Bruce Mau Design

The book that influenced a generation of architects

S,M,L,XL: The book that influenced a generation of architects

BMD’s first major studio project, the seminal S,M,L,XL, originated as a collaboration with OMA and Rem Koolhaas and helped to redefine thinking about architecture around the world.

The book spills over with graphs, charts, poems, scripts, revisions, essays, metaphors, panic, chronologies, plans, cartoons, Beckett, events, big men, big type, models, diaries, competitions, notebooks, disasters, artworks, manifestos, drawings, rants, lectures, cities, speculation, sex, invention and tragedies.

Moving in cinematic time, S,M,L,XL dares to “hold a shot too long”; to make the reader see details that would otherwise go unnoticed; to show “bad” images, unresolved ideas or problematic results - all to reveal the underlying invisible process that leads to finished results, visible to all.

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What we really hoped to say was: look, architects, when you build a building, people are going to have sex in that building. And some people will die there. And people may be born there and grow old there – it has a kind of real life dimension.

Bruce Mau

A wild jumble of grainy xerography, homemade cartoons, purloined typefaces and multicolored inks and papers, those ephemeral handouts were thrown together with a bravura abandon that undercut the pomposity so prevalent in the architectural profession.

New York Times