S, M, L, XL: Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large (Hardcover)

by Rem Koolhaas (Author), Bruce Mau (Author), Jennifer Sigler (Editor), Hans Werlemann (Photographer)

Editorial Reviews

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1376 pages
• Publisher: Monacelli (December 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885254016
• ISBN-13: 978-1885254016
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.1 x 2.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #787,751 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MASTERPIECE, March 28, 1999

By	[e-mail] (Atlanta Georgia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: S M L XL: Second Edition (Hardcover)

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!

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect desert island fare, huge range, its own Web site!, April 13, 1997

By A Customer

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.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Big Mega-Mega, May 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: S M L XL: Second Edition (Hardcover)

S, M, L, XL, love it or hate it, is seminal; Rem Koolhaas is one of the most important cultural figures on the planet at this time. S, M, L, XL serves as memoir, manifesto, documentation, diagnosis, prognosis, prophecy, plan, agenda, & propoganda -- local and/or global historicocriticophilosophical montage, collage, and barrage. The book is beautiful. Bruce Mau has indeed "given form" to the silver juggernaut. The cover, the illustrations, typographies, photos, and text come together in the manner of a Tristam Shandy or Finnegan's Wake. S, M, L, XL as literature is a commentary on the condition we call "modernity". Koolhaas seeks an understanding of both his profession and the chaotic dynamics of the world his profession leaves structures in. Koolhaas is at home in the chaos, and like Pynchon in fiction, or Antonioni in film, is remarkably detached and involved in the process at the same time(maybe this is false, but Koolhaas as a writer and architect is an auteur possessed by genius, and S, M, L, XL is both comforting and uncanny at the same time). S,M,L,XL is proof that Koolhaas is aware of the increasingly global nature of the architect's profession. I am fascinated by the concept and practice of traveling, and activity Koolhaas knows all too well as a traveler in the discourse and practice of "modernity". Essays within S,M,L,XL such as "Islam After Einstein" and "Singapore Songlines:Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa" show his knowledge of the increasingly important relation between the East and West, and the implications involved. Perhaps the most brilliant essay/manifesto in the book is one of the most recently written, "The Generic City" which questions notions of progress in history and the archeology(ies) of modernism. One photo in the back of S,M,L, XL is particularly haunting in its image and message. It shows a larger-than-life and late Deng Xiaoping in the foreground of a painting of a coastal city, rais! ing his right hand gently to his people looking at the mural. The insert reads, "Two billion people won't be wrong." We'll find out. This is where much of Koolhaas' importance lies, his insight into what the great comparative historian and Sinophile Joseph Needham called the "Grand Titration". S,M,L, XL must endure, though it will not be read by the masses. It transcends (a dangerous word to use) architectural writing. Anyone concerned about the future of both the arts and sciences and those who wish to gain a greater understanding of our relation to our environment(s) must read this book.