REM KOOLHAAS, B.

1944
Rem Koolhaas, Bigness and the Problem of Large, OMA< Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Man, S, M,
L, XL, (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 494-516. Copyright Rem Koolhaas and the Monacelli
Press, Inc.
Species
Beyond a certain scale, architecture acquires the properties of BIGNESS. The best reason to broach
BIGNESS is the one given by climbers of Mount Everest: because it is there. BIGNESS is the
ultimate architecture.
It seems incredible that the size of a building alone embodies an ideological problem, independent
of the will of its architects.
Of all possible categories, BIGNESS does not seem to deserve a manifesto; discredited as an
intellectual problem, it is apparently on its way to extinction like the dinosaur through
clumsiness, slowness, inflexibility, difficulty. But in fact, only BIGNESS instigates the regime of
complexity that mobilizes the full intelligence of architecture and its related fields.
One hundred years ago, a generation of conceptual breakthroughs and supporting technologies
unleashed an architectural BIG BANG. By randomizing circulation, short circuiting distance,
artificializing interiors, reducing mass, stretching dimensions, and accelerating construction, the
elevator, electricity, air-conditioning, steel, and finally, the new infrastructures formed a cluster of
mutations that induced another species of architecture. The combined effects of these inventions
were structures taller and deeper-BIGGER-than ever before conceived, with a parallel potential for
the reorganization of the social world-a vastly richer programmation.
Theorems
Fuelled initially by the thoughtless energy of the purely quantitative, BIGNESS has been, for nearly
a century, a condition almost without thinkers, a revolution without program.
Delirious New York implied a latent Theory of BIGNESS based on five theorems:
1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a BIG Building. Such a mass can no longer be
controlled by a singular architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures.
The impossibility triggers the autonomy of its parts, which is different from fragmentation: the parts
remain committed to the whole.
2. The elevator-with its potential to establish mechanical rather than architectural connections-and
its family of related inventions render null and void the classical repertoire of architecture. Issues of
composition, scale, proportion, detail are now moot. The art of architecture is useless in
BIGNESS.
3. In BIGNESS, the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the faade can
no longer reveal what happens inside. The humanist expectation of honesty is doomed; interior
and exterior architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of
programmatic and iconographic needs, the other-agent of dis-information- offering the city the
apparent stability of an object. Where architecture reveals, BIGNESS perplexes; BIGNESS

transforms the city from a summation of certainties into an accumulation of mysteries. What you
see is no longer what you get.
4. Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good and bad. Their impact
is independent of their quality.
5. Together, all these breaks-with scale, with architectural composition, with tradition, with
transparency, with ethics-imply the final, most radical break: BIGNESS is no longer part of any
issue. Its exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context.
Maximum
The absence of a theory of BIGNESS-what is the maximum architecture can do? Is architectures
most debilitating weakness. Without a theory of BIGNESS, architects are in the position of
Frankensteins creators: instigators of a partly successful experiment whose results are running
amok and are therefore discredited.
Because there is no theory of BIGNESS, we dont know what to do with it, we dont know where to
put it, we dont know when to use it, we dont know how to plan it.
Big mistakes are our only connection to BIGNESS. But in spire of its dumb name, BIGNESS is a
theoretical domain at this fin de siecle: in a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation,
disclamation, the attraction of BIGNESS is its potential to reconstruct the whole, resurrect the real,
reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility.
Only through BIGNESS can architecture dissociate itself from the exhausted ideological and artistic
movements of modernism and formalism to regain its instrumentality as a vehicle of modernization.
BIGNESS recognizes that architecture as we know it is in difficulty, but it does not overcompensate
through regurgitations of even more architecture. It proposes a new economy in which all is
architecture no longer, but in which a strategic position is regained through retreat and
concentration, yielding the rest of a contested territory to enemy forces.
Beginning
BIGNESS destroys, but it is also a new beginning. It can reassemble what it breaks.
A paradox of BIGNESS is that in spite of the calculation that goes into its planning-in fact, through
its very rigidities-it is the one architecture that engineers the unpredictable, instead of enforcing
coexistence, BIGNESS depends on regimes of freedoms, the assembly of maximum difference.
Only BIGNESS can sustain a promiscuous proliferation of events in a single container. It develops
strategies to organize both their independence and interdependence within the larger entity in a
symbiosis that exacerbates rather than compromises specificity.
Through contamination rather than purity and quantity rather than quality, only BIGNESS can
support genuinely new relationships between functional entities that expand rather than limit their
identities. The artificiality and complexity of BIGNESS release function from its defensive armour
to allow a kind of liquefaction; programmatic elements react with each other to create new eventsBIGNESS returns to a model of programmatic alchemy.
At first sight, the activities amassed in the structure of BIGNESS demand to interact, but BIGNESS
also keeps them apart. Like plutonium rods that, more or less immersed, dampen or promote nuclear

reaction, BIGNESS regulates the intensities of programmatic coexistence.

Although BIGNESS is a blue print for a perpetual performance, it also offers degrees of serenity
and even blandness. It is simply impossible to animate its entire mass with intention. Its vastness
exhausts architectures compulsion to decide and determine. Zones will be left out, free from
architecture.
Team
BIGNESS is where architecture becomes both most and least architectural: most because of the
enormity of the object; least through the loss of autonomy- it becomes instrument of other forces, it
depends. BIGNESS is impersonal: the architect is no longer condemned to stardom.
Beyond signature, BIGNESS means surrender to technologies; to engineers, contractors,
manufactures; to others. It promises architecture a kind of post-heroic status-a realignment with
neutrality.
Even as BIGNESS enters the stratosphere of architectural ambition-the pure chill of megalomania,
it can be achieved only at the price of giving up control, of transmogrification. It implies a web of
umbilical cords to other disciplines whose performance is as critical as the architects: like mountain
climbers tied together by life-saving ropes, the makers of BIGNESS are a team (a word not
mentioned in the last forty years of architectural polemic).
Bastion
If BIGNESS transforms architecture, its accumulation generates a new kind of city.
The exterior of the city is no longer a collective theatre where it happens; theres no collective it
left. The street has become residue, organizational device, mere segment of the continuous
metropolitan plan where the remnants of the past face the equipments of the new in an uneasy
standoff. BIGNESS can exist anywhere in that plane.
Not only is BIGNESS incapable of establishing relationships with the classical city-alt most, it
coexists- but in the quantity and complexity of the facilities it offers, it is itself urban. BIGNESS no
longer needs the city: it competes with the city; it pre-empts the city, or better still, it is the city. If
urbanism generated potential and architecture exploits it, BIGNESS enlists the generosity of
urbanism against the meanness of architecture. BIGNESS = urbanism vs. architecture.
BIGNESS, through its very independence of context, is the one architecture than can survive, even
exploit, the new-global condition of the tabula rasa: it does not rake its inspiration from givens too
often squeezed for the last drop of meaning; it gravitates opportunistically to locations of maximum
infrastructural promise, it is, finally, its own raison detre.
In spite of its size, it is modest. Not all architecture, nor all program, nor all events will be
swallowed by BIGNESS. There are many needs too unfocused, too weak, too unrespectable, too
defiant, too secret, too subversive, too weak, too nothing to be part of the constellations of
BIGNESS.
BIGNESS is the last bastion of architecture-a contraction, a hyperarchitecture. The containers of
BIGNESS will be landmarks in a postarchitectural landscape-a world scraped of architecture in the

way Richters paintings are scraped of paint: inflexible, immutable, definitive, forever there,
generated through superhuman effort. BIGNESS surrenders the field of after-architecture.