"Acknowledging Koolhaas as the consummate contemporary architect who is able to look past what constitutes the discipline's own boundaries, we became interested in his response to urbanism, a dissolution of the discourse and its transformation into a discussion of events rather than definitions and limits. Five or six of OMA's projects in "S,M,L,XL" focused on discovering unnameable hybrids rather than fixed typologies, and on the manipulation of infrastructure rather than discrete building blocks. More importantly, all of these projects approach urbanism through a loose diagrammatic set of associations between the formal, social and the political"

"Wal-mart was of interest to us because of it was the exact antithesis of what urban design projects typically deal with. We wanted to confront the nitty gritty of how to design for a large multinational corporation, to effectively re-arrange and re-formulate their building type to manifest something new."

"More important than the visual transparency was the idea that this kind of abrupt juxtaposition actually creates positive friction. Something that is lacking in many other new urban propositions where segregation and division are the primary operations at hand. In a certain perverse sense, typology offered us raw material to manipulate although our concern for rules regarding corridors, atriums, and other such features were always to leverage them in unexpected ways."