Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1072284 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1376 pages

Amazon.com
This extraordinary, massive, and mind-boggling 1,300-page book combines essays, manifestos, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city--and complex illustration--with work produced by Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture over the past twenty years. This almost overwhelming accumulation of words and images illuminates the condition of architecture today--its splendors and miseries--exploring and revealing the corrosive effects of politics, context, the economy, and globalization. In some ways, this is the "Medium is the Message" of 1990s architectural discourse: guaranteed to be hugely influential in the coming decades, but grossly misunderstood by those who have not read it. The core arguments it makes about metropolitan architecture--accepting complexity and lack of centralized control--are similar to those of Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. Very highly recommended.

Customer Reviews

Great book
This is a book that is a mirror of Rem Koolhas architecture. Is a book that people who don't understand Rem Koolhas architecture don't like but for those who Rem Koolhas is a hero this is: " the book".