There are any number of ways of looking at S,M,L,XL.

The easiest would be to see it as the ultimate press

book, the absolute communication weapon. But we can also trust author and publisher and see it as a
kind of novel. The blurb invites us to do just that: This massive book IS a novel about architecture.
Conceived by Rem Koolhaas, author of Delirious New York, and Bruce Mau, designer of Zone, as a free-
fall m the space of the typographic imagination, the book title, Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large is also
its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. The book combines essays,
manifestoes, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city, with work
produced by Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture over the past twenty years. This
accumulation of words and images illuminates the condition of architecture today its splendors and
miseries, exploring and revealing the corrosive impact of politics, context, the economy, globalization,
the world.
S,M,L,XL is a sort of book-world then, with Koolhaas gleefully mixing up theory, practice and references,
an ABC of 1200 widely varying quotes, ranging from John Lee Hooker to Louis Marin, and including
Deleuze, Bellow, Starck quoted by Boissiere, Debord, Trump, Virilio and Koolhaas himself, whose New
York Delire is referred to more often than all the buildings of the Oma. You might even say it is a
constant recycling of what remains to date his biggest success: New York Delire is reproduced full-page
in sooty black and white, so much so that the naive reader wonders if it isn't time to (re)read it. But after
ten pages the same reader realises he or she has fallen into a trap: it is impossible to tell the original
from the copy, the primary from the secondary, sense from nonsense. Even so, there is method in
Koolhaas's madness, and the book's hyped-up format serves no doubt as camouflage to its more
conventional content. Because the incredible assortment of texts set in the widest range of type, the
plans and photos of the most diverse projects, the clutter of layouts and eccentric references- all
continually say the same thing.
As of 1972 (or 68?) young Rem found his niche, or his label: emigration from the interior, satisfying
alienation or happiness in despair. Where other people had it off with nostalgia or shot-up on modernity,
Koolhaas got high on the loss of meaning. S,M,L,XL opens with his qualifying at the Architectural
Association in 1972.
Struck by the Stirring beauty of the Berlin Wall, he proposed to reproduce it in the heart of London,
around a rectangular vacant lot. This negative magnet was supposed to attract Voluntary prisoners
strong enough to love it, or ecstatic in the freedom of their architectural confines. Now we know
Koolhaas is the all round champ of oxymoron, and that his favorite metaphor is that of voluntary
servitude or happiness in slavery. But this paradoxical way of thinking leads him to deny any possibility of
architecture resisting the chaos of merchandise: since the mysteries are beyond us, let's pretend to
organize them; things being what they are, they can only get worse, and so much the better; the more
boredom there IS, the more the individual is liberated; brutality alone can save civilization ...
Such IS the red and black thread that runs through these 300 pages. For example there are hilarious
travel notes from Singapore, whose master of arts and information is supposed to have declared We
have to pursue the subject of fun very seriously if we want to stay competitive In the 21 st century; or
Atlanta, where the Mariott atrium by the unfortunate Portman IS described as the exact architectural
equivalent of Jean-Paul Sartre's dictum, hell is other people; or Japan, from which Koolhaas brought
back censored porn snapshots giving the potentially sordid an almost exalted dimension. (Buddhism?) ;
or Marne Ia Vallee where Perrault's school for engineers IS Said to derrive from Portman's work, in turn
inspired by Tange, who supposedly found the hit model in Gropius, from Paris during the Mitterrand era
If La Villette was our embodiment of the socialists' early euphoria, Expo 89 was now our articulation of
their new sobriety, from Lille where Congrexpo might be bought for the price of seven Van Goghs,
eighteen De Koonings or six Jackson Pollocks. The projects presented are generally better known, With
the exception of a Small one like the model-apartments of Fukuoka, of a Medium one like the Agadir
hotel, or of an Extra Large one like the waterfront at Yokohama. Another XL deserves a special
mention, that of the restructuring of Holland either maximum congestion in the centre in the form of a
Pundstad or Point-City; or total urbanization of the south of the country Zuidstad, drawing nearer to the
London-Milan-Torino banana.
