'Acerca de la ciudad', four texts by Rem Koolhaas together in one volume

'Acerca de la ciudad' is the new book published by Gustavo Gili which brings together essential texts by architect Rem Koolhaas. All four texts in this book share one common main topic, the city, urbanism.

Cover. Acerca de la ciudad, Rem Koolhaas. Courtesy of GGili.

It is not the first time that Koolhaas writes about this issue, already in 1978 he published his fundamental text Delirious New York, a retroactive manifesto for the grand world capital as a deposit of architectural findings, statements, conceptual strategies or architectural types ready to be taken and applied elsewhere.

As the editor explains, "the purpose of this book is to collect those intermediate texts that do not focus on any particular city and which appeared after and between studies about specific cities. Writings that summarize Koolhaas' analysis and ideas which, addressed from outside the discipline, explain the death of urbanism as it used to be understood."

This volume contains four previously scattered texts - What Ever Happened to Urbanism? (not yet published in Spanish until now), Bigness and the Problem of Large, The Generic City and Junkspace - which represent Rem Koolhaas' main ideas on the death of modern urbanism and the birth of a new urbanism with no theory or architects.

Two of the texts ("What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" and "Bigness and the Problem of Large") first appeared in the 1995 book S, M, L, XL; "The Generic City" was published two years later in the Italian magazine Domus; and finally, "Junkspace" appeared in the magazine October in 2007.

Except for the first text "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?", the others had been published in Spanish separately as part of the collection of small books GGmínima. However, Gustavo Gili publishers considered these four essays bear enough coherence in order to form a small volume which summarizes this great thinker and contemporary polemicist's most important ideas about the city and its urbanism.

Title.- 'Acerca de la ciudad', (About the City)
Author.- Rem Koolhaas
Size.- 12 x 18 cm.
Pages No.- 112 pages
ISBN.- 9788425227530
Format.- Paperback
Year.- 2014.

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Back-cover. Acerca de la ciudad, Rem Koolhaas. Courtesy of GGili.

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REM KOOLHAAS

Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944. He began his career as a journalist, working for the Haagse Post, and as a set-designer in the Netherlands and Hollywood. He beganHe frequented the Architectural Association School in London and studied with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University. In 1978, he wrote Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, which has become a classic of contemporary architectural theory. In 1975 – together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp – he founded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture).

The most important works by Koolhaas and OMA, from its foundation until the mid-1990s, include the Netherlands Dance Theatre at The Hague, the Nexus Housing at Fukuoka in Japan, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais of Euralille and Lille, the Villa dall’Ava, the Très Grande Bibliothèque, the Jussieu library in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Seattle Public Library.

Together with Koolhaas’s reflections on contemporary society, these buildings appear in his second book, S,M,L,XL (1995), a volume of 1376 pages written as though it were a “novel about architecture”. Published in collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer, Bruce Mau, the book contains essays, manifestos, cartoons and travel diaries.

In 2005, with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman, he was the founder to the prestigious Volume magazine, the result of a collaboration with Archis (Amsterdam), AMO and C-lab (Columbia University NY).

His built work includes the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Foundation Headquarters (2018), Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris (2018), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015/2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003). Current projects include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester.

Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and is a professor at Harvard University, where he directs The Project on the City, a research programme on changes in urban conditions around the world. This programme has conducted research on the delta of the Pearl River in China (entitled Great Leap Forward) and on consumer society (The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Taschen Verlag has published the results. Now is preparing a major exhibition for the Guggenheim museum to open in 2019 entitled Countryside: Future of the World.

Among the awards he has won in recent years, we mention here the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000), the Praemium Imperiale (2003), the Royal Gold Medal (2004) and the Mies Van Der Rohe prize (2005). In 2008, Time mentioned him among the 100 most influential people of the planet.