Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas

Delirious New York is the book of Rem Koolhaas which talked about Rem Koolhaas’s ‘Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan' assume New York as the arena for the terminal stage of Western culture. In the book, it wrote about remarkable history of the city and the ‘retroactive manifesto’ of the architecture and city planning. The content of the book is the special work of art which text work well with the illustration and many different types of writing.

Rem Koolhaas describes Manhattan as a ‘mythical island’ and declaring himself as the ghost writer of the city. For me, the most impressive thing in this book is he tells that the background of an urban experiment in which the city becomes a factory for man-made experiences, a laboratory to test the potential of modern life. Based on Rem Koolhaas, ‘Manhattanism’ is the one urbanistic concept that revels in ‘hyper density’ and is fuelled by the magnificence and suffering than come with the urban condition of man-made living. Using Manhattan as a example, this book is a blueprint of the congestion of culture.

The first part of the book talks about the overview history of the island that describes by a French artist as “A Utopian Europe” which regrouped from an existing component into a single location. The grid system in Manhattan predicted the future condition of the city; its restrictions gave way from two-dimensional to three-dimensional freedom, and the millions of people that it now houses were envisaged far before a tiny proportion were even present. That the area was filled up by the houses, shops even high rises has been divided by the road or street.

Written by Kong Yi Xuan, 1001852931