Now that the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale finally came to an end, we think it is the right time to publish

this interesting short essay by Italian

professor of architectural theory and writer Gabriele Mastrigli on the origins of Rem Koolhaas reading of the City, (which is in any way
indissociable from his architectural production). The dense paper presents a pretty uncommon image of the architect and theorist, identifying the
genesis of his thinking in his roamings across 1968 Parisian streets when they resonated utopian slogans such as Sous les pavs la plage!.

Later on, Mastrigli follows Koolhaas through his years at the Architectural Association school in London and then through his intense activity as a
collector of illustrated postcards in 1970s NYC, while writing Delirious New York. What is argued is that Koolhaas, pointing out that the City is a
preexisting condition before being a place, the locus for endogenous forces to unfold -, perpetuates the rhetoric of the bourgeoisie myth, the idea
that the norms of the bourgeoisie are experienced as undeniable or obvious laws of a natural order as Barthes stated.

The article was originally published on San Rocco magazine #8, but the author wished to share it online on our website for the sake of debate.

Rem Koolhaas and the Bourgeois Myth of New York

Gabriele Mastrigli
Originally appeared in San Rocco Magazine #8 Winter 2013 [Whats wrong with the primitive hut?] under the title: Modernity and myth: Rem
Koolhaas in New York

Has it not been accepted ever since Kant that there is an unbridgeable gulf between reality in itself and reality as it appears to us? That our
possibilities of knowing have more to do with our own apparatus than with the nature of reality? Elia Zenghelis1

Why do we have a mind if not to get our way?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky2

It is well know that Rem Koolhaas, one of the key figures in any discussion of modernity in architecture, has consistently cultivated a discursive, even
literary approach to architecture. For Koolhaas, theory and narrative are two sides of the same coin. 3 While he makes no secret of his suspicion about
the extemporaneous culture of wishful thinking of the late 1960s the very years of his education4 Koolhaass appearence in the realm of architecture
seems to evoke the periods famous motto: limagination au pouvoir.5
Among the various stories narrating Koolhaass interest in architecture, in fact, one places him in Paris precisely during the famous events of May 1968,
though as a quasi-tourist. Beyond a question of ideology, it was in Paris that Koolhaas was seduced by the power of urban space in its extreme
essentiality and artificiality: the street the space of life where the forces that literally create the city unfold. Thus, in those peculiar historical
circumstances, the Parisian streets revealed an unprecedented, and in some ways surreal, dimension of the city that was clearly readable in one of the
most famous slogans painted on the walls of Paris: sous les pavs la plage. For Koolhaas, dealing with architecture signifies giving a voice to this
dimension of the city, one that is anything but utopian. The city that Koolhaas assumes to be the opposite, in fact, is a city inhabited by a society
completely bourgeoisized, as Roland Barthes had already stated years before. Here the struggle was, in fact, mainly a generational conflict within the
same class whereby the expectations were the result of the (unconscious) ambition of the young bourgeois of then taking power, simply following their
fathers footsteps albeit in a much more radical way.6 Despite the reasonable aspirations of emancipation or perhaps thanks to this the zeitgeist of
the late 1960s appears to have been that of a process whereby the bourgeoisie reaffirmed its power. In this respect, the imagination represents not
just a yearning for change, but also a controversial, powerful device with which to reveal something already embodied in the present situation.

First page of the manuscript of Rem Koolhaass The Surface (1969) (Click to enlarge)

This is the case of Koolhaass approach to the city that incubated his first projects of the late 1960s and was eventually emblematized in his
psychoanalytical, retrospective tale about New York. Long before it offers a solution to the problems of the city, Koolhaass discourse focuses on
(literally) overturning its clichs, its ordinary commonplaces. His story of New York, then, is the expression of a fact, of what the city might be when
one begins by considering what it already is. Koolhaass secret is this. The intrinsically tautological nature of his discourse belongs to what Barthes
called the rhetoric of the bourgeois myth,7 a rhehoric that aims to define the (dream of a bourgeois) world as a new form of nature deprived of its
history and lacking external motivations: a geography in which qualities, in order to be effective, must be quantified.

