S,M,L,XL: The different kind of architecture book

Sometimes in life, you encounter a thing that can change the way you think. S,M,L,XL is one of these things. Written by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, this book, even though more than twenty years old, brings a different perspective.

The book is a behemoth. It contains more than 1 200 pages. And those pages are filled with…shards of information. Many different kinds. It is hard to describe, but to me, it sums up the architecture. It is a mess. There are many things. Obvious ones like plans, sections, descriptions of projects. And then there are others, travelogues, essays, scribbles, dictionary, transcripts of conversations, newspaper articles, paragraphs from other books.

You can feel that Rem is, in fact, writer as well as an architect. The text is often complicated and cryptic. Mysterious and it carries different meanings. It is chaotic.

Most of the architects prefer to show the world only the most polished work. Carefully arranged pictures of built projects and few selected drawings of the highest quality.

This book is different. It is filled with scribbles, sometimes redlines, which are impossible to read. It is a glimpse into the reality of the process. And the process is messy. People were discussing this drawing. And they have left a mark on it. The proof that architecture lives.

Throughout the whole book, there is a dictionary. Special kind of dictionary. It contains random thoughts, which are loosely connected to the words from the dictionary. A stream of consciousness.

And many random scribbles from the very beginning. The first, primordial ideas. Those unglamorous ones, that went through the careful pruning to become the finished product, ready to be shown to the world.

Sometimes, there are also drawings that can be considered finished. And the descriptions of projects, the thing you usually expect in a monography. They are islands of order in a sea of uncertainty.

Sometimes, the book is in a different language. Project from Japan is left in Japanese, some parts of the dictionary are French. There are maps and there are photos of finished projects. There are diagrams.

Sometimes the pictures span both pages, sometimes they are tiny. And text sometimes hides in shadow and is impossible to read. Mystery. There are handwritten calculations of different kinds of trusses and their moment diagrams.

This book is definitely not easily accessible. But. If you will persist, it will give you much more than you expect. It is a collage. It is a wild ride with twenty years of OMA.  It is provocative. It is unforgiving. There are comics inside, long before Bjarke’s “Yes is more”.

It was extremely hard to describe. You have to read it yourself to understand. And even though I have read it, and maybe you will, too, I do not think I have understood completely. It is spectacular and multilayered. It is architecture trapped to 1 200 pages

Cheers