Al Manakh, Gulf Region
by Rem Koolhaas, Ole Bouman, Mark Wigley (Editors)
Columbia University GSAPP / Archis, 2007

AMO in collaboration with Moutamarat and ARCHIS 

Al Manakh offers a detailed analysis of the history, culture and architecture of The Gulf region including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah and discusses the implications of the rapid development of these territories for the rest of the world.

This is the first time that the unprecedented urban condition of this region has been comprehensively documented from diverse viewpoints and communicated to outside the region. Voices of architects, intellectuals and developers making The Gulf happen are represented in the numerous essays and interviews that accompany this richly illustrated study. Key figures such as, Rem Koolhaas, Ole Bouman, and Thomas Krens give their take on the current situation in The Gulf, along with their predictions for the future of this ‘ultimate tabula rasa’.

Al Manakh is divided into three sections:

I.  The Dubai Guide
This opening chapter edited by MOUTAMARAT considers current projects, productions, plans and ideas happening specifically in Dubai. Highlights include essays by George Katodrytis, Elie Domit and Nadim Karam.

II.  Gulf Survey
This sizable section presents the in-depth research on The Gulf region carried out by AMO, the creative think tank of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). In this survey individual social, cultural and urban histories are presented for seven territories along The Gulf coast. Detailed statistics offer new insight into the architecture and urban ambitions of the Gulf and the social, economic and cultural consequences that the new urban condition can have on a society. A collection of essays reveals some of the most cogent aspects of The Gulf now, such as The World man-made islands off the coast of Dubai or the construction workers’ cities. Writings by Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf and Todd Reisz offer vital insight into the significance of the phenomena of The Gulf in the contemporary global context. At the end of this section a comprehensive overview of all the current urban and resort developments in The Gulf is offered. This is the first list of its kind that acts as an invaluable resource providing detailed information on projects taking shape today.

III.  The Global Agenda
The last section edited by ARCHIS reflects concepts and strategies for design to provide shelter, security, sustainability, fairness and dialogue. Authors and artists like Nader Ardalan, Stefano Boeri, CRIT, Ricardo Devesa, Emiliano Gandolfi, Jiang Jun, Jeroen Mensink, Bas Princen, Ilka & Andreas Ruby, Urban Think Tank and others reflect on ‘what can be the mission for design today’. Thirteen ‘Creative Design Agendas’ are compiled as a design manual for the greater good. With impressive graphics, a mirage of images and ground breaking new discoveries Al Manakh will be the most instrumental and immediately useful tool on The Gulf for architects, planners, designers, developers, decision makers and academics alike. Al Manakh will be launched as a special issue of Volume Magazine (#12) at the first International Design Forum organized in Dubai by Moutamarat from May 27-29. After this date, the publication will be made available in North America, Europe and the rest of the Middle East and Asia.

AA Words One: Architecture, Ideology and the City:
Peter Eisenman Meets Rem Koolhaas
by Brett Steele (Author), Rem Koolhaas (Author), Peter Eisenman (Contributor), Jeffrey Kipnis (Contributor), Robert E. Somol (Contributor)
AA Publications (May 10, 2007)

In January 2006 Peter Eisenman joined Rem Koolhaas at the Architectural Association for an evening of conversation about architecture, ideology, and the city. Their dialogue forms the basis for the first volume of AA Words, a series emphasizing the written word as the basis for critical debate by contemporary architects and theorists. Each architect states his views about the terms of architecture, including its theories and relationship to the city and other forms of critical and cultural practice. As a coda to the conversation, the book includes contributions by Jeffrey Kipnis, Robert E. Somol, and Brett Steele, who offer their personal interpretations of the critical practices of Eisenman and Koolhaas.

Lagos: How It Works
by Rem Koolhaas AMO
Edited by Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi
Lars Müller Publishers (April 2007)

Lagos: How it Works is the result of more than eight years of research in Lagos, Nigeria. As a symbol of West African urbanism, Lagos contradicts almost every defining feature of the “modern” city. And yet it’s a city that works. In over five hundred pages, this mega-book documents the changing mega-city with essays, illustrations, maps, diagrams, rumors, interviews, images, and anecdotes. It follows the development of Lagos from a small-scale, traditional settlement on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea in 1 800 into one of the largest mega-cities in the world today. With an emphasis on modernity, infrastructure, and the role of oil and town planners in the 1 970s, it observes the effects that globalization has had on the city’s identity, from its position on the cutting edge of African modernity through its dramatic decline during the oil crisis until today.

Rem Koolhaas & Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
The Conversation Series: Volume 4
Walther Konig (March 1, 2007)

In this traditional paperback, renowned critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist teams up with Dutch avant-garde architect and paradigm-shifting intellectual, Rem Koolhaas, for a discussion of Koolhaas's work in China, his designs for Prada, architecture as metaphor, and the development of urbanism in the slipstream of globalization.

The Gulf
by Rem Koolhaas
Lars Müller Publishers (November 3, 2006)

This accordion-fold booklet contains a series of analytical views of the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf by AMO-OMA and colleagues from the American University of Sharjah, UAE. In a “futurized present,” these views seek to depict the current and unprecedented state of the region, which invites one to contemplate the design of a new version of urbanism. Like a pristine and untouched canvas, the sand and sea of the Persian Gulf coast constitute a tabula rasa, waiting to receive the imprint of new identities. The West is guilty of a double negligence vis-à-vis this land of possibilities— something that actually has its origins in the West is not being taken seriously, and as a result we are unable to seize upon a burgeoning global phenomenon. This accordion-fold booklet is published to coincide with the 10th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

CONTENT

Introduction
Kuwait
The Gulf in Numbers
Import Expat
Bahrain
Halcrow
Export Dubai
Qatar
The Virtually-Unknowns
Abu Dhabi
Dubai
Land Reclamation
Educational Diplomacy
Ras Al-Khaimah
Gulf City Glossary

Junkspace
Rem Koolhaas
Quodlibet (Nov. 2006)
Language: Italian

I tre scritti di Rem Koolhaas, qui riuniti insieme dall'autore su richiesta dell'editore italiano, sono da leggere come il seguito ideale di Delirious New York (1978). Essi ci offrono una nitida visione delle forze ingovernabili che regolano lo spazio nelle nostre città. Il rapporto fra storia e identità (fra «destino e carattere», direbbe Benjamin) è qui smascherato crudelmente: Junkspace, «spazio spazzatura», è una nuova categoria del pensiero che Koolhaas, maestro di similitudini, introduce con lirico cinismo per aprirci gli occhi sullo spazio in cui viviamo, e forse sullo spazio in generale.

