The book in polish only
Four walls and a roof is a captivating account, based on the author’s tragicomic experience, of the contemporary reality of the architectural profession, the lost ideals of architecture, the false claims of its creators and the total dependence of the profession on the global market game. In his bitterly humorous notes Reinier de Graaf draws a picture of the world in the first decades of the 21st century. He allows his readers to see the corridors of power in Moscow, Dubai and London, he looks for the disappearing traces of social housing programs in St. Louis and the suburbs of New York, and confronts the delusions of smat city with the gloomy reality of megacities in the global South. It exposes the helplessness of architects doomed to a conflict of interest - serving forces to be resisted. Russian oligarchs and sheikhs from the Emirates, greedy developers and cynical consultants, politicians and web-dependency architects are building together a world in which you never know who is pulling the strings.
Reinier de Graaf - architect, urban planner, architectural researcher and critic, exhibition curator, essayist. Partner in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, founded by Rem Koolhaas. He is responsible for office projects in Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was one of the co-founders of AMO, a think tank created in 2002 to support OMA’s research activities.
