Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Next book: S, M, L, XL. What’s it about?
Koolhaas is just the most brilliant architectural thinker and doer operating today and so I had to include him (this is the only ‘pure’ architecture book on my list, in fact). Although I question his recent political ambivalence, there are more ideas in this book, or even in one page of it, than there are in countless of those boring coffee-table monographs. The book assumes the status of an architectural project, crossing scales and modes of communication. One of the central ideas in the book is called ‘bigness’, which is the acceptance of bigness as a way of thinking about the world and the future. It’s the idea that what ‘bigness’ allows is a whole set of hybrid conditions and unexpected events to pop out, which are not allowed within classic, small, old-fashioned thinking.
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Current Dean of the School of the Built Environment at Westminster University since 2008 and partner at Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, Jeremy Till both practises and teaches architecture. He was Britain’s representative in 2006 at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2004, 9 Stock Orchard Street, which he designed with Sarah Wigglesworth and is perhaps their most famous building, won the prestigious RIBA Sustainability Prize. In his latest book, Architecture Depends, he argues that architecture is a dependent discipline and offers a critique of the architectural establishment which he believes tries to escape this dependency.