Post-Occupancy
by AMO / Rem Koolhaas
Domus d'Autore, Italy, 2006 

As part of the 'Festa per l'architettura' Domus will present the new "Domus d'Autore" series, dedicated to "listening to the voice of those who know how to look beyond current confines and have the strength to direct and influence our way of perceiving the city and the spaces beyond it." This is how publisher Giovanna Mazzocchi describes the project, with the first issue edited by AMO/Rem Koolhaas. To illustrate this point of view, AMO has chosen to analyse four recent OMA buildings in the light of everyday experience, examining the way they are used rather than their form.

"(Our) buildings take their place in a primordial sea of predecessors on which their existence depends and to whose existence they try to contribute. We looked through the eyes of tourists, trusted others to record. Away from the triumphalist or miserabilist glare of media, we wanted to see what happens in the absence of the author, to represent the realities we were complicit in creating post-occupancy, as facts, not feats."
— Rem Koolhaas.

CCTV by OMA
Architecture and Urbanism, July 2005 Special Issue
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren

Aiming for the China 2008 Olympic Games, many famous international architects have started to inject their design concepts into China, the construction war has reached its peak, of the many projects, CCTV(China Central Television) stands outs prominently. This issue clarifies the whole picture based on the latest data with full cooperation by OMA.

Contents
Introduction
Interview with Rem Koolhaas
Beijing
CBD
Site
Program
Buildings
CCTV Headquarters
	Loop Ground Floor Television Making
		Program Production News Broadcasting Administration Staff Facilities
	Structure Facade Iconography 10,000 People Lobbies
		Tower 1 Lobby Tower 2 Lobby
	Visitors Loop Circulation Cores Elevators Structural Analysis Plans and Sections
TVCC
	Envelope Ground Floor Television Cultural Center Theater Hotel Axonometrics and Plans
Service Building
Landscape
Media Park
Buildings and the City
Technical Drawings
Collaboration
Team
Chronology
Firm History

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Content
Rem Koolhaas
Taschen, 2004

Content is a product of the moment. Inspired by the ceaseless fluctuations of the early 21st century, it bears the marks of globalism and the market, ideological siblings that, over the past twenty years, have undercut the stability of contemporary life.

This book is born of that instability. It is not timeless; it's almost out of date already. It uses volatility as a license to be immediate, informal, blunt; it embraces instability as a new source of freedom.

Content is a follow-up to SMLXL, an inventory of seven years of OMA's tireless labor. In many ways it is structured according to what its predecessor is not-dense, cheap, disposable... The relentless internal logic that propelled SMLXL is here counteracted by the incorporation of critical, external voices. Subjects are not arranged according to size, but by geographical proximity: the trajectory moves ever eastward, beginning in San Francisco, ending in Tokyo.

Content is dominated by a single theme — "Go East" — at once a response to 9-11's mounting wreckage and an acknowledgment of the eastward momentum that has, through AMO's political involvement with the EU and an increasing density of Chinese projects, redirected the office's energy. It is an attempt to illustrate the architect's ambiguous relations with the forces of globalization, an account of seven years spent scouring the earth - not as a business traveler or backpacker, but as a vagabond - roving, searching for an opportunity to realize the visions that make remaining at home torturous. Content is, beyond all, a tribute to what are perhaps OMA-AMO's greatest virtues - its dogged, almost existential pursuit of discomfort, its comitment to engaging the world by inviting itself to places where it has no authority, places where it doesn't "belong".

— Brendan McGetrick, Editor

CONTENTS

Violence against architecture
by Bill Millard
Tales from the front lines of the war on the city

History
by Rem Koolhaas (timeline compiles by Margared Arbanas)
The World according to OMA: 1972-2003

Material Fetish
Feel the steel

Wallpaper
Prada SoHo interior outtakes

Architectural Tribunal
by Eyal Weizman
Architecture and urban planning have become tools of war. Who's guilty and what should be done to stop them?

The Poisonous Mixture
by Shumon Basar
A disturbing look inside the architect's fragile ego.

Box vs. Blob
There's a war going on outside.

Patent Office
Don't bite; it's not polite.

Patent Pending
by AMO
Bulk is back!

12 Reasons to Get Back into Shape
by R. E. Somol
Round 2: Shape vs. form

Banned Words!
by Bill Millard
What's to be done when a word loses its power to explain, inspire or even annoy?

Context
by AMO
Snapshots of the world in transition

Go East!
_______ is History
by Michael Rock & Lucia Allais
What happens to a magazine that proclaims prophecies if only its worst scenarios come true?

Prada San Francisco
In memory of

Universal HQ
by Rem Koolhaas
Commissioned to design the new headquarters of MCA/Universal in 1995, OMA spent three years navigating the corporate landscape. Yet another unrealized dream, the Universal experience convinced OMA of the need to find ways of escaping architecture's lethal slowness.

Almost Famous
by Dan Wood
The highs and lows of life in Hollywood

LACMA
Confronted with a museum that, by housing its collections in seven seperate buildings, had become painful to visit, OMA proposes a fresh start.

Taschen House
What do you give to the man who has everything?

Prada LA
A look inisde the clandestine testing grounds where OMA scientists are busy constructing the latest Beverly Hills boutique

Seattle Public
by Joshua Ramus
The public library is at a cross roads: increasingly under pressure from Amazon.coms and Barnes & Nobles, its role has never seemed less sure. At the same time, as one of the last bastions of open, free space, its continued existence has never been more vital. How can the library adjust to the times without loosing its essence?

