HE PR of Ecr o N THE CITY assembles research from an ongoing graduate seminar directed by Rem Koolhaas at the Harvard School of Design; its first two volumes–the Great Leap Foruard, an exploration of the development of the Pearl River Delta between Hong Kong and Macao, and the Guide to Shopping–have just appeared in sumptuous editions, from Taschen." These extraordinary volumes are utterly unlike anything else one can find in the print media; neither picture books nor illustrated text, they are in movement, like a cD RoM, and their statistics are visually beautiful, their images legible to a degree.

Although architecture is one ofthe few remaining arts in which the great auteurs still exist–and although Koolhaas is certainly one of those—the seminar which has produced its first results in these two volumes is not dedicated to architecture but rather to the exploration of the city today, in all its untheorized difference from the classical urban structure that existed at least up until World War II. Modern architecture has been bound up with questions ofurbanism since its eighteenth and nineteenth century beginnings: Siegfried Giedion's modernist summa, Space, Time and Architecture, for example, begins with the Baroque restructuration of Romeby Sixtus Vandends with the Rockefeller Centre and Robert Moses's parkways, even though it is essentially a celebration of Le Corbusier. And obviously Le Corbusier was both an architect and, with the Radiant Cities, Chandigarh and the plan for Algiers, an" urban planner". But although the Project testifies to Koolhaas's commitment to the question of the city, he is not an urbanist in any disciplinary sense; nor can the word be used to describe these books, which also escape other disciplinary categories (such as sociology or economics) but might