But this is nothing new. Already at the dawn of modernity it was clear that the problem we had to face was how to approach reality. Modernity itself,
according to Foucault, is a matter of attitude toward reality in its present condition. And the value of the present, affirms Foucault, referring to
Baudelaire, is indissociable from a fervor to imagine it starting from our specific point of view, from ourselves. 8 As a form of relation to the present,
modernity therefore implies a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself. What lies behind the sociology of the bourgeois myth is the
problem of the bourgeois subject, the subject of modernity. It is in this respect that Koolhaass approach, which involves perceiving architecture not
simply as a discipline but also as the ultimate project of modernity, can be read as an attempt to question and problematize the very origin of this
project, eventually revealing its critical, yet productive, value.

1. Beginnings

In the summer of 1969 while studying at the Architectural Association in London, Rem Koolhaas wrote a story-manifesto titled The Surface. The text
marks the (un)official beginnings of his partnership with Elia Zenghelis, initiating a shared intellectual evolution that would lead to the founding of
OMA.9 In thirty pages of vignettes and captions presented in the form of a storyboard and sketched by hand, Koolhaas employs an epic tone to illustrate
a sort of ideal metropolis as an apology for the contemporary city in all of its most abstract and artificial aspects. This scorching debut would prove both
a prelude to and a synthesis of an entire decade of research that culminated in 1978 with the publication of Delirious New York: A city is a plane of
tarmac with some red hot spots of urban intensity; These red hot spots radiate city-sense. If not taken care of properly, it tends to quickly ebb away;
With ingenuity it is possible to stitch the area of urban radiation, to canalize city-sense into a larger network. Usually, the pre[s]sure of the population
explosio[n] strains the system by presuming it can be endlessly expanded. City[-]sense then becomes hop[e]lessly watered down. 10

For Koolhaas the city is first a condition, and only secondly a place. Everything rotates around the ambiguous notion of red hot spots of urban
intensity: points of accumulation and simultaneously sources of the city-sense from which the citys entire functional apparatus residential,
infrastructural, productive and recreational benefits.11 Without ever actually explaining them, Koolhaas assigns these red hot spots the leading role
in the tale of an invented city that unfolds in narrative subterfuges and highly specific architectural solutions. There is above all a need to collapse the
rhetoric of architecture as an activity of problem-solving. To the questions How can we originate new red hot spots of intensity? and How can we
leave them intact?, Koolhaass responses are intentionally summary (by waiting for new hot spots to develop, by thinking about it, by not letting
them die by adapting them to contemporary needs), and he concludes that its clear that there are no problems 12 in other words, that architecture
cannot be reduced to a dose of urban medicine, above all when its objective is the interpretation and design of the city as a whole.

Having set this as his objective, Koolhaas then passes quickly to imagining an urban device that, in the abstract, consents the most effective deployment
possible of the forces acting on the surface of the city. At this point the narrative precipitates vertiginously and immediately into a highly architectural
image: a system of large 500-by-750-metre platforms that replace the traditional fabric of streets and city blocks. The platforms host all manner of
activities, from residences to offices to recreational spaces. Some even include infrastructure and parks. Though the initial idea of the platforms was
that of large urban condensers embodying the sense of the city and leaving no room for any outside, in developing his story Koolhaas does not exclude
the possibility that platforms could be used for almost any urban renewal project. He goes as far as suggesting the insertion of one of these elements
in Les Halles in Paris or Covent Garden in London. 13 In so doing, he passes from the evocation of Le Corbusiers City for Three Million Inhabitants
(Koolhaass is home to 1,100,000) and hypotheses of linear structures reminiscent of Leonidovs Magnitogorsk 14 to the possibility of a direct
confrontation with the existing city. If on the one hand his logic and many of his architectural elements anticipate the strategies of Exodus Koolhaass
and Zengheliss project for London of some years later15 in his discourse Koolhaas keeps his sights set on what constitutes the original urban condition
in its more generic and abstract definition, even at the cost of flirting with tautology: If the city is a plane of tarmac with some Red Hot Spots of urban
(metropolitan) intensity or desirability, this means that the urban situation originates and depends on the surface in which it is built. The surface is the
city.16 The story then returns to the beginning, where the city-sense radiated by the hot-spot remains the inexpressible, mysterious origin of
everything.