Re-learning from Las Vegas
Interview by Rem Koolhaas & Hans Ulrich Obrist
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown talk Afriac, socialism, signage, and the current state of the strip.

Guggenheim-Hermitage
Living it up with Jeremy Irons, Dennis Hopper, and Lauren Hutton at the opening of the (now closed) Guggenheim Las Vegas

Junk Space
by Rem Koolhaas
The new flamboyant, flexible, forgettable face of architecture

Black Metropolis
by Ellen Grimes
Built up by massive migration and racist land policies, leveled by slum clearance initiatives, Chicago's Bronzeville section is now in the throes of a nostalgia-driven campaign of erasure and gentrification. Some things never change.

Miestakes
by Rem Koolhaas
Can Mies's legacy be saved from the good intentions of his defenders?

The Chicago School
In 1950, when Mies van der Rohe designed the campus for IIT, the university was booming. Fifty years later, the student population had halved, but the size of the campus has doubled; its surroundings had also vanished, erased by slum clearance. Can a single architectural gesture recreate the urban densities on which Mies's original design depended?

MoMA Charette
As its interests exponentially expand, how can the museum's primary function — the organized contemplation of art — remain undisturbed?

Breathing Space
What can be done to prevent Harvard from strangling Cambridge?

Astorology
by Fenna Haakma Wagenaar
The OMA-Herzog & de Meuron marriage from the inside out

The Butterflies fate
by Luis Fernández-Galiama
The OMA-Herzog & de Meuron marriage from the outside in

NeWhitney
by Shohei Shigematsu
3 is a magic number.

No more surprises
Interview by Beatriz Colomina & Rem Koolhaas
Martha Stewart, queen of American domesticity, discusses her dream home, life in the public eye, and conquering China.

Sex and the City
OMA's Prada SoHo store goes Hollywood

White Briefs against Filth
by Rem Koolhaas
The waning power of New York

Yes/No
The frenzied rise and vengeful fall of the global market economy

Museums
by Ole Scheeren
The market influence on culture

Maybe
by Jeffrey Inaba
In search of the city

Back to School
Photos by Rem Koolhaas
Above Sao Paulo modernity

Red Radio
by Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi
Cold War in the tropics

Lagos Life
Bola Tinuba discusses Europe, America, and his vision for Africa's biggest city

Prada Yada
So it's agreed: Prada is simply too expensive

Map: BBA
Can reality TV unite a continent?

Big Vermeer
What are you staring at?

Intensity generators
A conversation between Scott Lash & Arjen Mulder
Two leading media theorists get intensive

Cut and Paste
How to turn a Dutch house into a Portugese concert hall in under two weeks

Casa de Musica
The concert hall is a victim of its own success: rigidly defined by the necessity for perfect acoustics, most concert halls succumb to the time-tested reliability of the "shoe box." For the architect bent on innovtion, what remains to be done once a typology has been perfected?

Perbaaday
What would happen if a fashion house adopted its users' esthetics as its own?

Out of fashion
by Nicholas Firket & Markus Schaefer
The past, present, and future of the AMO-Prada partnership

Crib Death
by Rem Koolhaas
Build and destroy

Hollocore
by Nanne de Ru
At the center of Europe lies the Hollocore, a field of low rise sprawl. In the absence of identifiable demographic centers, the region is now dominated by an endless proliferation of loopholes and subcultures Content takes you there.

Second Empire
by Michael Hardt
New World Order 2.0

Content: Exhibition
Live from Berlin

Dutch Embassy
Challenged to build a structure that allows for air-tight security but conveys a sense of "Dutch openness," OMA chose to...

Haus Flick I & II
Live your collection

Maison à Bordeaux
The rebirth of house

E-conography
by Reinier de Graaf & Rem Koolhaas
Europe's current communication, whether external or internal, lacks eloquence and enthusiasm. Recent events have revealed Europe's urgent need of an iconographic overhaul. What can be done?

Spiegelein Spiegelein an der Wand
Interview by Reinier de Graaf & Rem Koolhaas
Stefan Aust, editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel discusses the future of Europe, the current state of American journalism, and the coming of Der Spiegel in english.

Utopia Station
by Rem Koolhaas
Although often suppressed, every architect caries the Utopian gene. To rekindle a dying flame, we take a look at Moscow, where, within a space of one km², we find what is, perhaps, the greatest concentration of Utopias ever known.

The State of the Hermitage
by Anastassia Smirnova
Considered by many in St. Petersburg to be a state within a state, the Hermitage Museum has acquired its own mythology.

Baalbeck
The fall of Rome

Jerusalem
Confessions of an Ingrate

The Hyperbuilding
OMA's one km high city in the sky

Asia New Town
Four proposals for covering a blank slate

Shanghai Exponential
by Jason Long
Is Expo 2010 doomed to success?

Togok
Composite sketches

Big time dilemmas
Interview by Kayoko Ota
Toyo Ito discusses the current state of Chinese architecture.

Beijing Preservation
Beijing's rapid modernization threatens to erase many of its existing layers: how can preservation be used to ensure that Beijing retains its urban heterogenity?

Map: Skyscraper Migration
The high rise relocates to Asia

Kill the Skyscraper
Although its qualities are largely exhausted, the skyscraper remains the dominant presence in modern cities. For Beijing, OMA proposes a low rise field in the center of the Central Business District.

The enemy
by Rem Koolhaas
Aussie bandits

CCTV
The new headquarters for CCTV in Beijing is OMA's most ambitious project ever, the embodiment of all the west has lost.

Roppongi Hills
by Rem Koolhaas
Pure evil

Patents II
Asian edition

Post-modern engineering?
by Rem Koolhaas
Let's hear it for the engineers....

