Koolhaas trained first as a journalist and screenwriter — he wrote for the Haagse Post and co-wrote a film script — before enrolling at London's Architectural Association in 1968. His 1978 book Delirious New York read Manhattan's skyscrapers as an unplanned "culture of congestion," and gave him a theoretical language before he had built almost anything. He founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam in 1975 with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp, joined briefly by Zaha Hadid, and later set up its research arm AMO to work on projects with no building client at all. S,M,L,XL (1995), a 1,344-page compilation of built work, theory and inventory, argued that architecture had to answer to a scale and to market forces it could no longer pretend to control. He won the Pritzker Prize in 2000.
