Product Description

S,M,L,XL presents a selection of the remarkable visionary design work produced by the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) and its acclaimed founder, Rem Koolhaas, in its first twenty years, along with a variety of insightful, often poetic writings. The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural projects, photos and sketches, diary excerpts, personal travelogues, fairy tales, and fables, as well as critical essays on contemporary architecture and society.

The book's title is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. While Small and Medium address issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on what Koolhaas calls "the architecture of Bigness." Extra-Large features projects at the urban scale, along with the important essay "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" and other studies of the contemporary city. Running throughout the book is a "dictionary" of an adventurous new Koolhaasian language -- definitions, commentaries, and quotes from hundreds of literary, cultural, artistic, and architectural sources.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20019 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1376 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781885254863
• Condition: USED - GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
This extraordinary, massive, and mind-boggling 1,300-page book combines essays, manifestos, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city--and complex illustration--with work produced by Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture over the past twenty years. This almost overwhelming accumulation of words and images illuminates the condition of architecture today--its splendors and miseries--exploring and revealing the corrosive effects of politics, context, the economy, and globalization. In some ways, this is the "Medium is the Message" of 1990s architectural discourse: guaranteed to be hugely influential in the coming decades, but grossly misunderstood by those who have not read it. The core arguments it makes about metropolitan architecture--accepting complexity and lack of centralized control--are similar to those of Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. Very highly recommended.

From Publishers Weekly
Koolhaas, Dutch architect, author (Delirious New York) and cult figure, wants architecture to be "a chaotic adventure," and this massive tome certainly is. Created with Toronto-based designer Mau, it's a huge collage splicing freewheeling essays, diary excerpts, photographs, architectural plans, sketches, cartoons and surreal montages of images. There's also a running glossary of Zen-like definitions, plus fables and parables intended to shake modern architects out of conventional thinking and to dispel urban despair. In one essay, Koolhaas admires Japan's metabolist movement, which fuses organic, scientific, mechanistic and romantic vocabularies. That approach seems compatible with his own innovative, eclectic vision as head of the Dutch firm Office of Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.), whose houses, villas, office towers, libraries, colleges, cultural complexes and other projects are showcased here. While some readers may be mystified by a nonlinear hodgepodge, architects, planners and designers will find this frequently outrageous assemblage a provocative repository of ideas. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Sheer size, or "Bigness" as Koolhaas refers to it, generates its own logic. Although the concept suffers from neglect in architectural discourse, it has prospered on its own. The exemplary case, for O.M.A. at least, is Manhattan, and the exemplary strategy to use is Manhattanism. The program for Manhattanism has been established in [his earlier book] Delirious New York... S,M,L,XL gives a record of the actual implementation of Manhattanism throughout the various (un)realized projects and texts O.M.A. members have generated . . . .

O.M.A. has developed a very specific approach towards urbanism and architecture. Instead of denial of complexity, lack of control, opposition, contradiction, and Bigness, they embrace these conditions and declare them as the starting point for their projects. The urban context specifically, they state, no longer can be controlled in the "classical" manner of Modernism. -- Henri Achten

Customer Reviews

A MASTERPIECE
I'm about half way through it and already it has profoundly changed my view of the world around me. This book transcends architecture and touches on spirituality, politics, society and culture. A stirring manifesto for the convergence of several aspects of the global condition. Reading it has sparked a wave of creativity in my own line of work (financial analyst/software developer). Why is architecture important? Because it deals with the design of systems. Physical systems, biological, computer and natural systems. Architecture is life. I beleive Mr. Koolhaas understands this by evidence of his writings. Bravo!

Extra Medium...
There's a terrific line in Breakfast at Tiffany's. George Peppard proudly hands neighbor Audrey Hepburn a copy of his just-published book. She has no idea what to do with it, so she puts it on a shelf next to a vase, backs away and says "Doesn't that look nice?"
This book is a lot like that. A self-conciously designed object for the homes of style consumers who already have the right clothes and the B&B Italia furniture. A prop for the still-life they want to inhabit. If they ever got around to "reading" it, they'd discover to their great relief... it's NOT a book to be read in any strict classical sense.

It also reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon where one associate asks another, "Read the first few pages of any good books lately?" The age of the short attention span is not going away any time soon. This hefty grey slab is easily recast as the shiny new headstone for verbalized intelligence.

As Kracauer holds it, there's nothing wrong with framing a culture via fragments, but I have plenty of qualms about advancing one's own ideas that way. And I'm suspect of ideas that trowel on style in the abundance seen here. If I could believe Bruce Mau's intentions were more than just trying to look new, (This 'look' now permeates architecture publications) I'd have more respect for this, but it was obviously calculated as a totem of style and style-suffusion.

For better or for worse, the book got noticed, the industry was distracted by the pretty surfaces and the ascent of Koolhaas is a done deal.
If you want to actually READ a book full of Koolhaas' thoughts, skip this and get a copy of Delirious New York.

Perfect desert island fare, huge range, its own Web site!
The book's designer, Bruce Mau, has as much to do with its impact as the famed architect author, Rem Koolhaas. This is a "drop-in-anytime" book. Open any page, and let yourself go on the main story, squint at the working drawings, cruise the side margins gleaned from a multitude of literary and professional sources. I compare it to a rich Web site... you enter anywhere and link to new topics and images in a surprising and stimulating way. As a personal challenge, I attacked the book in the most plebeian fashion- from cover to cover, an effort spanning several months, hence true desert island satisfaction. Certain of the stories have been reviewed by others as fairy tales, and I did read them as such. Imagine my surprise reading other architectural histories to find they were virtually true! The graphically-assisted view of project relationships is welcome to any project planner. After a dose of Koolhaas' generic city, you will see your world through new eyes. Despite its uncomfortable bulk, S M L XL contains enormous energy and insights, and is not for the architect or urban planner only. Also, despite its enormous bulk, it is well bound and will not disintegrate as you lug it all over in the significant amount of time it will take you to finish it! Compliments to Monacelli for publishing it, and risking our tolerance for a behemoth edition.