Property
OMA-AMO since SMLXL

When Buildings Attack
Illustrations by Simon Brown

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The Dutch Embassy in Berlin by OMA/Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas, Kayoko Ota (concept), Duc Boorsma, Franois Chaslin, Rem Koolhaas and Ton van Zeeland, Photography: Candida Hfer
NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004

In November 2003 Berlin gained one more spectacular example of contemporary architecture. The new Dutch Embassy built by the internationally renowned architect Rem Koolhaas on the River Spree in what used to be East Berlin. After the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, Congrexpo in Lille and the villa in Bordeaux among others, the Berlin embassy once again attests to the astonishing design talent of the Netherlands' best-known architect. Two concepts underpin the embassy design. Koolhaas managed to turn to his advantage the strict planning regulations applying in Berlin, which require that every corner of a city block has to be built-up. In one corner of the site he designed a freestanding cube to house the actual embassy. Wrapped around it, and defining the other corners, is an L-shaped block of three houses for embassy staff. The principal organizing element is a continuous route spiralling through the building, with the different embassy departments strung off it discretely. The spiral winds its way through the cube accompanied by new and unexpected views of the building and more especially of the city. In The Dutch Embassy in Berlin by OMA/Rem Koolhaas sketches, drawings and models illustrate the design's points of departure. Koolhaas himself expounds upon the context of the project. Candida Höfer gives her personal perspective on the embassy's exterior and interior. Parisian architecture critic François Chaslin analyses the building in an essay.

Contents

Plates [1]
Candida Höfer

Psychogeography of a Cube
The Dutch Embassy in Berlin
François Chaslin

Trajectory

Levels and Sections

Plates [2]
Candida Höfer

Building Abroad
Dutch presence in Berlin: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as client
Duc boorsma and Ton van Zeeland

Index of Plates

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Layout: Interview with Philip Johnson by Rem Koolhaas and Hams Ulrich Obrist
Edited by Thomas Bayrle.
Interview by Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Koln, 2004

Philip Johnson (born 1906) was director of architecture at the New York Museum of Modern Art during the 1930s. In “Layout”, he converses with colleagues and curators Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist about art, artists, and architects. Subjects include his legendary exhibit International Style (1932) at MOMA, the work of Schwitters, Mondrian, Finsterlin, Warhol, Duchamp and his admiration for Mies van der Rohe.

From this interview material, the artist Thomas Bayrle has created an extraordinary book, taking as its design basis, the layout of the New York Times and fleshing it out with text. In English and German text.

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WHAT IS OMA?
Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture
Rem Koolhaas, compiled and edited by Véronique Patteeuw
NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2003

This book provides a clear insight into the role and significance of Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Authors of international repute from beyond the province of architecture examine OMA's work in the light of social and economic developments.

The many facets of Koolhaas come under review: his take on architectural theory and the conceptual apparatus he employs, his vision of urbanism and the contemporary city, the designs put into practice by OMA and the research projects of the AMO think-tank, which exist outside the immediate boundaries of architecture.

This book paints an intelligent picture of the sheer range of OMA's architecture and of Koolhaas's seminal role in the architectural world.

Essays by Aaron Betsky, Ian Buruma, H.J.A. Hofland, Okwui Enwezor, Neil Leach, Matthew Stadler, Bruce Sterling, Bart Verschaffel. Excerpts by Jean Attali, René Boomkens, Fredric Jameson, Fritz Neumeyer, Michael Sorkin, Anthony Vidler, Sarah Whiting.

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New-York délire :
Un Manifeste rétroactif pour Manhattan
Rem Koolhaas, Catherine Collet
Parenthèses (Feb 17 2003)

Ce "manifeste rétroactif de Manhattan" selon l'expression même de l'auteur, décrit un Manhattan théorique, comme conjoncture, dont la ville actuelle n'est que l'imparfaite réalisation parce que seule une reconstruction spéculative peut faire comprendre le New York réel, vieilli prématurément. Il s'agit donc d'une interprétation de la théorie implicite sous-jacente au développement de la cité gigantesque. L'auteur montre comment la trame rigide du début a été envahie par le délire. Une abondante illustration appuie la thèse.

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Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping
Harvard Design School Project on the City
Edited by Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong, Harvard Design School, 2002

Contributors: Tae-Wook Cha, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jutiki Gunter, Dan Herman, Hiromi Hosoya, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong, Kiwa Matsushita, John McMorrough, Juan Palop-Casado, Markus Schaefer, Tran Vinh, Srdjan Jovanovich Weiss, Louise Wyman

Shopping is arguably the terminal form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has infiltrated–even replaced–almost every aspect of urban life. Town centers, suburbs, streets, and now airports, train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet, and the military are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. The voracity by which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal–if only–modes by which we experience the city. The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping explores the spaces, people, techniques, ideologies, and inventions by which shopping has so dramatically refashioned the city. Perhaps the beginning of the twenty-first century will be remembered as the point where the urban could no longer be understood without shopping.

CONTENTS

Evolution   History
Scope   Statistics
Crisis   The dilemma

Air Conditioning  
Life support for the consumer.  
Sze Tsung Leong with Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss

...And Then There Was Shopping  
The last remaining form of public life.  
Sze Tsung Leong

Bit Structures  
The unbearable lightness of network economy.  
Hiromi Hosoya and Markus Schaefer

Brand Zone  
Environment with added value.  
Hiromi Hosoya and Markus Schaefer

Captive  
Airmall.  
Sze Tsung Leong

City of Shopping  
Postmall urbanism.  
John McMorrough

Coopetition  
Singapore as a shopping center.  
Tran Vinh

Crystal Palace  
From greenhouse to mall.  
Louise Wyman

Depato  
The Japanese department Store.  
Kiwa Matsushita

Disney Space  
Urban template.  
Chuihua Judy Chung

Divine Economy  
Church reformation.  
Sze Tsung Leong

Ecologically Correct  
Conserve and spend.  
Tae-Wook Cha

Ecology  
Shopping is ecology.  
Tae-Wook Cha

Escalator  
Mechanism of smoothness.  
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and Sze Tsung Leong

