Junkspacefirst appeared in theHarvard Design School Guide to Shopping(2001), a vast compendium of text, images, and data concerning the consumerist transformation of city and suburb from the first department store to the latest mega mall. The architect Rem Koolhaas itemized in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is updated here and twinned withRunning Room, a fresh response from the cultural critic Hal Foster.Junkspacedescribes the bleak and featureless world of capitalism, whileRunning Roomseeks to find a space...

Since the beginning of the century, the field of architecture has fervently turned its attention to documenting the contemporary urban condition. Every city been has been examined as a repository of architectural concepts, scrutinized as an urban manifesto, and recorded as a series of found objects.

The Ordinary articulates a potential genealogy for this practice and for the genre of books derived from it. Organized around conversations with the authors of three seminal texts that document the city--Denise Scott Brown's Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Rem Koolhaas's...