false 161776 2 "A city is a plane of tarmac with some red hot spots of intensity," Rem Koolhaas, the pathbreaking architect and author of such semiotically seminal books as <I>Delirious New York</I> and the more recent <I>S, M, L, XL</I>, remarked in 1969. More than 30 years later, there are more of those hot spots around the world than ever, and they're getting hotter every day. Globalization, standardization, and the high-speed innovations of our current information age are transforming urban centers from London to Los Angeles to Lagos, and more places are becoming more urban, and at a faster pace, than ever before.<p> <I>Mutations</I> is an eye-popping atlas-cum-analysis of this new urbanization, and much of it is composed of essays and meditations (from a variety of contributors) on the 21st-century international City (often un-)Beautiful. Most of them are written in language that will be familiar to readers of Koolhaas's past books: in other words, dense, abstract, and chock-full of references to Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. If you like that sort of deconstructivist yammering, great; if not, the major small-type essays are best sampled (or, better, skimmed) one at a time, interspersed with the many other more accessible elements of the book that truly do add up to a vivid and fascinating mosaic of postmodern urbanism. <p> From Koolhaas and Harvard Design School's Project on the City come two engrossing and wholly straightforward explorations: one of the Pearl River Delta, which China has designated as a zone of unrestricted capitalist experimentation, and whose five major urban centers have consequently exploded overnight in all sorts of instructive and often frightening ways; and another of the chaotic, congested and <I>Blade Runner</I>esque megalopolis of Lagos, Nigeria, whose patterns of growth, housing, and commerce defy all conventional wisdom on how cities should develop. There's also a bounty of excellent (and often astonishing) statistics on all aspects of urban growth; a "snapshots" section of phenomena from cities all over the globe; a completely spot-on (and unintentionally funny) analysis of the evolution of shopping as the last truly unifying urban public activity (and the subject of Koolhaas's next full-scale book); and a trenchant look at Kosovo as ground zero in the first major war of the Internet age. (It should be noted that there's a separate section on the U.S., which with all its soulless, tacky consumerist excess gets the drubbing it usually can expect from the European intelligentsia, although the irony here is that more and more of newly urban Europe is starting to look like newly urban America.) <p> The exhibit-quality photography throughout is great, and, as you could expect from this unofficial successor to <I>S, M, L, XL</I>, the design is satisfyingly outré, right down to its post-Warholian plastic yellow easy-wipe cover with glued-on mousepad. But for all of <I>Mutations</I>'s rich trove of facts and insights, and the impression that its high-tech design gives of an ironic embrace of the new urbanization, its deeper tone is one of disappointment and loss. The spirit of Jane Jacobs resides here, with all its yearning for the quirky, quaint beauty of human-scaled townhouses and shops, sidewalks and byways, and for the precorporatized glamour of grand old towns like New York, London, Paris, and Shanghai, before such metallic nouveau hubs as Atlanta and Kuala Lumpur were ever on the world-commerce map. <I>Mutations</I> was written and compiled largely by architects, after all, who hate ugliness as much as the next guy, whatever they may claim otherwise; its precisely for that reason that this densely absorbing new compendium betrays its wistfulness as often as it promotes its own air of cool, ethnographic bemusement. <I>--Timothy Murphy</I> 156137 15 3 2001 Mutations total:56|5:0|4:1|3:0|2:0|1:0| 56 214 87 6 4 0 false false Wed Aug 29 05:29:18 -0700 2007 Wed Aug 29 06:12:13 -0700 2007 more...]]> 3 0 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Fri Jun 29 18:24:44 -0700 2007 Mon Jul 02 19:05:09 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 0 false false Sun Oct 04 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Aug 27 22:45:11 -0700 2009 Mon Oct 05 16:07:48 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Sat Oct 06 21:21:33 -0700 2007 Mon Oct 08 21:42:27 -0700 2007 more...]]> 0 0 false false Tue Sep 09 20:36:04 -0700 2008 Tue Sep 09 20:37:27 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Wed Jul 23 12:02:39 -0700 2008 Wed Jul 23 12:03:13 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Thu Oct 08 07:31:36 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 08 07:31:36 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Sun Sep 27 15:41:05 -0700 2009 Sun Sep 27 15:41:05 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Sun Sep 20 17:24:00 -0700 2009 Sun Sep 20 17:24:00 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Sat Sep 12 01:47:21 -0700 2009 Sat Sep 12 01:47:27 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Tue Sep 01 11:42:31 -0700 2009 Tue Sep 01 11:42:42 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Sun Aug 23 04:29:56 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 23 04:29:56 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Wed Aug 19 02:21:27 -0700 2009 Wed Aug 19 02:22:32 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Sat May 16 06:15:27 -0700 2009 Sat May 16 06:15:27 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Thu Apr 30 21:10:04 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 30 21:10:04 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Sun Apr 19 00:40:47 -0700 2009 Sun Apr 19 00:40:47 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Tue Mar 24 10:37:44 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 24 10:37:44 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Sat Mar 21 11:43:27 -0700 2009 Sat Mar 21 11:43:30 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Wed Mar 11 02:46:49 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 11 02:46:53 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Fri Feb 27 13:12:53 -0800 2009 Fri Feb 27 13:12:53 -0800 2009