E-urope  
Virtualizing European shopping.  
Juan Palop-Casado

Good Intentions  
Jane Jacobs and after.  
John McMorrough

Gruen Urbanism  
Mall as urbanism.  
Sze Tsung Leong

High Architecture  
Fear and loathing of shopping.  
Daniel Herman

Jerde Transfer  
Spatial assault  
Daniel Herman

Junkspace  
The debris of modernization.  
Rem Koolhaas

Legislated Transactions  
"Urban Design and Public Policy"  
John McMorrough

Lippo Way  
Gypsy empire.  
Tran Vinh

Mall  
Requiem for a type.  
Daniel Herman

Mobility  
Bringing the consumer to shopping.  
Sze Tsung Leong

Mobilize  
Shopping and the military.  
Sze Tsung Leong

Ms. Consumer  
The making of public space.  
Chuihua Judy Chung

Next Big Thing  
Survival of the fittest  
Daniel Herman

Nikevolution  
Strategies of a brand.  
Jutiki Gunter with Jeffrey Inaba

Psychogramming  
Predicting the consumer.  
Hiromi Hosoya and Markus Schaefer

Real(i)ty  
"Selling cities like soap."  
John McMorrough

Redemption  
Synchronicity revisited.  
Markus Schaefer

Relearning from Las Vegas
Then and now.  
Interview with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi
by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas.
Visual Essay by Chuihua Judy Chung and Sze Tsung Leong

Replascape™  
Mechanized nature.  
Louise Wyman

Resistance  
Europe vs. shopping  
Chuihua Judy Chung with Juan Palop-Casado

Scale  
A portfolio.  
Daniel Herman and Sze Tsung Leong

Section in Asia  
A portfolio.  
Tae-Wook Cha

Separated at Birth  
Frank Gehry vs. Jon Jerde.  
Daniel Herman

Suburban Model  
"Downtown needs a lesson from the suburbs."  
John McMorrough

Thou Shalt Not Shop  
Devotion or shopping?  
Chuihua Judy Chung

Three-Ring Circus  
The double life of the shopping architect.  
Daniel Herman

Tokyo Metabolism  
The Japanese convenience store.  
Hiromi Hosoya and Markus Schaefer

Ulterior Spaces  
Invisible motives.  
Sze Tsung Leong

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Great Leap Forward
Harvard Design School Project on the City
Edited by Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2002

Contributors: Bernard Chang, Mihai Craciun, Nancy Lin, Yuyang Liu, Katherine Orff, Stephanie Smith

Destined to become a crucial presence in the twenty-first century through sheer size alone, the Pearl River Delta region of the People¹s Republic of China – a cluster of five cities with a population of 12 million that will become a megalopolis of 36 million inhabitants by the year 2020 – has been gripped by a relentless pursuit of development at a scale and velocity previously unseen in the world. This maelstrom of modernization has been hastened by the presence of two Special Economic Zones in the Pearl River Delta: laboratories for the combined experimentation of communism and capitalism that have produced an entirely new urban substance. Great Leap Forward is based on field work conducted in 1996 and consists of a series of interrelated studies investigating a complex urban condition that has resulted from a uniquely transformed political environment.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION   Rem Koolhaas
CHRONOLOGY   Pearl River Delta   Yuyang Liu
IDEOLOGY   Shenzhen   Mihai Craciun
ARCHITECTURE   Shenzhen   Nancy Lin
MONEY   Dongguan   Stephanie Smith
LANDSCAPE   Zhuhai   Kate Orff
POLICY   Guangzhou   Yuyang Liu
INFRASTRUCTURE   Pearl River Delta   Bernard Chang
GLOSSARY   Project on the City

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Rem Koolhaas (Archipockets)
Aurora Cuito (Editor), Cristina Montes (Editor)
Neues Publishing Company, 2002

Rem Koolhaas (Rotterdam,1944) studied architecture at the AA in London--where he went on to become a lecturer--and at the IAUS in New York, during Peter Eisenman's time there. Koolhaas has always been connected with the theory of architecture, as lecturer at the innovative AA, as a speaker, and with his published work: Delirious New York, a retrospective manifesto for Manhattan (1978) and the recent S, M, L, XL (1995). In 1972 Koolhaas set up the OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), whose name clearly expresses the planning intentions of the team, comprising Koolhaas, Elia and Zoe Zenghelis, and Madelon Vriessendorp.

Each volume in this eminently affordable series highlights the work of a renowned 20th century architect. Packed with dazzling four-color photographs of exteriors and interiors, detailed plans, generous layouts and brief, comprehensive texts, these books are both authoritative and attractive, while their convenient size makes them great travel companions. An easy reference for work, school, or play, these colorful introductions to architectural wonders will fill your head with inspiration—without emptying your wallet.

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Mutations 
Rem Koolhaas, Harvard Design School Project on the City
ACTAR arc en rêve centre d'architecture, 2001

The Harvard Design School Project on the City began as a response to a pervasive condition of architectural practice, in which the architect is asked to intervene in, but never to appreciate or understand, a given situation. An architect's interests are ultimately determined by a series of random encounters with projects and clients that do not allow an independent investigation of issues or conditions outside their field of vision. Thus architects operate, be definition, with ulterior motives; the capacity for independent analysis, research or investigation is simply not within their repertoire. It is becoming increasingly important for architects to operate on a level independent of architecture, in order to understand, at the most basic level, the phenomena affecting the development of architecture and the city. The Project on the City is an investigation of a series of issues related to the urban condition. These issues have been chosen to reflect certain pertinent, unusual, or unknown conditions of the urban mutations taking place at this moment in the world. The project has no connection with design: it is a pure research project, conducted by thesis students who explore a specific subject each year.

