Small, Medium, Large, Extra-large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture

Celebrating 30 years of the groundbreaking publication by iconoclastic architect Rem Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau, now reissued in a new collectible colorway 

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.

Rem Koolhaas is a founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which has offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, and Brisbane. OMA’s iconic projects include: Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, Beijing’s CCTV Headquarters, and Seattle Central Library; OMA designed the forthcoming addition to the New Museum in New York. The firm’s most important projects of its first twenty years – all of which are featured in S, M, L, XL – include the Kunsthal in Rotterdam; Nexus Housing in Fukuoka; the Dutch House in Holland; and Villa dall’Ava in Paris. Koolhaas won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000, directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, is the author of the seminal Delirious New York (Monacelli, 1997), and is a professor in practice of architecture and urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Bruce Mau founded the critically acclaimed firm Bruce Mau Design in 1985. He is the author of Life Style (2000), Massive Change (2004), and MC24 (2020), all published by Phaidon.