Journal of Architectural Education

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The Materiality of the Immaterial: S,M,L,XL as

Postmodern Manifesto?

Léa-Catherine Szacka

To cite this article: Léa-Catherine Szacka (2015) The Materiality of the Immaterial:
S,M,L,XL as Postmodern Manifesto?, Journal of Architectural Education, 69:2, 163-165, DOI:
10.1080/10464883.2015.1063392

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2015.1063392

Published online: 23 Sep 2015.

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 The Materiality of
the Immaterial
S,M,L,XL as Postmodern Manifesto?
I did own a copy of S,M,L,XL. Yes,
of course I did. Like any architect
trained between the late 1990s and
the early 2000s, I bought a copy of
the Bible-like book upon enter-
ing architecture school. But since
my first encounter with S,M,L,XL, I
have moved countless times, across
continents. And where is my copy of
Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 22:04 05 November 2015
S,M,L,XL now? It is carefully stored,
in a box, in a basement, somewhere
in West Montreal, together with some
relics of my past. Paradoxically, the
materiality—1,376 pages, hardcover,
measuring 18.5 centimeters by 23
centimeters, and weighing 2.7 kilo-
grams—of what arguably constitutes
the quintessential proactive post-
modern manifesto of architecture is
at odds with our contemporary way of
living, which is to say, in transit.1
S,M,L,XL’s provocative articula-
tion of the relationship between the
material and the immaterial speaks
of a disciplinary shift toward a greater
immateriality of architecture. In
other words, if there is a presumptive
struggle between the material and
immaterial, S,M,L,XL proves that the
latter wins and governs contemporary
architecture.
Immateriality appears as a
noteworthy foil to postmodernism’s
travails. Questioning the pertinence
of S,M,L,XL as a postmodern mani-
festo entails reassessing the role of
the manifesto in architecture. In
addition, more importantly, and
certainly more tediously, it opens
the discussion on the sense of the
heavily loaded word “postmodern-
ism.” Obviously, the intention here
is not to put under scrutiny all the
different—at times convergent, at
times divergent—definitions of post-
modernism that have existed both in
Léa-Catherine Szacka
Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies
and around architecture between the
mid-1960s and the early 1990s. This
could be the subject of another 1,376-
page book, and probably much dryer
than S,M,L,XL. I recently asked Rem
Koolhaas if, in retrospect, he would
consider himself “postmodern.” His
answer was evasive yet intriguingly
revealing: “I don’t know,” he replied:
I think everyone is. One exhibition
I was happy to be part of was Les
Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou
in 1985. … I felt close to that exhibi-
tion because it was not connected
to an architectural movement: it
proposed a kind of thinking through
a condition. … It was exhilarating!
It was Pompidou at its best and its
most profound. It had nothing to do
with matter or substance—it was
concerned with thought.2
After coining the expression “post-
modern condition” in 1979,3 French
poststructuralist philosopher
Jean-François Lyotard curated the
by-now canonical exhibition Les
Immatériaux—usually translated as
“The Immaterials” or “The Non-
materials”—at the Centre Pompidou
in Paris from March to July 1985.4
Epochal and divisive, Les Immatériaux
was embedded in the international
debate on postmodernity and in
the early institutional history of the
Centre Pompidou, itself a postmod-
ern monument to culture.5 The show,
occupying the entire fifth floor of
the Pompidou, broke from conven-
tion. It did not merely “explain”
the growing anxiety at the dawn of
postmodernity6 but rather created
an event that would convey the sen-
sibility of postmodernity via forms
that appeared in the arts, literature,
JAE 69 : 2
sciences, and techno-lifestyles. In
other words, by questioning “the pos-
sibility of philosophy as exhibition”
as “a way to understand, or rather do,
philosophy spatially,” this exhibition
proposed “a new way of understand-
ing the ubiquity of ‘immaterials’ in a
post-modern information society.”7
Visitors were left somewhat free to
choose a path within the exhibition’s
spaces, as the curators replaced “the
modernist sequence of rooms” with
“a porous, semi-translucent laby-
rinth.”8 Moreover, Les Immatériaux
addressed the temporal dimensions of
contemporary life while emphasizing
the connections between aural and
visual communication in an “attempt
to convey the profoundly destabiliz-
ing experience of contemporary life.”9
According to art critic Pierre Restany,
the exhibition conveyed a sense of
“the third industrial revolution, that
of the year 2000 and of the Post-
Modern era,” here conceived “as a
radical mutation of our sensibilities.”10
Succinctly, the exhibition questioned
the relations between objects and
materials and showed that reality,
whatever it was, was elusive, leading
to a sentiment of complexity.
Although Koolhaas, along
with other architects such as Peter
Eisenman, was one of the exhibitors
in Les Immatériaux, the correlation
between the 1985 exhibition and the
first publication of S,M,L,XL merits
additional scrutiny.11 If we can hypo-
thetically presume the influence of Les
Immatériaux on Koolhaas’s thinking,
by 1995, our relation to the mate-
rial—or rather, the immaterial—had
certainly evolved. The World Wide
Web had just been “invented” by
computer programmer Tim Berners-
Lee, with an enterprising, happy
  163
 few establishing Web presences and
building on the success of early online
communities like Stewart Brand
and Larry Brilliant’s Whole Earth
‘Lectronic Link, or WELL.
Besides proclaiming an imma-
teriality readily connected to the
Internet—space that is elsewhere
and highly fragmented, other, and
parallel;12 information accumulated
