On the wooded hills of Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, stands a distinctive house. Dominique Boudet, editor-in-chief of Le Moniteur, tasked OMA in 1984 to build a home with conditions stipulated by his wife, Lydie Dall’Ava, who wanted bespoke spaces for herself and her daughter, lodgings for visitors, and a rooftop pool. A glance at this book suffices to grasp that the villa is an exercise in style, a personal testing ground. A theater of references where Rem Koolhaas, still on his early steps in construction, knew how to stage his desire to reinvent the functionalist discourse of Corbusian modernity.

Françoise Fromonot’s work is the first of the ‘Gumshoe’ series developed with Thomas Weaver, and is the fourth version of the text she wrote for an exhibition catalog. She delves into the sources Koolhaas distills, from Antonioni or Hitchcock films to Dalí’s obsession with Millet’s Angelus, in an essay organized in five sections which, like a police interrogation, raises more questions than it resolves. The interesting part is how the architect embraced dreams and irony in proposing a new way of inhabiting the suburbs.

The narrative is dominated by the surrealist drift and by cultural personalities (numerous but necessary to an understanding of the Koolhaas complex), yet the result is hypnotic. It is best read with S,M,L,XL on hand: Hans Werlemann’s photos and the comparisons of paintings, shown in small formats and in black and white, do not do justice to the project’s artistic dimension. Not that this is a grave defect; the journey is truly exciting.