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.

About the Authors: 

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 the 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, Massive Change and Bruce Mau: MC24

__________

Пролитсать книгу S, M, L, XL: Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.)

The long-anticipated monograph on OMA New York by Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long is sure to be the design and architecture book of the season. Presenting more than 20 radical architectural projects from a new generation of the firm, this mammoth volume is the first compendium by OMA, since Content and Rem Koolhaas’s S, M, L, XL.

Well into its fourth decade, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), founded by Rem Koolhaas in 1975, remains one of the most influential and successful practices of its kind. OMA describes itself as “a firm operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism that applies architectural thinking to domains beyond.” OMA New York, has grown from an American outpost to a full-fledged operation with its own attitudes, contributing to the evolution of the globally acclaimed office. Through a diversity of projects, the firm has transformed our understanding of the city and our evolving relationship with art, fashion, food, sustainability, and other quintessentially twenty-first-century preoccupations.

The works presented here elaborate on OMA’s philosophy even as they expand its portfolio geographically. Featured projects (led by partners Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long) include residential skyscrapers in New York, Miami, and San Francisco, mixed-use developments in cities from Tokyo to Houston, and projects like 11th Street Bridge Park in the public realm, alongside more intimate spaces such as the studio for renowned Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. Permanent structures, such as Milstein Hall at Cornell University, the new galleries of Quebec’s Musée National des Beaux-Arts, a cultural forum and neighborhood for Faena in Miami, and the expansion of museums such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the New Museum in Manhattan, contrast vividly with temporary interventions such as the Manus x Machina exhibition at the Met Costume Institute and the sculptural installation of soaring concrete columns for An Occupation of Loss.

In between projects are dialogues with leading policymakers, museum directors, artists, fashion designers, musicians, chefs, and curators — Christopher Hawthorne, Lisa Phillips and Massimiliano Gioni, Taryn Simon, Iris van Herpen, Virgil Abloh, David Byrne, Alice Waters, and Cecilia Alemani — who provide insight onto areas of the firm’s interests and preoccupations beyond the realm of architecture. 

About the Authors:

Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long are partners at OMA, based out of the New York office. Virgil Abloh is an American fashion designer and founder of Off White. David Byrne is an American musician & artist. Alice Waters is an American chef and author.