Books by Rem Koolhaas
Braun/Hogenberg. Cities of the World
by Stephan Füssel, Rem Koolhaas
More than four centuries on from its first publication, discover one of the jewels of urban cartography and civic studies. This quality reprint includes the most enchanting color plates from the Civitates orbis terrarum, a magnificent collection of town map engravings, produced between 1572 and 1617.
Featuring plans, bird’s-eye views, and maps for all major cities in Europe, plus important urban centers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this masterwork in urban mapping gives us a comprehensive view of city life at the turn of the 17th century. It was edited and annotated by theologian and publisher Georg Braun and largely engraved by Franz Hogenberg, but also involved over a hundred different artists and cartographers who contributed not only town views, but additional elements, such as figures in local dress, courtroom scenes, and topographical details, to help convey the situation, commercial power, and political influence of each city.
TASCHEN's reprint contextualizes the plates with selected extracts from Braun’s original texts on the history and significance of each urban center as well as detailed commentaries to place each city map in its cartographical and cultural context.
About the series
Bibliotheca Universalis — Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!
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Rem Koolhaas: Elements of Architecture
by Rem Koolhaas
Elements of Architecture focuses on the fragments of the rich and complex architectural collage. Window, façade, balcony, corridor, fireplace, stair, escalator, elevator and toilet: the book seeks to excavate the micro-narratives of building detail. The result is no single history, but rather the web of origins, contaminations, similarities, and differences in architectural evolution, including the influence of technological advances, climatic adaptation, political calculation, economic contexts, regulatory requirements, and new digital opportunities. It’s a guide that is long overdue—in Koolhaas’s own words, “Never was a book more relevant—at a moment where architecture as we know it is changing beyond recognition.”
Derived, updated, and expanded from Koolhaas’s exhaustive and much-lauded exhibition at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, this is an essential toolkit to understanding the fundamentals that comprise structure around the globe. Designed by Irma Boom and based on research from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the 2,600-page monograph contains essays from Rem Koolhaas, Stephan Trueby, James Westcott and Stephan Petermann; interviews with Werner Sobek and Tony Fadell (of Nest); and an exclusive photo essay by Wolfgang Tillmans.
In addition to comprehensively updated texts and new images, this edition is designed and produced to visually (and physically) embody the immense scope of its subject matter:
Custom split-spine binding: our printer modified their industrial binding machine to allow for the flexible, eight-centimeter thick spine Contains a new introductory chapter with forewords, table of contents, and an index, located in the middle of the book (where it naturally opens due to its unique spine) Printed on 50g Opakal paper, allowing for the ideal level of opacity needed to realize Boom’s palimpsest-like design Translucent overlays and personal annotations by Koolhaas and Boom are woven in each chapter to create an alternative, faster route through the book Printed at the originally intended 100% size for full readability
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Funda Men Tals
by Rem Koolhaas
The official Biennale catalogue—a global overview of architecture of the last one hundred years. The emphasis of the 2014 Biennale is on architectural history. Each country is asked to narrate its history over the last one hundred years in relation to the idea of modernity. Has national identity been sacrificed on the altar of modernity? This is the issue that the Biennale is called on to address.
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S M L XL
by Bruce Mau, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Werlemann
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.
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Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
by Rem Koolhaas
Since its publication - Delirious New York (1978) has attained mythic status. Rem Koolhaas's celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the variety of human behavior
At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle - "the culture of congestion" - and its architecture. "Manhattan," he 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)." Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York's history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper.
Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.
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Preservation Is Overtaking Us (GSAPP Transcripts, 1)
by Rem Koolhaas
Preservation is Overtaking Us brings together two lectures given by Rem Koolhaas at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, along with a response (framed as a supplement to the original lectures) by Jorge Otero-Pailos. In the first essay Koolhaas describes alternative strategies for preserving Beijing, China. The second talk marks the inaugural Paul Spencer Byard lecture, named in celebration of the longtime professor of Historic Preservation at GSAPP. These two lectures trace key moments of Koolhaas' thinking on preservation, including his practice's entry into China and the commission to redevelop the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. In a format well known to Koolhaas' readers, Otero-Pailos reworks the lectures into a working manifesto, using it to interrogate OMA's work from within the discipline of preservation.
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Junkspace with Running Room
Junkspace first appeared in the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2001), a vast compendium of text, images, and data concerning the consumerist transformation of city and suburb from the first department store to the latest mega mall. The architect Rem Koolhaas itemized in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is updated here and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from the cultural critic Hal Foster. Junkspace describes the bleak and featureless world of capitalism, while Running Room seeks to find a space within the junk in which the individual might still exist.
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The Ordinary: Recordings
by Rem Koolhaas, Denise Scott Brown, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto
Since the beginning of the century, the field of architecture has fervently turned its attention to documenting the contemporary urban condition. Every city has been examined as a repository of architectural concepts, scrutinized as an urban manifesto, and recorded as a series of found objects.
The Ordinary articulates a potential genealogy for this practice and for the genre of books that derived from it. Organized around conversations with the authors of three seminal texts that document the city―Rem Koolhaas on Delirious New York, Denise Scott Brown on Learning from Las Vegas, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto on Made in Tokyo―this volume traces the history of these “books on cities” by examining the material they recorded, the findings they established, the arguments they advanced, and the projects they promoted. These conversations also question the assumptions underlying this practice and whether in its ubiquity it still remains a space of opportunity.
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