Rem Koolhaas - Delirious New York

Rem Koolhaas

As Rem Koolhas vividly elucidates in his ironic story "Delirious New York", this book is conceived at the intersection of two observations, which he states, the fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence, but Manhattan’s problem, it is the opposite. Koolhaas believes that it is a mountain range of evidence without manifesto. Therefore, from that statement, he portrays that this book is a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan and claims that Manhattan is the twentieth century’s Rosetta Stone. 

This article is illustrating the idea and view of the writer himself about the city of Manhattan. He divides the article into a few subcategories which consist of his theoretical views on how the buildings affects the way of living or rather culture congestion in Manhattan. For example, the topic that caught my eyes, Ecstasy. Koolhaas explains that the Manhattan city has already developed a lot of peculiar buildings labelled as shameless architecture buildings as this developers went too far with what they have created. While this may be true, these buildings are of ecstasy to the beholders, and because of this, the architects starts to ignore the performance as well as the implication of the building just to give satisfaction to the people of Manhattan city. 

 I find that this part of the article correlates to our site in Kajang. The town developers finds it such an easy way out to put just a signage as their bus stop on road reserves that has big gravels and boulders on it because they know, bus stops are Kajang people’s ecstasy, it’s their main source of getting from one place to another, but they forget that some of these Kajang people are of disabled people and they as well need to go from one place to another. In this scenario, we can see that they want to give satisfaction of having one bus station to another closer to each other, but they ignore the part of the people’s safety and implication of the bus stop.  

Kajang bus stop, Taman Kajang Mewah

To conclude this proclaimed Ghostwriter of Manhattan city's article, we as architect's or developers should think thoroughly of what is more important to the beholders rather than to just build a building to satisfy them, making sure that it is of use and not just another building that will create a bigger cultural congestion not only in Manhattan city, but in any part of the world.

Adreena Abu Bakar 1001644220