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Fifty-two-year-old Rem Koolhaas, a renowned Dutch architect and co author of S,M,L,XL, the book whose weight everyone is still talking about (6 pounds, The Monacelli Press), is only now making his American professional debut - he's been commissioned to redesign MCA headquarters and its 420-acre Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles. But Koolhaas's fame as an iconoclastic visionary has been growing since the publication, in 1978, of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (2 pounds, Oxford University Press), which looks at urban life in this century as a fluid, largely chaotic "culture of congestion" over which architects can assert virtually no lasting control. And who would want to? Not Koolhaas. His love of the urban condition is surpassed only by his mania for the unknown, the untenable, the unmanageable, and the untried.

Wired: Is architecture behind the times?

Koolhaas:

Architecture has been defined in terms of one activity, and that activity is adding to the world. A few years ago I realized the profession was as if lobotomized - it was stuck conceiving of itself only in terms of adding things and not in terms of taking away or erasing things. The same intelligence for adding ought to also deal with its debris. It's a very depressing phenomeon that we can deal with decaying conditions in the city only by inventing weak attempts to restore them or to declare them historical. It would be much more powerful and creative to use other tactics, such as taking away something and then building something entirely new. One of the ambitions of S,M,L,XL is to extend the repertoire, which also includes, for instance, not doing anything, or asking somebody else to do something - both of which are, curiously, things that an architect never does.

Maybe because they're not overly appealing options from a business perspective.

But I am not modest, and the ambition to do this is not modest, either. The largest domain in which that sensibility to extend the repertoire is present is the virtual domain, and it's kind of leaving architecture behind.

Where do you see the future of architecture going?

With globalization, we all have more or less the same future, but Asia and Africa feel much more new. I've been doing research in China recently, investigating cities that emerge suddenly, in eight years or so, seemingly out of nothing. These places are much more vigorous and representative of the future. There, building something new is a daily pleasure and a daily occurence.

You're doing a big project in China now, aren't you?

Yes. Its working title is City of Exacerbated Differences. It is in the Pearl River Delta. It's not a single city but a region inhabited by a cluster of very diverse cities such as Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Guangdong, Zhuhai, and Macau. Together, they may represent a new model of the megalopolis in the sense that their coexistence, their functioning, their legitimacy is determined by their extreme mutual difference.

What are you learning there?

We've been looking at the average time that goes into designing a building in China and the average number of people who work on it. We discovered that in the area we were in it takes 10 days - and it's three people and three Apple computers. And it's a 40-story building. Others are done in two days. The work definitely becomes more diagrammatic, but maybe more pure at the same time.

It would also seem likely to produce a less hospitable environment.

I disagree. People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable.

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