Mutations

this book is packed with info. some of it is relatively hard to get at (your eyes are likely to glaze over at the reams of essays formatted in a narrow, sans-serif OCR-esque font) but the content and data is pretty good. it looks very nice in your bookshelf, but when hitting it up for a re-read, you may find yourself cursing the designers' decisions to go with form over function, IMHO.

This book is to be considered a piece of historical evidence of the tendencies of thought of the new era. Whether you may find the concepts proposed not suitable, every prospective or practicing architect, designer or urban planner must be aware of the latest tendencies of thought in order to be the best-educated he/she can be. The Pearl River Delta investigation is impecable. For the "reasonably intelligent person" that wrote a comment above, it is a shame that you overlooked the whole analysis on shopping, perhaps because you are so immersed in it in the USA that you cannot see the forest for the trees. I agree that the language is dense and often martian-like. This is the case of the introductory essay "Telegram from nowhere". But read between the lines. Reading is re-reading said Joyce. You will find a very smart concept regarding the architecture built for the media. This book is all about cities in different parts in the world. It helps a lot if you are a culturally aware person. If you have had contact with diverse forms of living and thinking, may I highly suggest you get hold of this book. If you are not, you may either feel that the text is just wobbling on things you cannot be empathic with, or you may be on your way to becoming a more educated human being. And do not think by any means that this is a meek and mild pro-globalization text. This book is just rasing questions and proposing concepts, like all masterpiece limit themselves to do.

At first it might look as "just another crazy object" from Koolhaas... but when getting into it you discover it says all those things that you emerging architect, or architecture student have been thinking about lately. From Globalization to the soul of the cities. Excellent. It puts into place the concepts of Globalization and Shopping together with the position of architects and architecture related to them. A while after reading it you realize it's not far away from "Towards a New Architecture" by Le Corbusier... it's another era book, but the fluxes travel among the same envelopes, using Rem's concepts.

The book creates an exciting panorama of our urban spaces. It is similar to the first book published by Zone Books, which also uses photos and essays. I think the book is best viewed as "book art". It repesents the urban experience as overwhelming in a somewhat distanced way. Keeping in mind that it focuses with an almost bleak view of cities and consumer culture(we don't see a lot of pictures of parks, clean streets, or "nice" things about cities), I still recommend it.

Pretty book well designed, essays are interesting and really do seem to have more to do with urban planning than architecture. But it's a fairly good compilation; the roman city section is reason enough to buy the book.