“The Generic City” and “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?”

For those able to muster the patience to penetrate the visual cacophony of the book S, M, L, XL by Rem Koolhaas, his firm the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), and Bruce Mau, there exists within its eye-popping graphics a couple of very lucid statements about contemporary cities: “The Generic City” and “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” The book itself is a mixed-media collage of contemporary architectural images, manifestos, travelogues, works from Koolhaas’ professional practice OMA, a glossary of terms that punctuates the entire work, and various critiques or essays on the state of contemporary architecture and urbanism. The book is organized in a spatially scalar way according to its title, from issues of the Small (houses, bus stops, hotels, details, and such) to the Extra Large (issues of cities, regions, urban form, mega-projects, and so on).