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.
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
A brick of a book … This book tells a tale, a great contemporary architectural odyssey-the story of how this architect came to think big.
About the Author
Rem Koolhaas is founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.); the firm s most important projects include the Lille Grand Palais in Lille; the Kunsthal in Rotterdam; Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague; Nexus Housing in Fukuoka; the Dutch House in Holland; and Villa dall Ava in Paris, all of which are included in
S,M,L,XL. Koolhaas is author of the seminal
Delirious New York and professor in practice of architecture and urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Bruce Mau founded the critically acclaimed firm Bruce Mau Design in 1985. He is the author of
Life Style and
Massive Change.

EAN: 9781885254863