorough consultation process with the Epson team, Barbican Art Gallery installed two 24-inch-wide Epson Stylus Pro 7700 inkjet printers - one in the gallery office and one in the exhibition itself.
 

The printer in the gallery office printed a selection of images from OMA’s archive which went on sale in the Art Gallery shop. It also produced several images and plans that were part of the exhibition. The second printer became part of a live installation within the exhibition itself. Each week OMA sent images from several of its live projects around the world showing the progress made on-site. The Epson Stylus Pro 7700 produced outstanding images that gave audiences a view of the development of OMA’s current work as it evolved.

Maarten Gielen, Rotor member explained: “We wanted to bring a ‘real time’ element to our OMA / Progress exhibition. Rather than streaming the expected lengthy, static videos via webcam, we chose to ask OMA architects to regularly send images of on-site progress. With the help of Epson, these images were instantly produced in large-format and to an incredible standard on a printer installed within the exhibition. In that way, the printer and the process became part of the exhibition.’’
 

Epson technology is renowned for delivering fast, efficient printing and the Epson Stylus Pro 7700 is designed to produce faster output without compromising print quality; an important feature for the Barbican to offer a print on demand service. The quality of the print was imperative for the images forming part of the exhibition and also for the special edition prints on sale to the visitors. Using the latest Epson inkjet technology the printer was the ideal choice to reproduce OMA’s images. The printer features the Epson MicroPiezo TFP printhead which achieves an outstanding level of detail and is optimised to work with the Epson's UltraChrome HDR inkset with Vivid Magenta delivering the widest gamut available.

Epson also supplied the EB-Z8000WU large venue WUXGA projector which was sited on the lower level and ran a sequence of every single image from OMA’s server – almost 3.5 million – that ran on a 48-hour loop.