The plan this weekend was that Matt and I would follow up on Nath’s post, detailing our exploits with Desirable Luxury Items; me with my powerbook, Matt with his Bang & Olufsen Television set. After friday night’s events however, my take on owning Desirable Luxury Items has been somewhat tarnished by the boys with big knife.

And so rather than rattle on about my powerbook, as I have done far too much already, I will direct my gaze to page 481 of Mr Koolhaas’ latest collection of work Content. A follow up to the huge, genre-defying and defining SMLXL, it covers the next seven years of OMA’s work as well as the catalogue for an accompanying exhibition. Named Content, the intended irony is of course that on first glance there appears to be very little content at all; the reader is initially greeted with advertisements for Prada and Gucci and a quick flick through reveals a bevy of blurry photographs and an apparent emphasis on graphic design over architectural projects. Actual reading rather than mereflicking does however reveal an enormous depth to the publication. Of course there is a layer of smugness that pervades nearly every page with with the strive for difference too often being attributed to brilliance: you know, skyscrapers are so not relevant anymore, except of course for their skyscraper proposed in Hong Kong, which isn’t a skyscraper because bits of it are slopey and a fortune cookie told them not to enter the contest for the World Trade Centre… However, where the chapters on the collaboration for the Astor Hotel and the CCTV Building contain just about 3% too much back slapping and ass licking, the interviews with Martha Stewart, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown and the work on display by AMO (the strategic arm of OMA) are completely fascinating.

Where SMLXL spawned about a hundred thousand imitators, four-inch-thick bloated tomes of theoretical projects and intermittent softcore pornography, expect Content to likewise fill the shelves of all good book shops with trash typography and a cut’n'paste aesthetic.

As for page 481, titled ‘The Enemy’ and dealing a sharp blow to Australian Architects in China, well, I feel the need to respond because Rem I know you are reading… There is no doubt that there is some really terrible architecture being carried out by Australians in China and it is not all that difficult to imagine who the “suits, with moustaches, receding hairlines, and suspect waistlines” may be. The irony for me is that Sydney-siders get accused of being grown up preemies of the Bilbao Effect in the same chapter detailing OMAs attempts at delivering Beijing their Bilbao.