Main entry:

Koolhaas, Rem.

Title & Author:

Delirious New York : A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan / Rem Koolhaas.

Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 1978.

Description:

263 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 30 cm

Notes:
"Printed in France from type set in the United States."--verso of title page.
Early impressions of the first edition have no ISBN.
Includes bibliographical references.
[Table of Contents] -- Introduction -- Prehistory -- Coney Island: The Technology of the Fantastic -- The Double Life of Utopia: The Skyscraper -- The Frontier in the Sky -- The Skyscraper Theorists -- The Lives of a Block: The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the Empire State Building -- Definitive Instability: The Downtown Athletic Club -- How Perfect Perfection Can Be: The Creation of Rockefeller Center -- The Talents of Raymond Hood -- All the Rockefeller Centers -- Radio City Music Hall: The Fun Never Sets -- Kremlin on Fifth Avenue -- 2 Postscripts -- Europeans: Biuer! Dali and Le Corbusier Conquer New York -- Postmortem -- Appendix: A Fictional Conclusion -- Notes -- Picture Credits -- Acknowledgments

Summary:

"Manhattan is the arena of the terminal stage of Western Civilization: Through the simultaneous explosion of human density and an invasion of new technologies. Manhattan became, from 1850, a mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a revolutionary lifestyle: the Culture of Congestion. Delirious New York is a polemical investigation of that Manhattan; it documents the symbiotic relationship between its mutant metropolitan culture and the unique architecture to which it gave rise. Though this book argues that it often appears that the architecture generated the culture. Delirious New York exposes the consistency and coherence of the seemingly unrelated episodes of Manhattan's urbanism; it is an interpretation that establishes Manhattan as the product of an unformulated movement. Manhattanism, whose true program was so outrageous that in order for it to be realized, it could never be openly declared. Delirious New York is the retroactive manifesto of Manhattan's architectural enterprise: it untangles the theories, tactics and dissimulations that allowed New York's architects to establish the desires of Manhattan's collective unconscious as realities in the Grid. Delirious New York proves above all, that Manhattan has been, from the beginning, devoted to the most rational, efficient and utilitarian pursuit of the irrational. In this vision Coney Island becomes an embryonic Manhattan, testbed of a Technology of the Fantastic, the Skyscraper a self-contained universe. Manhattan a man-made archipelago of architectural islands, Rockefeller Center the first and last fragment of a definitive Manhattan. The decline of this movement sets in with the European Modernist Blitzkrieg unleashed by Le Corbusier in the mid-thirties. An appendix presents a series of projects that announce the 'second coming' of Manhattanism, this time as an explicit doctrine that can claim its place among contemporary urbanisms. An impressive documentation of original materials and unpublished projects provides the evidence for this architectural manifesto, which reads, in its insistent tracing of subconscious clues and themes, like a psychological thriller." -- Book Jacket.

ISBN:

0195200357
9780195200355

Subject:

Rockefeller Center History.
Rockefeller Center
Architecture New York (State) New York.
Skyscrapers History.
Architectural manifestos 20th century.
Architecture New York (État) New York.
Gratte-ciel Histoire.
Manifestes (Architecture) 20e siècle.
Skyscrapers
Architectural manifestos
Architecture
Architektur
Bildband
Stadsplanning.
Stadscultuur.
Coney Island (New York, N.Y.) History.
Coney Island (New York, N.Y.) Histoire.
New York (State) New York Coney Island
New York (State) New York
New York (N.Y.)

Form/genre:

Writings.
History
Dust jackets (Binding) NNC

Holdings:

Location: Library main 199286
Call No.: NA44.K825.A35 1978
Status: Available