Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

The first publication of Delirious New York in November 1978 coincided with an exhibition of OMA’s Manhattan projects entitled ‘‘The Sparkling Metropolis’’ at the Guggenheim Museum. The book was well promoted, and was reviewed in architecture journals and mass market publications by Peter Blake, Richard Ingersoll, Reyner Banham, and Bernard Tschumi. Although Delirious New York generated renown for Rem Koolhaas, it did not immediately fulfill his ambition to popularize modern architecture. The book’s effect was delayed; it remained on the outskirts of mainstream architectural discourse until reprinted in 1994 by Monacelli Press, one year before the publication of S, M, L, XL and the exhibition ‘‘OMA at MoMA: The Place of Public Architecture.’’ As a graduate research fellow at the Institute for Urban Studies during the 1970s, Koolhaas found the hyperdensity and congestion of Manhattan between 1890 and 1940 to have fostered new programs, events, buildings, and places. He named the principles driving these developments Manhattanism, a theory of architectural delirium in which he found his first prototype for the contemporary city. The metropolis is depicted in Delirious New York as a kind of automatic writing, collectively constructed, through image and word, by architects, artists, developers, visionaries, philosophers, and journalists. Koolhaas was fascinated with not only the infrastructure of places such as Coney Island and building types like the skyscraper (many from the 1920s were still standing in the 1970s) but also with the city as a palimpsest of mediation made possible by technology in the age of art’s mechanical reproduction. His book is part of the development of architectural thought that is directly related to the development of the architectural press. Influenced by his education at Cornell University with Berlin architect O.M. Ungers, Koolhaas extended the notion of architecture as a subjective language to attribute social, cultural, and symbolic values to the modern (rather than the classical) tradition. The operation of retroaction, derived from the quasi-Freudian, Surrealist paranoid-critical method of Salvador Dali, allowed Koolhaas to frame his theory as the unveiling of the city’s unconscious. The affectation of paranoia endowed the pragmatic architecture of Manhattan with the aura of the critical avant-garde. The unconscious would breath life into buildings and rescue them from the suffocation of literal structure, enabling Koolhaas to expose the irrational side of the modern movement’s claims to functionalism, propriety, and objectivity, or, sachlichkeit. In positing the city as a projection of the collective unconscious, Delirious New York realizes the Surrealist dream of finding myths and icons in Manhattan. The city is a cadavre esquis composed of odd couples and alter egos, encompassing buildings (globe ⁄ tower), symbols (nineteenthcentury raft ⁄ Constructivist Floating Pool), movements (Surrealism ⁄ Constructivism), and personages (Le Corbusier ⁄ Dali, Le Corbusier ⁄ Wallace Harrison). Just as Manhattan is the flip side of the modern movement, so Manhattanism ‘‘suspends irreconcilable differences between mutually exclusive positions’’ (p. 162). The book, basically a typological reading of modern architecture taken from a paranoid-critical perspective, corroborates the view of Surrealism as ‘‘the underbelly of modernist techno-rationalism, the unconscious of modernist sachlichkeit.’’ Manhattan is a repository of memories, not unlike the analogous city of Aldo Rossi, engaging figure, narrative, and symbol.