Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students
Author: Remment Koolhaas
Editor: 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