2. Myth

From this moment onward, Koolhaass project becomes a question of investigation, of research in other words, an exploration of the urban condition
in its most definitive and artificial aspects, as emblematized ten years later in his psycho-historical tale of New York. It goes without saying that the
condition observed by Koolhaas is the generic, ordinary condition of the metropolis, with ordinary being understood as all that is unexceptional, all of
that which tends to link spaces, sites and practices through processes of accumulation, compression and standardization: the excitement generated by
differences is proportional to the robustness of the system that contains and controls them. Moreover, despite having its own history, New York is not a
layered city. The time in which it exists (at least, up to the time of Koolhaass writing) is the present. In the absence of a past, of a tradition that oversees
the development of the city, the present tends to express itself according to criteria of rationality and efficiency. Its form is that of Manhattans famous
grid: a conceptual checkerboard atop which, beginning with only a few rules, everything can change without changing anything. The ordinariness of
New York is thus not the other face of modernity, or its dark, repressed side. In New York all that had been repressed in the city was already there
before its inhabitants eyes, a paradigmatic mountain of evidence that, at most, was lacking a manifesto capable of explaining it for what it was.
Koolhaas and his wife, artist Madelon Vriesendorp, identified this in the most generic and common media of the 1930s, the illustrated postcard, of
which they became avid collectors.17 The illustrations depicting the construction of the city during the early 1900s made it clear that in New York
everyday life is a myth and the city its incubator.

But what is a myth? According to Roland Barthes, it is a mode of signification that dilates concrete reality: Every object in the world can pass from a
closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society. 18 There is no doubt that a rose is a flower, but in the description of a poet or in
the hands of a lover speaking to his beloved, it assumes a completely different value. In advanced societies the myth defines an objects capacity to be

invested with a social usage, that is, something added to pure matter that transforms its value. This social use stimulates Koolhaass observation of
the American metropolis. Against the deterministic approach of the majority of European postwar socialist architectural culture, Koolhaas reawoke
the more endogenous and heterodox characteristics of the urban history of New York. Not by chance, the beginning of everything is Coney Island, a
foetal Manhattan, the fun park used to test strategies and mechanisms later applied to the construction of the city (electricity, air conditioning,
mechanical systems of movement, etc.). A virgin territory of the imagination, Coney Island even its food synthesized all aspects of the mythology of
New York: congestion, artificiality and serial repetition. 19

Luna Park at night, Coney Island, N.Y.

From Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (London and New York, 1978) (Click to enlarge)

In Koolhaass mythical tale, New York resembles a city that builds itself. Its transformation was not guided by architecture (at least not in its official
version) but instead by secret and internal forces, which must be exposed and described. These forces had not only participated in constructing the city,
as if it were animated by a sort of mediaeval vitalism, but also, above all, aimed to prefigure it in an unprecedented visionary leap. This is precisely the
novelty introduced by Koolhaas: in its most ordinary dimension, reality does not simply construct its spaces, it designs them. Its visionary capacity is
on a par with the most advanced avant-garde culture. The city is a vision without an author, a utopia realized without a manifesto. Not by chance, the
iconographic universe articulated by Koolhaas describes a reality that often has yet to come into being but somehow has already been mythicized. Its
most evident architectural emblem was Samuel Friedes Globe Tower, the unrealized conceptual prototype of the skyscraper. 20

However, it is the very founding myth of New York that bears the signs of a projection into the future as improbable as it is prophetic. For example, in
1672 when, only a few decades after the arrival of the first Dutch settlers, the French engraver Jollain published a highly detailed though entirely false
birds-eye view of New Amsterdam. For Koolhaas, None of the information it communicates is based on reality. Yet it is a depiction perhaps
accidental of the project Manhattan: an urban science fiction. 21 In fact, the invention of New York occurred in 1807 with the prefiguration of the
current urban grid of 2,028 rectangular blocks, thereby imagining the final and conclusive occupation of Manhattan when the city still consisted of
only a handful of blocks. It was an act of extreme realism destined simultaneously to maximize the commercial exploitation of the islands territory and
to lay the foundations for the most courageous urban prophecy of Western civilization: the land it divides, unoccupied; the population it describes,
conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms; the activities it frames, non-existent. 22 In other words, it imagined nothingness.

