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death of planning.” For the traditional urbanist, reading Koolhaas was akin to the experiences of seeing a
horror movie – causing one to flinch uncomfortably, sometimes scream, feel repulsion, and continuously look
over the shoulder when leaving the theater – because one knows that danger lurks, yet hopes it was all fic-
tion. As many commuters know from passing through the urban periphery on a daily basis – whether outside
Atlanta or Paris – this is no fiction.
In the second short piece, “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” (an addition to “The Generic City” within
this second edition of this Reader), Koolhaas laments the loss of the “profession of urbanism.” He suggests
that urbanism has sabotaged itself and been ridiculed out of existence by the failed modernist project, the
irrelevant use of nostalgia, and the city’s devolution to a mere set of architectural elements – without any
underlying connective tissue, responsive infrastructure, or collective rationale. And all of this dissatisfaction
with traditional design practice, he suggests, has led to no credible alternative to the chaos of our current
urban predicament. This piece provides a very direct clarion call for resuscitating urbanism, addressing the
need to grow our cities in response to urbanization pressures, and supporting an urban attitude. He suggests
we focus on becoming supporters of urban thinking and look to ways of growing and modifying our cities
– rather than simply producing architecture. The theme of this work parallels several other critiques of status T
H
quo urban design practice provided in this Reader, including those by Rowe and Koetter, Michael Sorkin, and R
several of the environmentalists. E
Remment (Rem) Lucas Koolhaas is an architect and theorist working out of multiple Offices for Metro- E
politan Architecture in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing. A counterpart to OMA is AMO: a re-
search studio that pushes the boundaries of urbanism and architecture to investigate media, technology,
fashion, sociology, and other temporal interests. Koolhaas gained early notoriety for his 1982 entry into the
Parc de la Villette competition, ultimately placing behind winner Bernard Tschumi. A winner of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize in 2000, his many projects include the masterplans for Lille and Almere; housing in Fukuoka,
Japan; several Prada retail stores and catwalks; the public library in Seattle; museum projects and performance
halls in Dallas, St. Petersburg-Russia, Paris, Taipei, Porto, and Seoul; and the Dutch Embassy in Berlin. Just
as interesting as his built works are the number of OMA competition entries and unrealized designs across
the world.
Key texts by Koolhaas include: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1997, original 1978); Mutations: Harvard Project on the City, edited with Stefano Boeri,
Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, and Daniela Fabricius (Barcelona: Actar, 2001); Colours, written with Norman
Foster and Alessandro Mendini (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001); Project on the City II: The Harvard Design School
Guide to Shopping: Harvard Project on the City, edited with Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, and Sze
Tsung Leong (Cologne: Taschen, 2001); Project on the City I: Great Leap Forward, edited with Chuihua
Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, and Sze Tsung Leong (Cologne: Taschen, 2002); Content (Cologne: Taschen,
2004); a transcribed interview between Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks,
edited with Kayoko Ota and James Westcott (Cologne: Taschen, 2011); and The Maddalena Effect: An
Architectural Affair, written with Guido Bertolaso and Stefano Boeri, and edited with Michele Brunello and
Francisca Insulza (New York: Rizzoli, 2010).
A number of texts and monographs have been written on Koolhaas and his professional work at the Office
for Metropolitan Architecture. The most important of these are: Heike Sinning, More is More: OMA/Rem
Koolhaas (Tübingan: Wasmuth, 2001); Jean Attali, et al. What is OMA? Considering Rem Koolhaas and the
Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Rotterdam: NAi, 2004); Germano Celant (ed.) Rem Koolhaas: Unveiling
the Prada Foundation (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2008); Roberto Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas/OMA: Essays in
Architecture (London: Routledge, 2008); and Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architec-
ture: An Ethnography of Design (Netherlands: Uitgeverij: 2009).
Forms of contemporary urbanism are characterized often by two very different expressions, both implied
by Koolhaas in this reading. The first, Everyday Urbanism, cannot be considered a design movement in any sense
of the term, but rather a description of the lived realities of the un-idealized populist city. Everyday Urbanism
is the non-utopian informalism of trailerparks, freeway signage, the ad-hoc use of vacant lots, community
gardens, garage sales, and the vast informal settlements found in poor countries, for example. Considered a

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