About this product: In this fanciful volume, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.), both analyzes and celebrates New York City. By suggesting the city as the site for an infinite variety of human activities and events--both real and imagined--the essence of the metropolitan lifestyle, its "culture of congestion" and its architecture are revealed in a brilliant new light. "Manhattan," Koolhaas 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)." Filled with fascinating facts, as well as photographs, postcards, maps, watercolors, and drawings, the vibrancy of Koolhaas's poignant exploration of Gotham equals the heady, frenetic energy of the city itself. Anyone who loves New York will want to own this book.
About this product: Arthur Woodbury is tired of being called fat. So he¹s purchased a special product that is supposed to help him lose weight. But when he puts on the helmet like the instructions say, his world vanishes before his eyes. Now he is trapped in REM World, a place where nothing is as it seems. And it¹s not enough just to find his way home. By entering REM World, Arthur accidentally released a terrible creature called Nothing and it¹s now up to Arthur to save the world!
About this product: 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.
About this product: Google Earth's ancestor: a snapshot of urban life, circa 1600 History's most opulent collection of town maps and illustrations
The complete reprint of all 363 color plates from Braun and Hogenberg's survey of town maps, city views, and plans of Europe, Africa, Asia and Central America, with dozens of unusual details, two folding maps, as well as selected extracts from the original text and an in-depth commentary. First published in Cologne 1572-1617.
More than four centuries after the first volume was originally published in Cologne, Braun and Hogenberg's magnificent collection of town map engravings, Civitates orbis terrarum, has been brought back to life with this reprint taken from a rare and superbly preserved original set of six volumes, belonging to the Historische Museum in Frankfurt. Produced between 1572 and 1617 - just before the extensive devastation wreaked by the Thirty Years' War - the work contains 564 plans, bird's-eye views, and map views of all major cities in Europe, plus important cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Edited and annotated by theologian and publisher Georg Braun, and largely engraved by cartographer Franz Hogenberg, the Civitates was intended as a companion volume for Abraham Ortelius's 1570 world atlas, Theatrum orbis terrarum. Over a hundred different artists and cartographers contributed to the sumptuous artwork, which not only shows the towns but also features additional elements, such as figures in local dress, ships, ox-drawn carts, courtroom scenes, and topographical details, that help convey the situation, commercial power, and political importance of the towns they accompany.
The Civitates gives us a comprehensive view of urban life at the turn of the 17th century. TASCHEN's reprint includes all of the city plates, accompanied by selected extracts from Braun's texts on the history and contemporary significance of each urban center as well as translations of the Latin cartouches. A detailed commentary places each city map in its cartographical and cultural context, and examines earlier sources and later editions. Rounding off this comprehensive publication is a separate introductory essay examining the Civitates in its cultural and historical context. From Paris and London to Cairo and Jerusalem, readers will find many a familiar city to zoom back in time to and explore - in fact, many of the maps can still be used for orientation in historical town centers today.
In this book, the projects, buildings and theories of Koolhaas, as well as the other members of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, are examined in chronological and thematic sequence, beginning with the period of Koolhaas’ education at the Architectural Association School of Architecture of London in the cultural context of the neo-avant-gardes at the end of the 60s and at the beginning of the 70s. The essay then discusses the period of his stay in New-York, his contact with Ungers, Eisenman, Rowe, as well as the polemic confrontation with the emerging post-modernism movement; and it concludes with the last critical contributions of Koolhaas. The starting point is design, which, in the case of Koolhaas, usually grows out of an alchemy of logic, influenced both by the proposed program (as viewed by the clients and institutions) and the metaphorical and autobiographical aspiration of the artist. The analysis is carried through to the details of construction, with special attention paid to the choice of materials, the configuration of the structure, and the role and position of the installation. The book is richly illustrated and includes an exhaustive bibliography.
About this product: The notion of building based on sheer desctruction has become an accepted understanding of modernity, but new insight also suggests that destruction can have an agenda and a level of precision that may even exceed the precision of architecture itself. Contributors to this issue include Andrew Herscher, Mlakit Shoshan, Crhistian Ernsten, Ole Bouman, Studio Beirut, and F.A.S.T.
About this product: Rem Koolhaas along with OMA and AMO have grown into an influential architectural phenomenon producing architecture, urban planning and wide-ranging research projects. This double volume explores a total of 29 works and projects produced between 1996 and 2006 through full page colour photographs, plans, models and various investigations. Included are projects such as: Bordeaux House and Pool, the Prada projects, CCTV & TVCC in China, The McCormick Tribune Campus Centre at IIT, and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin.