C.L. Jollain, Birds-eye View of New Amsterdam, 1672.

From Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (London and New York, 1978) (Click to enlarge)

Underlying the myth of New York is the construction of a city without any ambition other than its optimal yet extreme development. Evidently, this
is possible only in a sedate socio-political condition. Rather than the struggle of history, the myth has to do with a certain normality of urban
phenomena. The city grows as an ultimate, man-made artefact, yet in a natural way. Nevertheless this is part of the logic of the myth that, according

to Barthes, results in the urban condition being perceived as nature. It is once again Barthes who claims that, from a social point of view, the premise of
the myth is, in fact, the total bourgeoisization of society in other words, the point when middle-class society subsumes everything: Our press, our
films, our theatre, our pulp literature, our rituals, our justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a
touching wedding, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in everyday life, is dependent on the representation which the
bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between man and the world.23 For this reason the norms of the bourgeoisie are experienced as
undeniable or obvious laws of a natural order. And for this reason, Barthes continues, it is the bourgeois ideology itself, the process through which the
bourgeoisie transforms the reality of the world into an image of the world, History into Nature. 24

The bourgeois ideology is, obviously, the ill-concealed DNA of New York. All the same, from the outset this ideology, stripped of its most European
aspects and definitively de-historicized, revealed the city as a new nature to the point that its artificiality is almost impossible to recognize as
such.25 The Metropolis, Koolhaas states in conclusion, strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it
absolutely coincides with his desires. The Metropolis is an addictive machine, from which there is no escape, unless it offers that, too. Through this
pervasiveness, its existence has become like the Nature it has replaced: taken for granted, almost invisible, certainly indescribable. 26 The objective of
Koolhaass book is to give a voice to New York, to demonstrate the theoretical dimension behind the evidence of its nature: a hypothetical Manhattan
concealed beneath the myth of New York. However, the role of the mythologist, to use Barthess term, is constitutionally ambiguous because he
constantly runs the risk of causing the reality which he purports to protect, to disappear. A perfect example is the Citroen DS 19: The mechanic, the
engineer, even the user, speak the object; but the mythologist is condemned to metalanguage. 27 For Koolhaas, who is well aware of Barthess
conclusions, the question must be confronted head-on and without delay in order to deal with the extravagant and megalomaniac claims, ambitions
and possibilities of the Metropolis openly.28

New York suffers from the syndrome of the film star, being too egocentric to discover patterns, too inarticulate to express intentions, too restless to
record or remember events.29 The role of the essayist, of the historian of the city, is thus replaced by that of the ghostwriter. All the same, the problem
is that New York has aged prematurely, before its life had been fully lived. The ghostwriter is thus forced to provide his own ending. To do so, he
cannot speak about the city, he must design it. The conclusion of Delirious New York is thus an interpretation of the same material, not through
words, but in a series of architectural projects.30 The end of the book is also its apotheosis, for it ceases to recount an architectural narrative and instead
presents architecture as the form of fiction: the story of New York concludes with an appendix that presents a series of theoretical projects for
Manhattan prepared by the four members of OMA between 1972 and 1977. The projects re-evoke and condense the materials accumulated while
recounting the city.31 The myth of Manhattan, invested by the powerful retroactive action of Koolhaass manifesto, can continue to exist only in
an imaginary dimension, a dimension in which reality is literally placed in a state of crisis and re-invented, used as a surface onto which to project the
ambitions, desires and expectations that have always constituted the sense of the urban dimension.

