S, M, L, XL
Signed by Rem Koolhaus
Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau,
Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann
Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau: S, M, L, XL. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995. First edition. Thick quarto. Silver leatherette-covered boards with title and text stamped in black and yellow on covers and spine. Photo illustrated endpapers. 1,344 pp. Elaborate and colorful graphic design and typography throughout. Designed by Bruce Mau et al. SIGNED by Koolhaus in silver marker to title page. No dust jacket as issued. Trivial—and expected—light handling wear to edges, but a nearly fine copy of this unweildly first edition.
7.25 x 9.5 hard cover book with 1,344 well-illustrated pages, produced by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, edited by Jennifer Sigler, and photography by Hans Werlemann. The book spills over with graphs, charts, poems, scripts, revisions, essays, metaphors, panic, chronologies, plans, cartoons, Beckett, events, big men, big type, models, diaries, competitions, notebooks, disasters, artworks, manifestos, drawings, rants, lectures, cities, speculation, sex, invention and tragedies.
Moving in cinematic time, S,M,L,XL dares to “hold a shot too long”; to make the reader see details that would otherwise go unnoticed; to show “bad” images, unresolved ideas or problematic results - all to reveal the underlying invisible process that leads to finished results, visible to all.
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.
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. The book combines essays, manifestos, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations on the ground of contemporary city, with work produced by Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture over the past twenty years. This accumulation of words and images illuminates the condition of architecture today - its splendors and miseries - exploring the revealing the corrosive impact of politics, context, the economy, globalization - the world.
A mammoth compendium of 20 years of OMA's projects, arranged in order of size, S,M,L,XL gives an insight into the restless, ingenuitive thinking of the office through an era when architecture became a mere bystander to the explosion of the market economy and globalization.
S,M,L,XL was first published by Monacelli Press in 1995 in New York and 010 Publishers in Rotterdam. The enormous, 1376-page-long book is a collection of essays, diary excerpts, travelogues, photographs, architectural plans, sketches, cartoons produced by Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) in the twenty years prior to publication. O.M.A. is a Rotterdam-based company founded by Koolhaas in 1975.
The second edition (ISBN 1885254865) was published in 1997, printed and bound in Italy, and has the name Rem Koolhaas printed in orange ink on the cover unlike the original which was printed in yellow.
The third, special edition (ISBN 3822877433) was published in December 1998, printed and bound in Italy, and has the name Rem Koolhaas printed in blue ink on the cover. The book weighs 6 pounds (2.7 kg).
The book became immediately popular, selling all the 30,000 copies of the first edition within months, while it was counterfeited in China.The second edition printed in 70,000 copies has been subsequently exhausted as well. [wikipedia]