“The Generic City” and “Whatever

Happened to Urbanism?”
from S, M, L, XL (1994)

Rem Koolhaas

Editors’ Introduction

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 “What-
ever 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).
The two pieces presented here share Koolhaas’ deft use of language that both sensationalizes and poses
questions worthy of his celebrity. As with his past writing, Koolhaas provides an often humorous, unsentimen-
talized and existential view of the contemporary urban scene. The themes in these two pieces focus on a
similar outcome – an urbanism that has lost its way. In the first, he describes the urbanism of the generic
city, and in the second he provides a call to action.
In the first selection Koolhaas describes the unsatisfactory urbanism we tend to produce all too regularly
and which is found increasingly at the periphery of traditional city centers. Koolhaas suggests the Generic
City is a justified reflection of present-day need and society’s current urban abilities. Its physical characteris-
tics are spaces of anomie and atomism, neutral and beige with unnoticeable buildings, dominated by the
automobile, signified by an increasingly tropical friendliness, where people dine at waterfronts on shrimp that
tastes like nothing. From the fun he derives in describing these characteristics, one might get the impression
that Koolhaas is not only an existential documentarian, but might be the Generic City’s champion. He writes
very similarly to the ways in which Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown described Las Vegas or Joel
Garreau defined the Edge City. But to assume Koolhaas is satisfied with this state of conditions would be to
underestimate his call for a deeper and more serious urbanism.
Koolhaas’ critical stance in this work is “simply to abandon what doesn’t work – what has outlived its use –
to break up the blacktop of idealism with the jackhammers of realism and to accept whatever grows in its
place” – in this case the dominance and propping up of the exhausted historic urban center. He argues
against the straitjacket of urban identity building and the destructive centralization that is required to keep
central urban areas flourishing. In its place, the importance of the periphery is put forth as the true represen-
tation of contemporary urbanism, not only as a place where modernism can flourish in the form of shopping
centers, parking lots, freeways and airports, but also as “free style” spaces where architects are free to
innovate without the strictures and limitations of historic contexts. Although he notes the unstoppable march
of postmodern choice and style, his critique also suggests both “the death of the street” as well as “the final

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