About the Author

Rem Koolhaasis a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist, and Professor in the Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He has published works on the evolution of the contemporary metropolis and been responsible for landmark urban projects such as the Euralille development in northern France and the CCTV Tower in Beijing, and has designed master plans for, among other places, suburban Paris, the Libyan desert, and Hong Kong.

Hal Fosteris Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of many books, includingDesign and Crime,Prosthetic Gods,The Art-Architecture Complex, andTheFirst Pop Age. He writes regularly forOctober(which he co-edits),Artforum, and theLondon Review of Books. He was the 2013 recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. He lives in Princeton.

Reviews

Junkspace is the most important piece of writing on architecture of the 21st Century. The stream of Koolhaas’s prose is akin to a visionary dream, a structureless sequence of crystalline insight and enfolding opiate fog. . . It is distinctly literary, and there are moments of outright genius.
—Icon

Foster responds to Koolhaas with an argument for autonomy—both disciplinary (from one art to the next) and (by implication) personal—in order to find space (or the running room of the title) within the junk in which Koolhaas suggests we have drowned. And whether you are at an airport an art fair, that’s something we all need.
—Art Review

Rem Koolhaas’s luminescent essay Junkspace decries the mall as the slagheap of America...Koolhaas illuminates the dark underbelly of the kind of advanced capitalism living in the mall.
—Columbia Review Magazine