S,M,L,XL (Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large) by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. The book was first published in 1996 by The Monacelli Press, and sold for $75.
On the subject of remarkable collaborations between authors and book designers (see my last posting), the 1996 publication S,M,L,XL (Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large) is another stand-out edition. Like McLuhan and Fiore’s The Medium is the Message, S,M,L,XL combines the words of a writer–the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944) –and an art director–the Canadian graphic designer Bruce Mau (b. 1959)–whose names appear as co-authors on the book’s cover.
Aside from its shared authorship, S,M,L,XL is notable for several other reasons. For starters, at 1,344 pages and six pounds (2.7 kg) the book’s sheer heft is exceptional. (A now well-known photo of the book, originally featured in a Dutch newspaper supplement, shows a model using S,M,L,XL as her tall ultra-chic pillow.) More remarkable though, S,M,L,XL stands out because with it Koolhaas radically altered the look, feel, and meaning of the architectural monograph. Before S,M,L,XL such books were staid tomes on one architect’s practice, often of little interest to anyone other than the author and a handful of his or her followers. Although S,M,L,XL was commissioned as an architectural monograph to showcase Koolhaas’s then relatively small body of work (in the late nineties his firm, OMA–the Office for Metropolitan Architecture–had executed fewer than 20 structures) the architect created anything but a conventional work.
To achieve this, Koolhaas’s creative union with Mau was essential. Like The Medium is the Message (a book which Mau had long been a fan of) S,M,L,XL had no one manuscript upon which to build the book’s visual form. Its creation is the outcome of a five-year-long collaboration between the book’s writer and its designer, who achieved a symbiotic evolution of words and pictures. Mau’s layouts often inspired Koolhaas’s prose and vice versa. Central to S,M,L,XL is the book’s alphabetical reflection on the nature of scale in architecture, born of its integration of images and texts, which include essays, diary excerpts, travelogues, photographs, architectural plans, sketches, and cartoons produced by OMA. Together these features take what might have been a turgid monograph into a new realm, one in which architecture reads as an energetic and fast-paced narrative.
Although S,M,L,XL has been criticized as a triumph of form over function, it stands out not only as a ground-breaking book and a work of significant social observation, but also as a document that catapulted the careers of both its creators. After the publication of S,M,L,XL Koolhaas went from being an architect to starchitect while Mau’s design practice grew exponentially eventually taking him from Toronto to Chicago. Today S,M,L,XL sits in offices and homes as a signifier of cool, a reminder that Koolhaas and Mau, like McLuhan and Fiore before them, understood that a ground-breaking book is an essential act of self-promotion.
For more reading see: “The Master Builder” by Martin Filler, published in the New York Times on Sunday, March 17, 1996
S,M,L,XL
By Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, 1996
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S,M,L,XL (Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large) by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. The book was first published in 1996 by The Monacelli Press, and sold for $75.
On the subject of remarkable collaborations between authors and book designers (see my last posting), the 1996 publication S,M,L,XL (Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large) is another stand-out edition. Like McLuhan and Fiore’s The Medium is the Message, S,M,L,XL combines the words of a writer–the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944) –and an art director–the Canadian graphic designer Bruce Mau (b. 1959)–whose names appear as co-authors on the book’s cover.
Aside from its shared authorship, S,M,L,XL is notable for several other reasons. For starters, at 1,344 pages and six pounds (2.7 kg) the book’s sheer heft is exceptional. (A now well-known photo of the book, originally featured in a Dutch newspaper supplement, shows a model using S,M,L,XL as her tall ultra-chic pillow.) More remarkable though, S,M,L,XL stands out because with it Koolhaas radically altered the look, feel, and meaning of the architectural monograph. Before S,M,L,XL such books were staid tomes on one architect’s practice, often of little interest to anyone other than the author and a handful of his or her followers. Although S,M,L,XL was commissioned as an architectural monograph to showcase Koolhaas’s then relatively small body of work (in the late nineties his firm, OMA–the Office for Metropolitan Architecture–had executed fewer than 20 structures) the architect created anything but a conventional work.
To achieve this, Koolhaas’s creative union with Mau was essential. Like The Medium is the Message (a book which Mau had long been a fan of) S,M,L,XL had no one manuscript upon which to build the book’s visual form. Its creation is the outcome of a five-year-long collaboration between the book’s writer and its designer, who achieved a symbiotic evolution of words and pictures. Mau’s layouts often inspired Koolhaas’s prose and vice versa. Central to S,M,L,XL is the book’s alphabetical reflection on the nature of scale in architecture, born of its integration of images and texts, which include essays, diary excerpts, travelogues, photographs, architectural plans, sketches, and cartoons produced by OMA. Together these features take what might have been a turgid monograph into a new realm, one in which architecture reads as an energetic and fast-paced narrative.
Although S,M,L,XL has been criticized as a triumph of form over function, it stands out not only as a ground-breaking book and a work of significant social observation, but also as a document that catapulted the careers of both its creators. After the publication of S,M,L,XL Koolhaas went from being an architect to starchitect while Mau’s design practice grew exponentially eventually taking him from Toronto to Chicago. Today S,M,L,XL sits in offices and homes as a signifier of cool, a reminder that Koolhaas and Mau, like McLuhan and Fiore before them, understood that a ground-breaking book is an essential act of self-promotion.
For more reading see:
“The Master Builder” by Martin Filler, published in the New York Times on Sunday, March 17, 1996
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/17/books/the-master-builder.html?pagewanted=2
Interior spreads from S,M,L,XL.