About this product: This is not a book about dream interpretation. This is a book about why we dream. This is not a dream dictionary that defines what each object in a dream is supposed to represent. This is a book about some amazing recent research that is beginning to tell us at least one of the reasons as to why we dream: Sleep is crucial for the storage of new memories and for their incorporation into the matrix of all our previously existing memories. Although the average person may not remember a dream every night, or even rarely remember one at all, we all spend an average of one and a half to two hours a night in REM sleep dreaming. While we sleep our brains are very busy formulating complicated dreams with twists and turns and seemingly nonsensical details. We dream for a reason: to consolidate memory. As a sleep medicine physician and neurologist, I am a true believer that your most valuable asset is your consciousness. If your consciousness is not optimized, you are not living your life to its full potential. You are not enjoying all of the people and all of the things to the extent that you could. Optimizing your consciousness means being as awake, alert, and as intelligent as possible. I spend every day trying to educate patients about what is going on with them medically. I try to take a patient s complicated medical diagnoses and translate it into plain English, so that any patient with almost any level of education can understand what is going on inside their body. In writing this book I have tried to do the same thing for what we have learned about the importance of sleep and memory. Having a good memory is important to all of us. Which one of us would not like to be more intelligent than we are right now?
About this product: "A city is a plane of tarmac with some red hot spots of intensity," Rem Koolhaas, the pathbreaking architect and author of such semiotically seminal books as Delirious New York and the more recent S, M, L, XL, remarked in 1969. More than 30 years later, there are more of those hot spots around the world than ever, and they're getting hotter every day. Globalization, standardization, and the high-speed innovations of our current information age are transforming urban centers from London to Los Angeles to Lagos, and more places are becoming more urban, and at a faster pace, than ever before.
Mutations is an eye-popping atlas-cum-analysis of this new urbanization, and much of it is composed of essays and meditations (from a variety of contributors) on the 21st-century international City (often un-)Beautiful. Most of them are written in language that will be familiar to readers of Koolhaas's past books: in other words, dense, abstract, and chock-full of references to Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. If you like that sort of deconstructivist yammering, great; if not, the major small-type essays are best sampled (or, better, skimmed) one at a time, interspersed with the many other more accessible elements of the book that truly do add up to a vivid and fascinating mosaic of postmodern urbanism.
From Koolhaas and Harvard Design School's Project on the City come two engrossing and wholly straightforward explorations: one of the Pearl River Delta, which China has designated as a zone of unrestricted capitalist experimentation, and whose five major urban centers have consequently exploded overnight in all sorts of instructive and often frightening ways; and another of the chaotic, congested and Blade Runneresque megalopolis of Lagos, Nigeria, whose patterns of growth, housing, and commerce defy all conventional wisdom on how cities should develop. There's also a bounty of excellent (and often astonishing) statistics on all aspects of urban growth; a "snapshots" section of phenomena from cities all over the globe; a completely spot-on (and unintentionally funny) analysis of the evolution of shopping as the last truly unifying urban public activity (and the subject of Koolhaas's next full-scale book); and a trenchant look at Kosovo as ground zero in the first major war of the Internet age. (It should be noted that there's a separate section on the U.S., which with all its soulless, tacky consumerist excess gets the drubbing it usually can expect from the European intelligentsia, although the irony here is that more and more of newly urban Europe is starting to look like newly urban America.)
The exhibit-quality photography throughout is great, and, as you could expect from this unofficial successor to S, M, L, XL, the design is satisfyingly outré, right down to its post-Warholian plastic yellow easy-wipe cover with glued-on mousepad. But for all of Mutations's rich trove of facts and insights, and the impression that its high-tech design gives of an ironic embrace of the new urbanization, its deeper tone is one of disappointment and loss. The spirit of Jane Jacobs resides here, with all its yearning for the quirky, quaint beauty of human-scaled townhouses and shops, sidewalks and byways, and for the precorporatized glamour of grand old towns like New York, London, Paris, and Shanghai, before such metallic nouveau hubs as Atlanta and Kuala Lumpur were ever on the world-commerce map. Mutations was written and compiled largely by architects, after all, who hate ugliness as much as the next guy, whatever they may claim otherwise; its precisely for that reason that this densely absorbing new compendium betrays its wistfulness as often as it promotes its own air of cool, ethnographic bemusement. --Timothy Murphy
About this product: This past November, Berlin gained yet one more spectacular example of contemporary architecture. The new Dutch Embassy by OMA/Rem Koolhaas has been built on the River Spree in what used to be East Berlin. Renowned for his Kunsthal in Rotterdam, Congrexpo in Lille, and the villa in Bordeaux, among other extraordinary projects, Koolhaas will now also be recognized for his Berlin embassy, a structure that firmly attests to the astonishing design talent of the Netherlands' best-known architect. Two concepts underpin the design for the embassy, the first instigated by the city's strict planning regulations, which require that every corner of a city block be built up. Thus, Koolhaas designed one corner of the site to fit a freestanding cube that houses the actual embassy; the other corners are defined by an L-shaped block of three houses for embassy staff. But the principal organizing element is a continuous route that spirals through the building; the different embassy departments are strung off it discretely. The spiral winds its way through the cube accompanied by new and unexpected views of the building--and of the city. In this publication, sketches, drawings and models illustrate the design's points of departure, and Koolhaas himself expounds upon the project's context. German photographer Candida Höfer, famous for her large-scale color photographs of architectural spaces, offers her personal perspective on the embassy's exterior and interior, while Parisian architecture critic François Chaslin provides a textual analysis.
Essay by François Chaslin.~Photographs by Candida Höfer.
Hardcover, 5.75 x 8 in./144 pgs / 50 color and 20 b & w.
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