REM KOOLHAAS - DELIRIOUS NEW YORK ( A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan )

1978      

REM KOOLHAAS      

                             Delirious New York : A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is an engaging review of modern architecture and urbanism, setting a celebratory account of the surreal ‘culture of congestion’ found in Manhattan. Rem Koolhaas is a visiting professor at the New York Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies and was first published in 1978 - written during the financial crisis, the city government used a large number of federal loans to avoid bankruptcy in a weak way. While confidence in the city is at its lowest point in history, Koolhaas promotes Manhattan as the prototype of a modern metropolis. This is a visionary who is committed to making urban life a “very irrational experience”. ".

Koolhaas claims to be the ghost writer of the city. He tells the story of Manhattan, a “fabulous island” and a background for urban experiments. The city becomes a factory of man-made experience and a potential for testing modern life. Laboratory. He claims that "Manhattanism" is a concept of urbanism that is integrated into "ultra-density" and is driven by the splendor and suffering brought about by the urban conditions of human life. “In Manhattan, for example, this book is a blueprint for a crowded culture.”

The first chapter gives an overview of the history of the island, discovered in 1609, "Utopia Europe". Manhattan's grid system predicts the future of the city. This book is a representation of the grid: "It's close and juxtaposed to strengthen the collection of its singing blocks. Each block is associated with a chapter; Coney Island, skyscrapers, Rockefeller Center and Europeans.

Manhattan’s architecture under went a lobotomy, ‘less and less surface represented more and more internal activity’. By separating the internal and external, the monolith of the skyscraper spared the outside world of everyday life, a shell housing layers of reality. Entering a building in Manhattan, even changing floors, could become an act of moving between worlds. The deliberate disconnection of storeys – ‘the vertical schism’ – accepted the skyscrapers instability in a definitive composition, succumbing to cultural potential. Each new building spanning a block, like a collection of urban islands, each striving to be a ‘city within a city’, all potentially at war with each other.

In these interesting journeys through Manhattan's history, Koolhaas advocates his modernity responsibility, if not building modernism as a movement. He focuses on Manhattan's ability to invent "modern" and keeps pace with Le Corbusier's European modernist sobriety and abstract ideals. The architecture of the city is not promoted as a masterpiece of architecture, but a tool to reshape urban life.

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