Great Leap Forward / Harvard Design School Project on the City

by Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong (Editor), Rem Koolhaas (Editor)

Authors: Bernard Chang, Mihai Craciun, Rem Koolhaas, Nancy Lin, Yuyang Liu, Katherine Orff, Stephanie Smith Design: Alice Chung Harvard Graduate School of Design's independent study seminar Project on the City aims at identifying and analyzing problems leading to and resulting from accelerated urbanization, as well as developing new philosophies to aid our increasingly metropolitan planet cope with the rapid changes. Taking the roles of both architect and sociologist, the students travel and research in the first phase of each cycle, and write their theses in the second. The result of each project is a comprehensive, specialized study of the effects of modernization on the contemporary city. During the 1996-1997 period, Project on the City focused its sites on China's Pearl River Delta, a cluster of five cities with a population of 12 million destined to reach 36 million by 2020. Under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party the Pearl River Delta has been (and still is) undergoing a Western-influenced, unrestricted capitalist development which is effectively destroying traditional Chinese social structures thereby producing an entirely new urban substance. Described as "laboratories for the contained unleashing of capitalism," these Special Economic Zones in the Pearl River Delta constitute an unprecedented experiment in urbanization on an astonishingly large scale. The new book presents thesis essays which explore, in a theoretical and critical context, the problematic results of this forced modernization and the possibility of a new system for understanding the troubled relationship between urbanization and economic growth.

Genres: Architecture, Cultural Studies, Art, Urban Studies, Theory, Urbanism

800 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

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

[Lisa D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting stories and history of the building out of the Pearl Delta. A little too repetitive between theses and with unnecessary trademarking of words/ design-speak, which subtracted from the narrative and analysis.

[Abraham · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a crazy book! As insane as Koolhaas' vision of the generic city

[Vanlilith]

-