Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto For Manhattan

The articles was written by Rem Koolhaas-an architect and a writer as well as a philosopher. Delirious New York is a retroactive manifesto of Manhattan's architectural enterprise. It unfold the theories, tactics and dissimulations that allowed New York's architects to establish the desires of Manhattan's collective unconscious in the Grid that we know today. Manhattan is the arena of the terminal stage of Western Civilization, thus it’s an economy hub to one of the world’s superpower nation, The United States.

The grid arrangement of Manhattan evoke a collection of blocks: Coney Island, The Skyscraper, Rockefeller Center and The Europeans which are known as the first 4 blocks. The grid was designed for utilitarian concern and for the conduct of business.

Coney Island is a resort for Manhattan inhabitants and a laboratory of the new technologies that would be applied in Manhattan. Coney Island became a revolutionary place that is ready to subvert the long-formed traditional culture. This urbanism is based on new technology which become a permanent conspiracy against the realities of the external world. In Coney Island there was a shortage of reality of outside world and nature. The masses of culture on Coney Island is unconscious while the modernist culture is conscious. 

The Skyscraper-is considered a virgin island because the architects have no control over the specific programs. The fact that Manhattan is separated from the continent by two rivers at each side, which excludes the possibility of expansion, the skyscraper is the only choice for the growing business demand. The skyscrapers are seen as repetition or perhaps reproduction of the site.

Rockefeller Center is the combination of beauty, utility, dignity and service. It is the fulfillment of the promise of Manhattan. It represents the multi-sided civilization of that time. The significant culture represented in Rockefeller Center is optimistic and bourgeois. It denies advice from other culture and other ideology.

When Koolhaas mentions about Le Corbusier and his adversary of Manhattanism, one of Koolhaas’ purposes of writing the book is revealed. He is the apologist of the commercial and pop culture that is behind the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Thus, as his nature, he should be opposed to the modernism Le Corbusier stands for. Koolhaas spends great effort to retrospect the history of Manhattan as an island whose area is so small but had to accommodate people’s requirement for a commercial center, in which skyscrapers have to be erected. When Koolhaas talks about that Corbusier undoes the Great Lobotomy, I think according to Koolhaas, the lobotomy is, as a matter of fact, a layer of velvet that hides the delirious activities of Manhattan.

CHUA CHYI SHYAN   1001542549