S, M, L, XL

the more architecture mutates, the more it confronts its immutable core.

In Europe there are no typical plans. in 1929, Ivan Leonodov proposed the first office slab for Moscow, a House of Industy. It's rectangles we're conceived as socialist Typical Plans: a parallel zone reintroduce the full paraphernalia of daily life -- 099"s, pools, tanning beds, club like arrangements, small dormitories -- to create a compressed 24-hour cycle not of business-life, but of life-business. The European office is thin, as thin as it's more historic substance. The European needs day-light and air, even though a simple extrapolation of the square meters involved reveals that this need will destroy the very decor that reassures him of his historical status. Where the American office assembles a critical mass, the European office dismantles it, simply because the things that happen in an office are supposed to be "bad"

Could the office building be the most radical typology? A kind of reverse type defined by all the qualities it does <i>not</i> have? As the major new program of the modern age, its effect is one of deprogramming. Typical plan is the initial mutation in a chain that has revolutionized the urban condition. Concentration of Typical Plan has produced the skyscraper: unstable monolith; accumulation of skyscrapers, the only "new" urban condition: downtown, defined by sheer quantity rather than as a specific formal configuration. The centre is no longer unique but universal, no longer a place but a condition. Practically immune to local variation, Typical Plan has made the city unrecognizable, an unidentifiable object. Typical Plan is a quantum leap that provokes a conceptual leap: an <i>absence</i> of content in quantities that overwhelm, or simply preempt, interllectual speculation. Did the plan without qualities create men without qualities? Was the space of Typical Plan the incubator of the man in the gray flannel suit?

It was as if Typical Plan created the castrated white-collar caricature, suppressed family photos, frowned on the fren, resisted the personal debris that now-20 years later- makes most offices ghastly repositories of individual trophies, packed with the alarming assertion of millions of individual mini-ecologies.

An environment that demanded nothing and gave everything was suddenly seen as an infernal machine for stripping identity.

Nietzsche lost out to Sociology 101.

Architecture is monstrous(n.可怕的) in a way which each choice leads to the reduction of possibility. It implies a regime of either/or decision often claustrophobic, even for the architect. All other architecture preempts the future