and made accessible by open-source
models; a growing and diversification
of the sharing economy; the ever-
expanding repository of images at our
immediate disposal; the greater con-
nectivity and increased globalization
of architecture and of the world in
general—S,M,L,XL speaks of another
immateriality: that of architecture in
our postmodern condition. With the
Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 22:04 05 November 2015
publication of Delirious New York in
1978, Koolhaas had already announced
his intentions to reveal and narrate
another kind of space, showing that
architecture was created by systems
of relations rather than mere physical
consequences. Or, as Koolhaas best
put it, “architecture was no longer a
substance but an illusion.”13 S,M,L,XL
further emphasized immateriality by
creating an object whose materiality
is the most present of all: extra-large,
extra-heavy, and containing an over-
whelming quantity of quotes and
heterogeneous images.
The book opens with the Office
for Metropolitan Architecture’s
(OMA’s) 1972 project “Exodus, or the
Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture.”
Koolhaas, “struck by the ‘stirring
beauty’ of the Berlin Wall,”14 proposes
a new urban condition, implying the
reproduction of the wall in the heart
of London, around a rectangular
vacant lot. This project too clearly
speaks of immateriality: the immate-
riality of the Cold War, whose physical
presence is manifested by the bold-
ness of the wall. The impact of the
wall, as Koolhaas writes, was about
communication: “Its significance as a
‘wall’—as an object—was marginal;
its impact was utterly independent
of its appearance.”15 At the core of
the Exodus projects is the insistence
on the semantic and symbolic aspect
of the wall—and of architecture in
164 The Materiality of the Immaterial
general—rather than the physical
(material) manifestation of the wall.
S,M,L,XL was a savvy, prophetic
announcement of architecture’s
dematerialization, a heterogeneous
collage of words and images framed
by “politics, context, the economy,
globalization—the world and describ-
ing the condition of architecture in
the mid 1990s.”16 As Terence Riley
wrote in 1996, “S,M,L,XL, subsumes
the tension that has existed between
architecture and its media reflections
ever since Frollo’s prediction that
‘the book will kill the edifice.’”17 Riley
continues, noting how “even Hugo
could not have predicted the evolu-
tion of other media, the photograph
and the film, which would in turn
infringe on their predecessors as well
as each other.” For Riley, the book is
not so much a book but a space. Riley
prophetically describes the book as
“an unstructured series of coherent,
though randomly accessed, events
within a system whose logic is too vast
to easily comprehend.”18 Today, the
book appears as an early materializa-
tion of our contemporary apparently
dematerialized world: it presents no
hierarchy other than that of the sizes
(small, medium, large, and extra-large
projects and writings) and is an accu-
mulation of data, images. Subversive
and proactive, S,M,L,XL can indu-
bitably be seen as a postmodern
manifesto because of the relationship
between the material and the immate-
rial it represents. Yet, as manifesto it
offered declaration of intentions that
remained in filigree, hidden behind
the sublimity of the book as object.
Yet why exactly does this book—and
not any others—have this particular
potential of establishing immaterial
relations?
Apart from his 1979 definition of
postmodernity as the end of meta-
narratives and his 1985 canonical
exhibition, Lyotard is also best known
for “his many attempts to restore
the sublime as a central category of
the avant-garde or ‘anesthetic’, for
him the sublime is what resists and
violates the senses.”19 Furthermore,
critic and theorist Fredric Jameson
in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) identi-
fies many “constitutive features of
the postmodern,” including a new
depthlessness related to the culture
of the image or the simulacrum, and
a consequent weakening of historic-
ity. Jameson also identifies a new
category of fundamental emotions,
or “intensities,” “which can best be
grasped by a return to older theories
of the sublime, exposing the deep
constitutive relationships of all this
to a whole new technology, which is
itself a figure for a whole new eco-
nomic world system.”20 Both Lyotard
and Jameson offer opportunities to
rethink the postmodern sensibility
and how it might have materialized in
architecture beyond mere historicism
and stylistic pastiche.
As suggested by Andreas Huyssen
back in 1984, it is, in fact, “a change
in sensibility for which the term
‘postmodernism’ is actually, at least
for now, wholly adequate.”21 And this
new sensibility literally materializes in
the book. In the late 1990s and early
2000s, S,M,L,XL served as an almost
inexhaustible source of visual refer-
ences—in full spreads, sometimes as
background for the text, other times
as collage or seemingly randomly
placed amongst textual entries—a
common ground on which to rebuild
architecture after the demise of the
aesthetic purity of modern avant-
garde. The imagery produced by
Koolhaas’s particular dirty aesthetic,
translated in the materiality of
S,M,L,XL, belongs to an entire gen-
eration and, as such, speaks of an era.
Ostensibly, no book has yet sur-
passed S,M,L,XL. But what is it that
made the book so relevant for my
generation? If, in the 1920s, Vers une
Architecture appeared radical for its
provocative statements and avant-
gardist association of words and
images, what was it about S,M,L,XL
that conveyed such an overwhelm-
ing sense of awe coupled with an
exhilarating feeling of discovery and
intellectual bulimia? I suggest that
it is precisely the book’s sublimity,
provoked by an excess of materiality,
that made it into a manifesto. It might
as well have been many other things.

