Mutations by Rem Koolhaas

by Rem Koolhaas

"A city is a plane of tarmac with some red hot spots of intensity," Rem Koolhaas, the pathbreaking architect and author of such semiotically seminal books as Delirious New York and the more recent S, M, L, XL, remarked in 1969. More than 30 years later, there are more of those hot spots around the world than ever, and they're getting hotter every day. Globalization, standardization, and the high-speed innovations of our current information age are transforming urban centers from London to Los Angeles to Lagos, and more places are becoming more urban, and at a faster pace, than ever before. Mutations is an eye-popping atlas-cum-analysis of this new urbanization, and much of it is composed of essays and meditations (from a variety of contributors) on the 21st-century international City (often un-)Beautiful. Most of them are written in language that will be familiar to readers of Koolhaas's past in other words, dense, abstract, and chock-full of references to Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. If you like that sort of deconstructivist yammering, great; if not, the major small-type essays are best sampled (or, better, skimmed) one at a time, interspersed with the many other more accessible elements of the book that truly do add up to a vivid and fascinating mosaic of postmodern urbanism.From Koolhaas and Harvard Design School's Project on the City come two engrossing and wholly straightforward one of the Pearl River Delta, which China has designated as a zone of unrestricted capitalist experimentation, and whose five major urban centers have consequently exploded overnight in all sorts of instructive and often frightening ways; and another of the chaotic, congested and Blade Runneresque megalopolis of Lagos, Nigeria, whose patterns of growth, housing, and commerce defy all conventional wisdom on how cities should develop. There's also a bounty of excellent (and often astonishing) statistics on all aspects of urban growth; a "snapshots" section of phenomena from cities all over the globe; a completely spot-on (and unintentionally funny) analysis of the evolution of shopping as the last truly unifying urban public activity (and the subject of Koolhaas's next full-scale book); and a trenchant look at Kosovo as ground zero in the first major war of the Internet age. (It should be noted that there's a separate section on the U.S., which with all its soulless, tacky consumerist excess gets the drubbing it usually can expect from the European intelligentsia, although the irony here is that more and more of newly urban Europe is starting to look like newly urban America.)The exhibit-quality photography throughout is great, and, as you could expect from this unofficial successor to S, M, L, XL, the design is satisfyingly outré, right down to its post-Warholian plastic yellow easy-wipe cover with glued-on mousepad. But for all of Mutations's rich trove of facts and insights, and the impression that its high-tech design gives of an ironic embrace of the new urbanization, its deeper tone is one of disappointment and loss. The spirit of Jane Jacobs resides here, with all its yearning for the quirky, quaint beauty of human-scaled townhouses and shops, sidewalks and byways, and for the precorporatized glamour of grand old towns like New York, London, Paris, and Shanghai, before such metallic nouveau hubs as Atlanta and Kuala Lumpur were ever on the world-commerce map. Mutations was written and compiled largely by architects, after all, who hate ugliness as much as the next guy, whatever they may claim otherwise; its precisely for that reason that this densely absorbing new compendium betrays its wistfulness as often as it promotes its own air of cool, ethnographic bemusement. --Timothy Murphy

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, Urban Studies, Urbanism, Art, Cities

Mass Market Paperback

First published November 1, 2000

About the author

Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a representative of Deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
He is seen by some as one of the significant architectural thinkers and urbanists of his generation, by others as a self-important iconoclast. In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize. In 2008, Time put him in their top 100 of The World's Most Influential People. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014.

Reviews

[Yoon · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's fun. you don't have to finish the book to talk about it, but if you do, kudos for you! each chapter or essay has a good visual hook to it, and granted, it is a colorful book. if you find a cheap copy, buy it as if you are buying a cook book. not for a revolution, but it's tasty when you are ready to bite it.

[Sarah]

Aah! this book is so rich in its research of globalization and urbanization of third-world countries, and the changing and evovling of American cities... it could be its OWN thesis!

[Leandro Llorente · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best Rem Koolhaas book and could be ignored. There are a lot better Koolhaas books.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful pictures; some mumbo jumbo. There are fascinating photo essays on urban development in Lagos, Shopping, China's Pearl River Delta, and development in the US. There are also small photo portfolios that are great to just thumb through randomly. I'd say it's more or less an interesting urban planning coffee table book that you can actually get something out of if you find yourself reaching over absentmindedly from the couch. Also comes with a compilation cd of sound artists organized around the theme of cities. The book itself is designed to illustrate one of its themes - reuse and adaptation. The cover is a rubber sleeve you can scrub and the titles are on a piece of foam pasted to the front that looks like it could be used as a mouse pad. Cheesy and clever.

[Rory Hyde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did the 'amazing urban facts in big type' thing before The Endless City or Massive Change, which was cool at the time. The 'How to Build a City: Roman Operating System' stands out as still a great idea. Lots of good contributors, including Mirko Zardini, Thomas Keenan, John McMorrough, Stefano Boeri, Bart Lootsma. And has a big chunk on Lagos, which would inform the documentary. A mixed bag with lots of gold.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The middle sections hold the real meat of this book. The photoillustrations, graphs and factoids are complimented by shocking facts about the challenges our country faces. We are exposed to the consequences of unregulated free markets and hope to learn from our past mistakes. Though this book is thick, you can finish it in a matter of hours by skipping the beginning and end sections. I feel like I gleaned the best material from the middle.

[Mike Bularz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this exploring other aspects of urban planning and geographical philosophy, and it was a good launching point for more research and a real eye opener. Skip the Urban Rumors section at the end it was a waste of time.

[Sarah]

I am looking forward to reading this! I want to use Lagos in my thesis

[Vanlilith]

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[Ronny Gonzalez]

The opportunity to create links and networks between layers of information, covered by different codes that provide the event form to tackle a project