 
Contents

Statistics  Céline Rozenblat 

How to Build a City Roman Operating System
(Harvard Project on the City)
Amale Andraos, Rami El-Samahy, Patricia Heyda, Jennifer Lee, Christina Long, Allyson Mendenhall, Francisco Meza, Hunter Ford Tura, Peter Zellner

The Roman System, or the Generic in All Times and Tenses Jean Attali 

Telegram from Nowhere  Mckenzie Wark
Fragments of Net-Theory  Nadia Tazi
What's New About the New Media? Friedrich Kittler
A Mutation of Political Economy as a Whole  Yann Moulier Boutang
Looking Like Flames and Falling Like Stars, Kosovo, the First Internet War  Thomas Keenan
Breakthrough to the World Code: etoy's Concept of Net Architecture Reinhold Grether
The Global City: Introducing a Concept and its History 
Saskia Sassen

Shopping (Harvard Project on the City)
Tae-Wook Cha, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jutiki Gunter, Daniel Herman, Hiromi Hosoya, Sze Tsung Leong, Kiwa Matsushita, John McMorrough, Juan Palop Casado, Markus Schaefer, Tran Vinh, Srdjan Jovanovich Weiss, Louise Wyman
Control Space  Sze Tsung Leong 

Photographic Dossier

Europa -- Francesco Jodice
Europa -- Jordi Bernadó
America -- Alex MacLean
China -- Jordi Bernadó
Urban Africa -- Edgar Cleijne
A Surpassing Mutation -- Jean Attali

PDR Pearl River Delta (Harvard Project on the City) 
Bernard Chang, Mihai Craciun, Nancy Lin, Yuyang Liu, Katherine Orff, Stephanie Smith, Rem Koolhaas 

USE Uncertain States of Europe  Stefano Boeri and Multiplicity

Notes for a Research Program  Stefano Boeri 

USE Cases

Notes for a Cultural History Between Uncertainty and the Contemporary Urban Condition  Yorgos Simeoforidis
Post it City: The Other European Public Spaces  Giovanni La Varra
Unstable Geographies   Valentin Blum
Observe and Interact   Lorenzo Romito
Green is the Color  Mirko Zardini
Cityscapes  Gabriele Basilico
Smooth Space  Aldo Bonomi
Strata, Not Mutations  Eduard Bru
The New Landscape  Bart Lootsma
Temporary Habits  Francesco Jodice

The American City -- Sanford Kwinter, Daniela Fabricus
Urbanism: An Archivist's Art?
Television: The Infrastructural Revolution
Generica
Houston™
Contract with America
American Noir
Dossier

Lagos (Harvard Project on the City)
Pierre Belanger, Chuihua Judy Chung, Joshua Comaroff, Michael Cosmas, Sonal Gandhi, A. David Hamilton, Lan-ying Ip, Jeannie Kim, Gullivar Shepard, Reshma Singh, Nathaniel Slayton, James Stone, Sameh Wahba 

Urban Rumors -- a project curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
produced in collaboration with Fri-Art, Fribourg, Switzerland

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Colours
Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Norman Foster, Alessandro Mendini
with a forword by Gerhard Mack, Princeton Architectural Press, 2001

"The nature of colour should change - no longer just a thin layer of change, but something that genuinely alters perception" and this stipulation of Rem Koolhaas is echoed by the world famous architects and designers Alessandro Mendini and Norman Foster. In this volume, they present between them a total of 90 colours - each covering half a page - accompanied by comments on the background, the significance and the applications of the colours. The studies of colours from each office form the basis of this book, and were previously only available in extravagant individual editions.
With this comprehensive and consistent presentation of the varying approaches to colour, we have a compendium which shows the wide use of colour in today's technologically advanced architecture with its modern, post-modern and deconstructive orientation. The range of examples of the colours in practice includes load-bearing structures, facades, interior designs, furnishing and the entire spectrum of product design.

Contents

Between surface and space colour in architecture
Foreword by Gerhard Mack

Rem Koolhaas/OMA
The future of colours is looking bright by Rem Koolhaas
30 colours

Normal Foster
Colour in the work of Norman Foster by Paul Overy
30 colours

Alessandro Mendini
Interview with Alessandro Mendini by Stefano Casciani
30 colours

Biographies
Concept
Acknowledgements
Colophon

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Projects for Prada, Part 1
Rem Koolhaas (Editor), Miuccia Prada, Patrizio Bertelli, Michael Kubo (Editor), Fondazione Prada, 2001

Indefinite expansion represents a crisis: in the typical case it spells the end of the brand as a creative enterprise and the beginning of the brand as purely financial enterprise.

Expansion can be measured on two levels: quantity and quality. On the level of numbers, there are simply more and more Prada stores; on the level of scale, Prada is about tot launch a number of special epicenter stores.

The danger of the large number is repetition: each additional store reduces aura and contributes to a sense of familiarity. The danger of the larger scale is the Flagship syndrome: a megalomaniac accumulation of the obvious that eliminates the last elements of surprise and mystery that cling to the brand, imprisoning it in a 'definitive' identity.

But expansion can also be used for a strategy of permanent redefinition of the brand. By introducing two kinds of stores - the typical and the unique - the epicenter store becomes a device that renews the brand by counteracting and destabilizing any received notion of what Prada is, does, or will become. The epicenter store functions as a conceptual window: a medium to broadcast future directions that positively charges the larger mass of typical stores.

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Wired: Koolworld
Guest Editor: Rem Koolhaas, Conde Nast, 2001

In April 2001, the publisher Condé Nast, the wholly owned subsidiary of Advance Publications, asked AMO to look at Wired, post boom. Where to locate a new mission, how to position a magazine previously based on the relentless narcissism of Silicon Valley?

Fashion magazines adhere to a rigorous formula—a focus-group-tested mélange of cleavage, airbrushed skin, and exclamation points. Wired's strategy for techno-single mission: eulogize the old and herald the new. This formula served as an ever-renewable font of optimism for a monthly package perpetually promising the next big thing.

In the beginning, the Word The Wired Dictionary emerged out of a hunch: that a magazine's vocabulary can be as glossy as its paper stock. The simplest way to understand Wired's message was to strip its language of grammar, catalog every word it had ever published and record the frequency of its use. The dictionary made apparent the invisible fin-de-siècle lexicon that Wired both chronicle and helped produce.

