5 Books by Rem Koolhaas

From the Publisher. Rem Koolhaas's celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the 19th, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle—"the culture of congestion"—and its architecture.

“Manhattan,” he writes, “is the 20th century's Rosetta Stone . . . occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall).” Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York's history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper. Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.

From the Publisher. Harvard Design School’s Project on the City is a graduate thesis program that examines the effects of modernization on the urban condition. Each year the Project on the City studies a specific region or phenomenon, and develops a conceptual framework and vocabulary for urban environments that cannot be described within the traditional categories of architecture, landscape, or urbanism. In order to understand new forms of urbanization, thesis advisor Rem Koolhaas and students from the fields of architecture, landscape, and urbanism document and analyze areas of study through a combination of field research, statistical analysis, historical developments, and anecdotes. The result of each project is an intensive, specialized study of the effects of modernization on the contemporary city.

During the years 1997 and 1998, Harvard’s graduate students concentrated their studies on the phenomenon of shopping as the primary mode of urban life. As a generative engine of urbanization, shopping has become a defining element of the modern city, and, in many cases, the reason for its existence. Research for this project, targeting the United States, Europe, and Asia, focuses on retail technologies, marketing strategies, and the hybridization of retail and cultural/recreational environments. Including essays ranging from “Disney Space: Urban Template” to “Three-Ring Circus: The Double Life of the Shopping Architect,” as well as hundreds of diagrams, floor plans, and photographs, the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping explores the ways in which shopping has refashioned the contemporary city.

From the Publisher. 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.

From the Publisher. Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism—the first non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images—master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions—telling the 20th century history of Japan through its architecture, from the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s to a devastated Japan after the war, the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo, to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, to the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo ’70 in Osaka and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.

From the Publisher. In the manifesto The City in the City—Berlin: A Green Archipelago, Oswald Mathias Ungers and a number of his colleagues from Cornell University presented the first concepts and intellectual models for the shrinking city. In contrast to the reconstruction of the European city that was popular at the time, they developed the figure of a polycentric urban landscape. However, the manifesto really began to exert an effect beginning in the 1990s onward, when the focus of the urban planning discourse turned to the examination of crises, recessions, and the phenomenon of demographic shrinking. This critical edition contains a reproduction of the Ungers-manifesto and a previously unpublished version by Rem Koolhaas, as well as interviews with co-authors Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur Ovaska. Introductory texts explain the development of the manifesto between Cornell and Berlin, position the work in the planning history of Berlin, and reveal its influence on current approaches.