Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students
by Sanford Kwinter

Earlier and more clearly than any contemporary architect, Rem Koolhaas, like Manfredo Tafuri before him, recognized that architecture has been eclipsed by the Metropolis. While other architects have settled for being mere decorators of the scaffold of commerce, Koolhaas remains among the last holdouts to seek new possibilities and locuses for architecture. Though this struggle might at first seem quixotic, a form of obsessive delirium, it now appears, with the imminent arrival of his opus magnum 'S,M,L,XL', that Koolhaas may have found a temporary respite for architecture within the very concept of the extra-large, that is, in Bigness, or in the Metropolitan itself.