Volume 12: Al Manakh

by Rem Koolhaas

4 almenak, 6-7 almanache(e, (6 amminick), 7 almanacke, 6-9 -ack, 8- -ac. (Apperas in med.L. as almanch(h in end of 13th c., and soon after (thought it might have been earlier) in most of Rom. langs., It. almanacco, Sp. almanaque, Fr. almanach, the immediate source of which was app. a Spanish Arabic al-manakh, which translates to 'the climate'

Genres: Architecture

496 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

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

[Mike Bularz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A snapshot of the time & place it was written about.. the Middle East and Gulf area, although it's only 3-4 years old it is the best architectural and planning insight you can find about the recent developments and experiments in the area.
This collection of three journals large enough to be books by themselves is a stimulating, as well as visually appealing guide to the region's development on an architectural and regional scale. Al Manakh seeks to be a guide/almanac to the forces and growth in the region, and it does this well through examining economic and geographic forces as well as redefining the vocabulary of urbanism and design.
At times it digresses into discussion of strange combinations of fields and how they are viewed in the eye of design, and at times it gets detailed through interviews with architects and master planners of the region. Overall it tries to put logical and practical understanding together of the development, which is difficult, but overall it is the food for thought and research / insider's perspective on the region's development necessary to have some understanding of it all, and to try to apply to the global vocabulary.
Al Manakh is a snapshot, and a message of what problems we need to address, and some view of how to address them. Looking forward to the planned sequel to this.