Argument on topic: Micro and mega architecture

17 years - that's what it will be on October 31 - since the publication of S,M,L,XL.¹ Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau have brought together in this volume - ultra-commented and debated by the entire cultural-architectural community of the 1990s - a collection of essays, diary excerpts, travel notes, photographs, architectural plans, drawings and sketches by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.). The title of the volume S,M,L,XL also represents its structure - projects and essays organized according to scale. Small and Medium cover topics ranging from individual to public, Large focuses on what Rem Koolhaas calls BIGNESS architecture. Extra-Large illustrates projects on an urban scale.

Today, the discourse of scale in architecture is still inexhaustible. It is not the variety of recent production that amplifies its pertinence for debate, but the almost ubiquitous abundance, no matter where in the world, of rapidly and densely developing urban areas. Scaling down by size - or in the micro-mega range - contains a risk of inadequacy. Obviously quantitative classification can be a justifiable tool in catalog (or, rarely, biennial) reductions. In other words, architecture is confronted with activators, mixed uses, poles and intermodal nodes that attempt, regardless of the scale of intervention, to generate beneficial insertions, propose reconsiderations and civi-lize conflicts.

Architecture operates with and at different scales. Its corporeality - whatever the type of design process - remains indissolubly linked to the human body. We understand a project at scale or more precisely scaling not only as an adjustable size to a reference system, but also as a sum of techniques, a set of materials and resources that are appropriate to the architectural intervention.

The outcome of parametric processes is tested or not. The project must be scaled. Even though the generative or algorithmic design product may as well be the lampshade of an office lamp or a shopping center, it is textured differently according to scale.

In the October 2012 issue of ARHITECTURA we aim to discuss this kind of texture in a key of reading that - like the legato in music - looks at the major or minor equidistantly, focusing on composition, tempo and counter-tempo.

1.ISBN 1-885254-01-6, Monacelli Press, 1995, New York with 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (1,376 pages, 2.7 kg. - ed.)