But, no matter the reasons, all this
made me want to hold on to my copy
of S,M,L,XL and extract the soon-to-
be object collector’s item “out of the
box.”
Author Biography
Léa-Catherine Szacka is a post-
doctoral fellow at the Oslo Centre
for Critical Architecture Studies
(OCCAS), Oslo School of Architecture
and Design (AHO), and holds a
PhD in architectural history and
theory from the Bartlett School of
Architecture. She has published
widely on postmodern architecture
(contributing to the V&A’s Style and
Subversion catalog, AD, Arch+ 216, and
the 2011 edition of The Post-modern
Reader, for which she has acted as
Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 22:04 05 November 2015
editor, with Charles Jencks and Eva
Branscome) and architecture exhibi-
tions (contributing to Log 20, OASE88,
and the volume Place, Displacement:
Exhibiting Architecture and serving as
coeditor of the Cahiers du MNAM
129—Exposer l’Architecture). More
recently, Szacka curated the instal-
lation Effimero: Or the Postmodern
Italian Condition, a contribution to
the Monditalia exhibition at the 2014
Venice Architecture Biennale. Her
current research centers on the role
of ephemeral architecture in the con-
struction of cities in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
Notes
1 If being in transit is a human condition, particu-
larly problematized in modernity and explored
by existentialism, it seems very important to our
current society and needs to be problematized
by architecture. In fact, it is the underling theme
of the forthcoming Oslo Architecture Triennale,
curated by After Belonging Agency (Lluís Alexandre
Casanovas Blanco, Ignacio G. D. Galán, Carlos
Mínguez Carrasco, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis,
and Marina Otero Verzier), an event that will
take place in the fall of 2016. With the theme
“After Belonging, A Triennale in Residence, on
Residence, and the Ways We Stay in Transit,” this
sixth Oslo Architecture Triennale will look at how
“the global circulation of people, information and
goods has accelerated that transformation, and,
consequently, destabilized what we understand
by residence, undermining spatial permanence,
property and identity,” http://oslotriennale.com/en
(accessed June 2, 2015).
2 Rem Koolhaas, interview with the author,
February 3, 2015, published as “Translucent
Oppositions,” OASE, no. 94, “OMA: The First
Decade,” http://www.oasejournal.nl/en/Issues/94/
Szacka
TranslucentOppositions (accessed May 30, 2015).
3 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and
Brian Massumi (Oxford: Manchester University
Press, 1986). (It was first published in English in
1984.) The book was first published in French as
La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris:
Les éditions de Minuit, 1979) and was a report on
the state of knowledge in the Western world, which
was produced at the request of the government of
Quebec.
4 The thematic exhibition Les Immatériaux was pre-
sented at the Centre Pompidou between March 28
and July 15, 1985. Its curators were Jean-François
Lyotard and Thierry Chaput. It was organized
by the Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI)—a
French cultural organization dedicated to design,
architecture, and the urban, born in 1969 out of
the Union central des arts décoratifs (UCAD) and
subsumed, in 1977, into the project of the Centre
Pompidou—and was presented in the Grande
Galerie, on the fifth floor of the Centre Pompidou.
The exhibition attracted more than 200,000
visitors. Originally the exhibition was conceived
with the different title of “Matériaux Nouveaux
et Création” (“New materials and creation”), but
Lyotard’s arrival slightly modified the project’s
scope. Today, Les Immatériaux is undoubtedly a
landmark of exhibition history, as testified by
numerous symposiums, commemorations, and
publications dedicated to the legacy of the show
and its message: on May 21 and May 22, 2014, the
Centre for Digital Culture at Leuphana Universität,
Lüneberg, held the symposium “30 Years after Les
Immatériaux, Art, Science and Theory.” In March
2015, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London held
a research forum under the title “Les Immatériaux:
Towards the Virtual with Jean-Francois Lyotard,”
celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Les
Immateriaux’s private viewing on March 27–28, 1985.