City of the Captive Globe key: 1) Religion in ruins; 2) A subconscious portrait of O.M. Ungers architecture; 3) Two towers of Le Corbusiers Plan
Voisin in the grass; 4) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; 5) The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel; 6) Homage to Mies; 7) Dals Architectural Angelus, 1933; 8) Ivan
Leonidovs Ministry of Heavy Industry; 9) El Lissitskys Lenins stand; 10) Outdoor indoor; 11) Malevics Architekton; 12) RCA Building, Rockefeller
Center, 1933; 13) Homage to Superstudio; 14) Trylon and Perisfera by Wallace Harrison
From OMA, Architectural Design 47, no. 5 (1977) (Click to enlarge)

3. Project

Speaking of projects signifies moving from the world of contingent reality into that of hypothesis. The latter is the world of modernity. The modern
paradigm is the notion of a diverse world imagined on the basis of conjecture. Its presuppositions belong to pure intuition. The only certainty is that
which one refutes and of which one aims to take ones leave.
Of the projects presented in the appendix to Delirious New York one offers the best illustration of the modalities of Koolhaass method: The City of the

Captive Globe (1972), not by chance a first intuitive exploration of Manhattans architecture, drawn before research would substantiate its
conjectures.32 In this project, the grid the modernist tool par excellence is freed of the incumbency of mediating any context and traces an abstract
and potentially infinite archipelago of Cities in the City. Each island corresponds with a city block of this theoretical Manhattan. If, at its origin, the
blocks of New Yorks urban grid had generated diverse buildings simply on a formal level, then during the adult phase ofManhattanism, a growing
programmatic complexity and the development of technologies transformed each project into a potential ideological laboratory, reducing the city to a
catalogue of avant-garde movements Futurism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Socialist Realism, etc. that, Koolhaas claims, never
took hold in Europe because their coexistence was incompatible due to their respective theoretical premises. 33 If the ambition of the urban device is that
of consenting the development of each ideology without compromise or mediation of any sort, in reality, this only demonstrates its modesty. According
to a plot reminiscent of Superstudios narrative, The City of the Captive Globe warns against the totalizing, though ineffective, dimension of ideology
when it is not in some way contained.

The underlying theme is thus that of the modernist project, which exists solely in a dialectic dimension between forces representing the destructive
character of modernity on the one hand, to use Benjamins term, and the capacity to bridle and channel instances of emancipation within a project that
renders them operable on the other. On the contrary, if there is a limit to Koolhaass project, then it is an excess of realism. Lined up like so many toy
soldiers, the ideologies of The City of the Captive Globe appear ready, at most, to fight a solitary, private war, rushing vertiginously upward or, at
best, attacking the plinths atop which they rest (in some cases, actually managing to partially destroy them). 34

For this reason Koolhaas introduces an element that interrupts the grid-blocks dialectic: the Captive Globe, suspended in the middle of the city. Its role
is to demonstrate that all ideologies contribute to the construction of the world, and nurture it. The Globe is the only object that confers the status of
city on an otherwise indefinite distension of blocks. It is an idealized version of its centre. It does not fail to exhibit all of its disconnection from the
city, to which it manages to belong only with great difficulty (exactly like its reference in the real world, New Yorks Central Park). The very existence of
the Captive Globe represents the inevitable gap between the idea of the city and its reality, or, better yet, between urban reality and its unconscious.
Having opposed a psychoanalytical perspective to a dialectic one, Koolhaas realizes that there is a need for a bridge between reality and the unconscious
that is capable of both revealing the mechanism that makes the city function and putting it into operation. If, on the one hand, the Globe represents
the idea of the city in this sense recalling the story of Superstudios Third Ideal City, a New York destroyed, reduced to a cube of pulsating brains
assembled atop the site of Central Park and condemned to the pure, eternal act of meditation 35 then on the other it is also its tangible, though wholly
irrational product. Where the blocks of the city reproduce the reading of the structure and functioning of Manhattans blocks, in some cases with
entirely credible forms, the central Globe remains the representation of the essentially surreal nature of the metropolis, rendering it concrete: Through
our feverish thinking in the Towers, the Globe gains weight. Its temperature rises slowly. In spite of the most humiliating setbacks, its ageless
pregnancy survives.36

