BOOK
The Gist: Inside-out inspection of architecture and urban sprawl
$45
Every year architect Rem Koolhaas leads a group of grad students in an urban research study, called Harvard Project on the City. Four of these endeavors - including an analysis of China's Pearl River Delta and a guide to shopping ("the last remaining public activity") - have been excerpted for part of this high-gloss volume, which is as thick as a cinder block and bound in bright vinyl, with a mousepad glued to its cover.
Even if you're familiar with the economic frenzy of Southern China, the photos of the Pearl River Delta will startle you, as will the account of an anti-market that has created entire cities as speculative communistic ventures, divorced from conventional accounting of profits and losses. In a few particularly amazing pages, the Koolhaas-led group describes the 75-mile Gordon Wu highway, built on a viaduct and touching down on the sites of a dozen yet unbuilt cities: "It is an incredibly spectral, almost phantom situation: a highway leading nowhere, in the middle of nothing. Can all this be explained by the market economy?"
The best things here are the full-bleed spreads of Lagos, whose catastrophic and yet productive chaos represents the terminal condition of the modern city. The photos of this Nigerian metropolis are heart-stopping. Lagos grows by hundreds of people daily, and every form of congestion is exploited for improvised commerce. "Lagos has no streets; instead it has curbs and gates, barriers and hustlers," writes Koolhaas' team. "Even the Lagos superhighway has bus stops on it, mosques under it, markets in it, and buildingless factories throughout it."
Each of the Harvard manuscripts deserves to be published separately and unabridged, and they will be: The book on the Pearl River Delta, Great Leap Forward, and The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping are due out in September. The volume on Lagos (where Koolhaas currently spends one week every two months) and one analyzing ancient Roman city building will be published a year later.
Unfortunately, Koolhaas and his collaborators are responsible for only 20 percent of this 800-page collection. Mutations was published in association with a project presented in Bordeaux from November 2000 to March 2001, by arc en rêve centre d'architecture. The other writers sampled in the book are formidable, but several of the best - such as Saskia Sassen, who writes about "the global city" - suffer from poor editing. In other selections, the influence of academic art criticism is evident in the abstract language used, which is dull next to Koolhaas and his student-colleagues' vivid material.
Distributed Art Publishers: (800) 338 2665, www.artbook.com.
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