And so tracing Wired's history was no longer a matter of following shifts in ownership, tracking world events, or chronicling editorial regimes. We found that a simple and consistent rhythm punctuated Wired's seven years of existence: on average, Wired proclaimed a revolution every three months. A new future generated before other futures had time to be verified.

Optimism
What happens to a magazine that proclaims prophecies if only its worst-case scenarios come true? Wired captured a moment of historical change with iconic perfection - the advent of the internet, the triumph of the market economy, the optimism for a technologically enhanced world, and the promise of a digitally-fueled political revolution: all found their voice in Wired's alchemy of four distinct audiences. The geeks that ruled the '90s can be classified into 4 typologies, and Wired consistently identified the fronts on which all could unite.

World Agenda
How can NEW continue to be Wired's favorite word when the cycle of newness has changed? How can Wired's rhythmic consistency help calibrate its agenda to the apparently chaotic field of events that seems to regulate the world? Can NEW and GLOBAL combine to create unexpected adjacencies?

Strategy—Demographics
Wired's readership aged in perfect synchrony with the magazine - what if Wired staged an Oedipal confrontation confrontation between two generations and their respective revolutionary ideals? Isn't it time to reveal who is a sell-out and who isn't?

Wired's demographic profile is punctured with holes—as if the impact of technology had impacted the lives of only wealthy, white, middle-aged men. What would happen if Wired tailored its message to...women? seniors...teenagers?...blacks?

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Dutchtown: A City Center Design by OMA/Rem Koolhaas
Essays by Bernard Colenbrander and Michelle Provoost.
NAI Publishers, 2000

Almere, the Netherlands's newest town, took a significant step towards maturity with its recently completed city center, designed by Rem Koolhas, leader of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the Netherlands's most internationally oriented architectural practice. Compared to such high-profile OMA achievements as Euralille and Generic City, Koolhas' scheme for Almere is an interesting departure as it succeeds both in the contexts of old Dutch towns and contemporary metropolitan design. In addition to documenting the city center design, this book explores the design process involving the city, the property developers, and the project leaders. Also included are the designs made to flesh out the master plan, amongst them a theater by Kazuyo Sejima, housing by Claus & Kaan and Frits van Dongen, William Alsop's pop/rock center, Benthem Crouwel's business center, OMA's parking garages and cinema, and the public space design by DS Landschapsarchitecten.

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OMA 30: 30 Colours
Rem Koolhaas
Blaricum, Netherlands, V+K Publishing, 1999

Through the ages, paint has been used to protect surfaces, to enhance the appearance of simple materials or to provide decoration for aesthetic pleasure.

Over the past century, the coatings industry has devoted considerable time and effort to creating as many different colours as possible, in a wide variety of textures and in as many different product forms as required. Despite all this work, the natural colours of materials and the colours of paints remain fundamentally different, a fact which has often led to a degree of ideological friction.

The key topic addressed during the most recent phase of the New Colours for a New Century project was therefore 'Stretching the possibilities of colour in paint'.

We are honoured that Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture were willing to share their ideas with us and create the thirty colours featured in this book.

— M. Roosebloom,
President, Decorative Coatings, Akzo Nobel

Contents

Preface
The future of colours is looking bright
Materials, textures and colours
From concepts to models
Colours and light
OMA 30 colours
Rem Koolhaas/OMA biography

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OMA Rem Koolhaas Living, Vivre, Leben 
Rem Koolhaas
Bordeaux, France : Arc en rêve centre d’architecture
Basel ; Boston : Birkhäuser Verlag, 1999.

Patiovilla / Rotterdam (1988)
Villa Dall'Ava / Paris (1991)
Nexus Housing / Fukuoka (1991)
Dutch House / Netherlands (1993)
Maison à Bordeaux (1998)

The completion of Rem Koolhaas' latest house provides an occasion to take a look at the architect's "Small" projects. Small is one of the four size categories used to organize building projects in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau's outstanding book S, M, L, XL.

Living, the exhibition and publication by arc en rêve center d'architecture, spotlights five projects four houses built in the Netherlands and France between 1988 and 1998 and the housing project in Japan in 1991, which comprises 24 individual homes and gives a comparative reading of them.

Koolhaas is paradoxically better known for his Extra Large urban schemes such as Melun-Sénart Euralille or the more recent Seoul projects, and his Large building plans such as the Paris Bibliothèque de France, Ferry Terminal in Zeebrugge, ZKM in Karlsruhe and Lille Grand Palais.  Yet the theme of the house participates in OMA's meditation on the contemporary city. Houses may even work as a small-scale laboratory, a site for experimenting with the most intimate aspects of living space.  All of these houses were born out of a meeting between their future occupants and the architect who designed them; each of these singular encounters is evoked in this book.

Bearing in mind the housing experiments initiated by the great modern architects of the pre-war period, Rem Koolhaas never ceases to extend the bounds of creation and invention and to open up new horizons through his remarkable work on context, typology, materials and construction.  Extreme freedom is the common denominator of the four European houses and 24 Japanese homes.  Openings, transparency, translucency and opacity make the interior spaces utterly permeable to variations in light and weather.

Through the spatial quality and layout, these houses express subtle contradictions between brutality and sensuality, heaviness and lightness.

Michel Jacques

Contents

Living  Introduction

OMA   Biography

The gay disenchantment  François Chaslin

The pleasures of dissymmetry  Jacques Lucan

5 projects
Comparative plans
Patiovilla
Villa Dall'Ava
Nexus Housing
Dutch House
Maison a Bordeaux

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S,M,L,XL
Rem Koolhaas with Bruce Mau
New York, N.Y., Monacelli Press, 010 Publishers, 1997

This massive book is a novel about architecture. Conceived by Rem Koolhaas - author of Delirious New York - and Bruce Mau - designer of Zone - as a free-fall in the space of the typographic imagination, the book's title: Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. This book combines essays, manifestoes, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, and a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city, with work produced by Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture over the past twenty years. This accumulation of works and images illuminates the conditions of architecture today - its splendors and miseries - exploring and revealing the corrosive impact of politics, context, economy, globalization -- the world. 

