Content, a new “magazine-book hybrid” (as its publisher, Taschen Books, describes it) is something you are under no obligation to purchase, let alone to read. Why then draw your attention to this work, largely by and about the architect Rem Koolhaas, only to deflect it at once? Because it depicts the slightly malodorous essence of so much that is wrong with contemporary architectural discourse.

Design is to the present decade as food was to the 1990s. In part because of the publicity that has surrounded the World Trade Center competition, design is something that rightthinking people are expected to have an opinion about. And just as there has arisen a phalanx of foodies all over the world, so now there are those whose self-esteem depends on a boisterous concern for the way things look. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if it resulted in genuine visual inspiration. Instead it often results in a frantic arbitrariness that imports hip-hop and techno aesthetics into the visual arena.

For those who find happiness in such things, Content represents the embellishing of the art of architecture until it has been assimilated to, if not engulfed by, the paltry ambitions of the glamour business. The fact that the book opens and ends with a series of ads from Prada and Armani tells you pretty much all you need to know.

The intellectual guru behind this publication is not so much Rem Koolhaas as the late Tibor Kalman, whose dubious achievement it was to create the ultra trendy Benetton Colors magazine, a toxic amalgam of faux cleverness and graphic pizzazz that mistook spastic inconsistency for creativity. At the same time, there is a cloying cuteness to it, combined with the belief – perhaps well founded – that you can forestall criticism by anticipating it.

To those who are paying attention, there is thus something viscerally obnoxious in the disembodied dialogue at the beginning of Content.”I’m not sure if this is a magazine or a book,” one uncool interlocutor asks. “Actually I find the tension between the two strangely interesting,” the hipper one replies.

Content’s problem is that books generally have to have words in them. In its 544 glossy pages, Content obliges us with about a hundred short articles (many bristling with footnotes, a sure indicator of intelligence).

These usually promise more than they deliver. “Black Metropolis,” by Ellen Grimes, is a look at the slums of Chicago. “The State of the Hermitage,” by Anastasia Smirnova, takes a look at Russia’s biggest museum. For the most part, however, the articles are written by or about Mr. Koolhaas. There are interviews that he has conducted with the likes of Martha Stewart and the architectural couple Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. And there are pieces in which he complains about the various ways that his dealings with Ian Schrager, Edgar Bronfman Jr., and the Whitney Museum have come to grief.

Why Mr. Koolhaas? Probably because Frank Gehry was too busy building and thus was unavailable and because, after him, Mr. Koolhaas is the only living architect known to people who, deep down, don’t know much about architecture.

I could, I suppose, approach this book dead on, and try to describe all its inconsistencies and illogicalities. Mr. Koolhaas seems to have discovered what Michael Moore has always known, that one inconsistency or halftruth can easily be confuted, but a pullulating mass of a hundred or a thousand interlocking inconsistencies and halftruths defy easy refutation. To even take up the task in detail would be to give it more respect that it deserves.

It is better simply to treat Content as a nonargument posing as an argument, as a neutral document of our own misdirected zeitgeist, a manipulative machine for glamour, to paraphrase Le Corbusier. There is something astonishingly revealing in Mr. Koolhaas’s statement that, “Liberated from the obligation to construct [architecture] can become a way of thinking about anything, a description that represents relationships projections, connections, effects, the diagram of everything.”

That all sounds impressive, but he never explains what he means by thinking architecturally, and in the hyperventilating prose that he favors, handme-down sociology takes the place of architectural discourse. In his eagerness to sound thoughtful, he writes that, “Air-conditioning has dictated mutant regimes of organization and coexistence that leave architecture behind.” His prose often seems dictated more by the fortuities of sounds than any compelling sense of logic.

Commenting on the World Trade Center competition, which he seems to believe should have been awarded to him, he writes that the outcome “captures the stumped fundamentalism of the superpower.” What can he possibly mean? Or how about this winner: “Because we abhor the utilitarian we have condemned ourselves to a life-long immersion in the arbitrary.” A point, by the way, that he contradicts elsewhere. I suspect Mr. Koolhaas has never really encountered people who expect him to make sense.

Content, whether it be a book or a magazine,is not really meant to be read at all, but to be looked at or more precisely to enable certain people to be seen carrying it. It is a sort of fashion accessory, and people who wish to wear it are entitled to such consolations as they can find. But it does contain ideas (or parodies of them) and so for all its obvious pretension, Content leaves the realm of architectural discourse even more foolish than it found it.