Buildings, Urban & Land Use Planning 

Monograph, manifesto, travelog, history, autobiography, novel--A Guide to Ecstacity is a bit of all of these things. The brainchild of British architectural visionary Nigel Coates, it asks us to reimagine the city as a dynamic hybrid of inventive design and cross-cultural political empowerment. Produced in the spirit of Rem Koolhaas's S,M,L,XL, it is a palimpsest of the real and the hypothetical, with fragments of seven cities from around the world--Cairo, London, Mumbai, New York, Rio, Rome, and Tokyo--woven together into one multifaceted urban fabric. In addition to extensive documentation of architecture and product design by Coates's own groundbreaking firm--Branson Coates Architecture--A Guide to Ecstacity features projects by Norman Foster, Future Systems, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Philippe Starck, and Bernard Tschumi. Presented in a remarkable package created by the design firm Why Not Associates in close collaboration with Coates, these varied works form a fascinating kaleidoscope of metropolitan culture and suggest how the city of tomorrow might be transformed by a proactive architectural community that embraces the challenge of designing for a multicultural world. - from Amzon