Contents

Fore Play
Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture
Delirious New York 

Small
Less Is More
The House that Made Mies
Dutch Selection
+/- 13,000 Points
Learning Japanese
Worth A Detour
Obstacles
Only 90 Degrees, Please
Imagine Nothingness
The Terrifying Beauty of the 20th Century

Medium
Field Trip
A (A) Memoir
Revision
Shipwrecked
Final Push
Cadavre Exquisis
Typical Plan
Byzantium
Globalization
Vanishing Act
Islam After Einstein
New Rotterdam
Life in the Box?
Neue Sachlichkeit

Large
Bigness, or the Problem of the Large
Soft Substance, Harsh Town
Indeterminate Specificity
Dirty Realism
Working Babel
Bifurcation
Strategy of the Void
Weird Science
Last Apples
Darwinian Arena
Passion Play
Organization of Appearances
Palace of the Soviets

Extra Large
The White Sheet
Atlanta
Las Vegas of the Welfare State
Unlearning Holland
Congestion Without Matter
Elegy for the Vacant Lot
Their New Sobriety
What Ever Happened to Urbanism?
Surrender
Dolphins
Singapore Songlines: Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa
Tabula Rasa Revisited
Side Show
Quantum Leap
Programmatic Lava
The Generic City

Postscript
Unraveling

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Euralille: The Making of a New City Center: Koolhaas, Nouvel, Portzamparc, Vasconi, Duthilleul: Architects
ed. Espace Croise, Isabelle Menu, Isabelle Uenu, Birkhauser, 1996

Euralille is regarded as the most spectacular architectural and urban planning project in Europe of the last five years. The core of the recently completed plans for this large, completely new city quarter was the TGV station, stop for the «Eurostar» train between London and Paris. The master plan of Rem Koolhaas emerged from an international competition as the winning entry ahead of works by Vittorio Gregotti, Norman Foster, Oswald Mathias Ungers, and others. This plan forms the framework for the sensational buildings by Christian de Portzamparc (office tower for Credit Lyonnais), Claude Vasconi (World Trade Centre), Jean Nouvel (shopping and office center), Jean-Marie Duthilleul (TGV station), and Rem Koolhaas (congress center and rock concert hall).

The book describes the creation of the new quarter, outlines the design processes, and shows extensively the individual buildings. The documentation is supplemented by floor plans, structural drawings, and other technical information. In a series of interviews the architects comment upon their work and explain the backgrounds of their plans. Well-known critics such as Stanislaus von Moos, Jean-Louis Cohen, Jean Attali, and finally Rem Koolhaas himself establish a theoretical context for Euralille and discuss the results.

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Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, 1991 
Rem Koolhaas, edited by Sanford Kwinter
Rice University School of Architecture, 1996, 1991

Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, is a pocketbook manifesto. In these transcriptions of a lecture and seminar given at Rice University in 1991, Koolhaas argues for architects to come empty handed into the spaces and processes of the free-form contemporary city; and to approach these conditions without the embarrassment of modernism, optimistically but without hope. Reflecting on OMA's work of the late 1980s, and the Houston skyline, Koolhaas makes a manifesto of the "too-large building." The BIG building effects its surroundings through its willful ignorance of them, and creates admixtures of difference, congestion and possibility within its own vast bulk. Through BIGNESS (an) architecture is achieved which sits comfortably in low slung development and becomes its own city. 

Contents

Lecture 1/21/91

Seminar 1/21/91

Flying the Bullet, or When Did the Future Begin? 
by Sanford Kwinter

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Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, 
Rem Koolhaas
Monacelli/010 Press, 1994; Oxford University Press, 1978

Manhattan is the arena of the terminal stage of Western Civilization: Through the simultaneous explosion of human density and an invasion of new technologies, Manhattan became, from 1850, a mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a revolutionary lifestyle: the Culture of Congestion. Delirious New York is a polemical investigation of that Manhattan; it documents the symbiotic relationship between its mutant metropolitan culture and the unique architecture to which it gave rise. Though this book argues that it often appears that the architecture generated the culture. 

Delirious New York exposes the consistency and coherence of the seemingly unrelated episodes of Manhattan's urbanism; it is an interpretation that establishes Manhattan as the product of an unformulated movement, Manhattanism, whose true program was so outrageous that in order for it to be realized it could never be openly declared. 

Delirious New York is a retroactive manifesto of Manhattan's architectural enterprise: it untangles the theories, tactics and dissimulations that allowed New York's architects to establish the desires of Manhattan's collective unconscious in the Grid. 

Delirious New York proves above all, that Manhattan has been, from the beginning, devoted to the most rational, efficient and utilitarian pursuit of the irrational. In this vision Coney Island becomes an embryonic Manhattan, testbed of a Technology of the Fantastic, the Skyscraper a self contained universe, Manhattan a man-made archipelago of architectural islands, Rockefeller Center, the first and last fragment of a definitive Manhattan. The decline of this movement sets in with the European Modernist Blitzkrieg unleashed by Le Corbusier in the mid-thirties. 

An appendix presents a series of projects that announce the second coming of Manhattanism, this time as an explicit doctrine that can claim its place among contemporary urbanisms. 

An impressive documentation of original materials and unpublished projects provides the evidence for this architectural manifesto, which reads in its insistent tracing of subconscious clues and themes, like a psychological thriller. 

Contents

Introduction

Prehistory

Coney Island: The Technology of Fantasy

The Dull Life of Utopia: The Skyscraper
The Frontier in the Sky
Skyscraper Theorists
The Lives of a Block: The Waldorf Astoria Hotel & the Empire State Building
Definitive Instability 

How Perfect Can Perfection Be: The Creation of Rockefeller Center
Talents of Raymond Hood
All the Rockefeller Centers
Radio City Music Hall: The Fun Never Sets
Kremlin On 5th Avenue
2 Postscripts 

Europeans: Biuer! Dali & Le Corbusier Conquer New York

Post Mortem

Appendix: A Fictional Conclusion

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