After six years running OMA New York, architect Joshua Prince-Ramus felt it was time to cut the umbilical cord with his largely absentee partner-mentor, Rem Koolhaas.

OMA NY, formed in 2000, was owned by Koolhaas and Prince-Ramus. “Our office became an aberration within OMA,” says Prince-Ramus, who cut his teeth on OMA’s unorthodox Seattle Central Library. “There were six partners in the [Rotterdam-based Office of Metropol-itan Architecture] and me in New York,” he says.