There was also a commemoration at the Dusseldorf
Quadriennale in 2014, and there will be one at the
Pompidou in 2015. See also Yuk Hui and Andreas
Broeckmann, eds., 30 Years after Les Immatériaux
(Lunenberg: Meson Press, 2015); Francesca Gallo,
Les Immatériaux: Un percorso di Jean-François Lyotard
nell’arte contemporanea (Rome: Aracne, 2008); Tate
Papers, no. 12, “Landmark Exhibitions Issue”
(October 1, 2009); Appareil 10, “Lyotard et la surface
d’inscription numérique” (2012), Paris.
5 Open on January 31, 1977, the Centre Pompidou
was envisioned as a multidisciplinary museum and
a communication “machine” in the heart of Paris’s
city center.
6 “Les Immatériaux est une sorte de dramaturgie
posée entre l’achèvement d’une période et l’in-
quiétude d’une époque naissante à l’aube de la
postmodernité, et en ce sens, relève d’un projet
tant philosophique qu’artistique.” Exhibition press
release, Centre Pompidou, 1985, http://monoskop.
org/Les_Immatériaux (accessed June 3, 2015).
7 Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein,
“Figuring the Matrix: Lyotard’s Les immatériaux,
1985,” in Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture,
ed. Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending, Wallis Miller,
and Jéremie Michael McGowan, (Zurich: Lars
Müller, 2014), 73.
8 In his paper “Structures for thinking: architecture
of/at Les Immatériaux,” delivered at the Courtauld
Institute of Art thirtieth anniversary research
forum in March 2015, Antony Hudek argues a
JAE 69 : 2
curatorial genealogy for Les Immatériaux—made of
the work of pioneers of exhibition design and sce-
nography such as, for example, Frederick Kiesler,
Claude Parent, and Paul Virilio.
9 Tara McDowell, “Les Immatériaux: A Conversation
with Jean-François Lyotard and Bernard Blistène,”
Art Agenda, March 27, 2014, http://www.art-agenda.
com/reviews/les-immateriaux-a-conversation-
with-jean-francois-lyotard-and-bernard-blistene/
(accessed June 2, 2015).
10 Pierre Restany, “Immatériaux: Let Us Be Leavened
with Lyotard,” Domus 662 (June 1985): 60.
11 S,M,L,XL was first published in 1995 by Monacelli
Press in New York and 010 in Rotterdam, selling
the 30,000 copies within a few months. This first
copy has the name Rem Koolhaas printed in yellow
on the cover. The second edition was published in
1997 by Monacelli Press in Italy and has the name
Rem Koolhaas printed in orange on the cover.
The third edition was published in 1998, also by
Monacelli, and has the name Rem Koolhaas printed
in blue on the cover.
12 Cf. Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to
Supermodernity (London: Verso, 2009).
13 Koolhaas, interview with the author (note 2).
14 Jean-Claude Garcias, “Koolhaas et le sublime,”
Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 304 (1996): 60.
15 OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL,
2nd ed. (New York: Monacelli, 1997), 227.
16 In 1996, Jean-Claude Garcias quotes a “blurb”
describing the book: “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 in the
space of typographic imagination, the book title,
Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large is also its frame-
work: projects and essays are arranged according to
scale. The book combines essays, manifestoes, dia-
ries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations
on the contemporary city, with work produced by
Koolhaas’s OMA 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, globaliza-
tion, the world.” See Garcias, “Koolhaas” (note 14),
60.
17 Terence Riley, “Chute Libre,” Architecture d’Au-
jourd’hui 304 (1996): 58.
18 Ibid.
19 Birnbaum and Wallenstein, “Figuring the Matrix”
(note 7), 74.
20 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1991), 6.
21 In 1984, Andreas Huyssen published “Mapping the
Postmodern,” also using the medium of the exhibi-
tion (here 1982 Documenta 7 in Kassel) as a basis for
discussing the meaning of the word “postmodern.”
Huyssen wrote: “Much of my ensuing argument
will be based on the premise that what appears on
one level as the latest fad, advertising pitch and
hollow spectacle is part of a slowly emerging cul-
tural transformation in Western societies, a change
in sensibility for which the term ‘postmodernism’
is actually, at least for now, wholly adequate.”
See Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” New
German Critique 33, “Modernity and Postmodernity”
(Autumn 1984): 5–52, on 8.
  165