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: 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: Volume: Independent bimonthly for architecture to go beyond itself Volume 6 features essays by Francesco Bonami, Rem Koolhaas, Markus Miessen, Jeffrey Inaba, Zvi Efrat, and many others. Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-Lab + ...
About this product: It's shaped like a trade paperback book, but its hellzapoppin pages look like a glossy, madcap magazine. Really, Content is more like an explosion in an idea factory, or a wild party thrown by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas in a mood considerably more delirious than his classic 1978 manifesto Delirious New York. It has 70 or 80 sections that look like magazine articles, and they're loosely organized in geographical order, from west to east. Pieces on Koolhaas's projects for Prada and MCA/Universal in LA and the acclaimed Seattle Public Library lead to syncopated meditations on Guggenheim Las Vegas, Chicago's van der Rohe "Miestakes," a modest plan to save Cambridge from Harvard by rechanneling the Charles River, Lagos' future as Earth's third-biggest town, the Hermitage's strange Russian past, Shanghai's Expo 2010, and Asia's skyscrapers, which now outnumber those of the West. When Koolhaas interviews Martha Stewart and gets a Las Vegas update from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, it's straightforward, but many pages are as mystifying as hallucinations--apropos of nothing, a woman is depicted leaving her infrared heat signature on a tombstone, and Vermeer paintings are paired with scenes from TV's Big Brother. You don't read Content in linear fashion, you page through it amazed, gradually acquiring Koolhaas' ultracultivated taste for the bizarre. --Tim Appelo
About this product: Award-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is the founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and has become one of the most intriguing and exciting architectural thinkers of our time. This small-scale, affordable paperback presents a selection of texts from a seminar series conducted by Koolhaas, as well as an essay by the architect discussing three of OMA's large-scale projects. Addressing questions of urbanism and architecture in Europe, Asia, and the United States, these texts ultimately illuminate in a concise manner OMA's long-term mission and ideals.
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: After more than 15 years--during which it exhibited work by such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Dan Flavin, Carsten Holler, Barry McGee, Tom Friedman, Francesco Vezzoli, Tom Sachs and Nathalie Djurberg and hosted numerous lectures, panels and film festivals of unusual sophistication--Milan's Prada Foundation is widening its exhibition spaces and broadening its cultural perspective with a new compound designed by the renowned Dutch architecture firm, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), led, of course, by its Pritzker-Prize-winning founder, Rem Koolhaas. The new art center and permanent exhibition space will be situated in a location that includes early twentieth century buildings that originally belonged to one of Milan's first spirits manufacturing companies. Preserved in their original condition, the seven preexisting buildings include warehouses, laboratories, brewing silos and workers' residences--surrounded by a large courtyard. OMA/Koolhaas' project adds an exhibition building, an auditorium and a tower to the existing structures, which will house works from the permanent collection. This accessible volume documents the Foundation's past events and future developments, highlighting the ways that contemporary architecture can coexist with a regenerated historic site.
About this product: Volume: Independent bimonthly for architecture to go beyond itself Volume 1 features visions by Beatriz Colomina, Keller Easterling, Rem Koolhaas, Kester Rattenbury, Mark Wigley, and others. Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-Lab + ...
About this product: 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.
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