When S,M,L,XL first landed in 1995, it detonated the conventions of the architectural monograph. Critics from The Architect’s Newspaper to Design Observer hailed this sprawling, 1,400-page collision of design, narrative, and manifesto as “a fully integrated vessel of word and image.” Three decades later, Monacelli’s reissue—dressed in a new collectible colourway—reminds us how radically Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau rewired the relationship between architecture and publishing.
Part portfolio, part provocation, S,M,L,XL still reads like a restless mind unfurling. Projects from OMA’s first 20 years—the Kunsthal, Villa dall’Ava, Nexus Housing—appear beside diary fragments, fairy tales, and essays dissecting the “architecture of Bigness.” Its dictionary of Koolhaasian terms continues to shape how we talk about cities, scale, and ambition.
Koolhaas and Mau’s mash-up of projects, essays, sketches, and myth-making remains a tactile provocation. For professional designers today, revisiting S,M,L,XL is less nostalgia than recalibration: a reminder to think bigger, stranger, bolder. In an era of algorithmic design and post-digital gloss, the book’s dense, tactile pages and sprawling intellect feel almost defiant. As Archidose noted, “the effort of discovering and making sense of [its ideas] is still a thrill all these years later.” 30 years on, it remains not just a book about architecture, but architecture itself: a creative rupture bound in paper and ink.