The systematic use of paradox in Koolhaas's writings and projects enables him, and the architects that
read him, to bear the grief of the failure of modernism. Or more simply to resolve, at least symbolically,
all the contradictions on which the great moderns broke their teeth and their necks: democracy/
enlightened despotism, quantity/ quality, avant-garde/ entrenchment. Koolhaas might thus be
accomplishing a mourning ritual valid for us all, by producing the antidote capable of persuading
decision-makers and builders that urban problems exist in their own heads rather than in reality.
In the same psychologizing vein, we might claim that Koolhaas's cult of emptiness stems from the fact
that he has less need of meaning than other people do, that he feels a bitter joy at seeing it fade, or that
he refuses the traditional role of the architect as a purveyor of meaning and social links in a society that
no longer cares for them. A process that is not without suffering, examples of which might be easily
found in Le Corbusier. It is significant that the only revealing text in a book so perfectly controlled is
the account of a nightmare at the beginning of XL. Koolhaas tells how, with his associate Voorberg, he
dreamed he lost balance on a slippery pontoon (Holland?) and fell from a dizzying height into a little
meadow amidst a crowd of picnickers (the Netherlands a game ?) And how, in spite of the desperate
efforts by Koolhaas-lcarus to avoid squashing anyone, he ends up landing on a baby's head. Should we
see this as self-criticism of the surfing theory, which holds that the architect cannot resist the wave of
scale and Bigness, but surfs on it?
Forever on the lookout for metropolitan congestion and hedonist incandescence, rare indeed around the
ljselmeer, Koolhaas globetrots in search of the urban model: London, New York, Singapore, Atlanta,
and, more modestly, the new train station area m Lille From his headlong flight we can salvage a few
precise and apparently anti-bourgeois remarks: the inhabitants of Manhattan are snobs who look down
on the bridge-and-tunnel people, the suburbanites who have to commute; Paris can only become more
Pansian - It is already on its way to becoming hyper-Paris, a polished caricature; London - Its only
identity a lack of clear identity - is perpetually becoming even less London, more open, less static. None
of which is totally false. But the acuteness of the journalist or the script-writer should not make us forget
that, like Le Corbusier, Koolhaas tends to found his theory on hasty generalizations calculated to take in
architects. It is thus that the congestion of American metropolises is meaningless unless related to the
suburbs and the freeways, and that Koolhaas's new discovery - the Generic City doesn't set much store
by the actual history of Cities. If by generic we are to understand devoid of quality, neutral, banal and
interchangeable, there is no such thing, since every City has a specific history. We would like to go along
with Koolhaas when he asserts that: Architects no longer create, order, resist chaos, Imagine coherence,
fabricate entities. From form givers they have become facilitators. ln Atlanta, architects have aligned
themselves with the Incontrollable, have become its official agents, instruments of the unpredictable:
from imposing to yielding in one generation. This is all prettily said, but should not make us forget that a
lot of the facts are missing: what about Atlantas place in the New South, what about the implantation
of insurance companies, the laying out of networks, real estate subdivision, migrations? Like Le Corbusier
again, Koolhaas dreams of urban history reduced to architecture, at the expense of economic and social
life, and for the greater happiness of the Innovators.
There is cynicism and suffering m S,M,L,XL - commonplaces and intuitions, conformism and situationism
Koolhaas sets out from the despair-ridden acknowledgement according to which certain forces (de-
localizing capitalism, mass tourism, the private car, the retreat into the private sphere) are devastating
city centres, which were once oases of a wholly relative order. In parallel these scourges are creating
pockets of chaos in peripheral areas, destined in time to form the Generic city. But from this analysis,
which might be globally qualified as leftist, the author draws conclusions that are strangely defeatist,
since he advises us not to resist the barbarian tide, but to ride it like a surfer on a wave. ln this there is
something like a policy of the worst to come, which amounts to aggravating tensions or pushing
contradictions to the absurd. Worse still, there is a sort of exhilaration in defeat, in the renouncing of
secular urban culture.
Jean-Claude Garcias