In the end, the Globe is the emblematic incubator of that city-sense that Koolhaas identified as the generative origin of the urban condition: an
evocation of human nature, in all of its unfathomable ambition. If the role of the architect is to project this ambition in a collective dimension, giving it
form and thus rendering it socially operative, then at the same time the procedure it utilizes is not, in principle, verifiable. The ultimate aspiration of
architecture namely, to embody the world thus passes through the inevitable disconnection between reality and hypothesis. In other words, the
practice of design is a practice wholly impossible to demonstrate. For this reason, architecture, strictly speaking, is pure fiction. Koolhaas offered a
plastic demonstration of this with the numerous postcards mentioned above: in Delirious New York they offer a similar description of the real
Manhattan, designed, imagined and never realized. They are true and proper souvenirs of a surreal condition.37 If the ambition of the metropolis is to
create a world entirely fabricated by man, in other words, living in a fantasy, then architecture cannot exist other than by imposing on the world
structures that existed previously only as clouds of conjectures in the minds of their creators. 38 Consequentially, it is inevitably a form of paranoidcritical activity, or an interpretation of the concrete facts that is delirious to the point that it outclasses those facts, offering the world irrefutable
evidence of their irrelevance and confirming the initial hypothesis without a shadow of a doubt. To put it in other words the same used by Salvador
Dal, inventor of the Critical-Paranoid Method (CPM) The reality of the external world is used for illustration and proof to serve the reality of our
mind.39

For Koolhaas whose artistic nature, it must be said, is anything but Surrealist 40 Dals CPM represents a secret weapon to be used against that
Modern architecture which with its implacable aversion to metaphor has tried to exorcize its fear of chaos through a fetish for the objective and to
regain control over the volatility of the Metropolis by dispersing its bulk, isolating its components, quantifying its functions, and render it predictable
once more.41 By recalling the terrifying beauty of the artificial metropolis, Koolhaas in fact lays claim to the convergence of the real and the
imaginary, something already invoked by Dal in one of his few references to architecture (Beauty is nothing more that the sum of the total of our
perversions, he asserts, concluding, paraphrasing Breton, La beaut sera comestible ou ne sera pas 42 Beauty will either be edible or will not be at
all). However, this implies that architecture has to deal with desires and aspirations whose nature remains for the most part unconscious and often
unmentionable. Thus, their operability as a project remains confined to the mythical world of the surreal, as the City of the Captive Globe clearly
demostrates. If by introducing the notion of irrationality the Surrealistic device can shift the reading of reality to a more conscious dimension, at the
same time its inoperability reflects the intrinsically projective, and thus unpredictable, nature of modern culture. As underlined by Dalibor Veseley,

Surrealism was in fact a movement that revealed the latent dreams of modernity, their shamefulness, violence, anxiety and hopes, but and this is a
profound dilemma and irony itself remained caught in the dream of the same modernity. 43

4. Modernity

What exactly should we interpret modernity to mean in order to understand Delirious New York, and more in general Koolhaass position?
According to Foucault, Kant is to be credited with having written the first philosophical text to relate the significance of his own work within the
historical context in which it was conceived and produced. His short essay Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, published for the first
time in September 1784 in the German magazine Berlinische Montaschrift, unites the depth of philosophical thinking with the immediacy of a
journalistic article. Using this introduction of the philosophical reflection on today, Foucault identifies in the Kantian text the first draft of what could
be defined the attitude of modernity:

By attitude I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a
way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the
Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the modern era from the premodern or postmodern, I think it would
be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of
countermodernity.44

This sanctions above all two aspects regarding the nature of modern society which are also legible in the words of Giambattista Vico, utilized by
Koolhaas in the epigraph to Delirious New York:45 a) that the origin of modern society the world of nations, to use Vicos term is essentially
mental, in other words, belonging to the capacity of each individual to interpret his/her own experiences, in order to communicate and share them with
others; b) that the modifications of the mind, which, according to Vico, must be investigated in order to retrace the principles of the world itself,
constitute the true driving force of society. Modernity is then a matter of the mental interpretation of the contemporary condition. Thus, what
characterizes the modern attitude is not only the consciousness of those aspects tied to the discontinuity of time and all its related phenomena (a break
with tradition, a sentiment and desire for the new, a sense of vertigo in response to passing events, etc.). Foucault turns to Baudelaire to clarify this
point. Being modern does not simply mean recognizing and accepting the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent. On the contrary, it means assuming
a certain attitude of respect for this movement: And this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the
present instant, nor behind it, but within it. If fashion is that which follows the course of time, modernity is an attitude that seeks to grasp all that is
heroic in the present. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to heroize the present. 46

Delirious New York is entirely founded on this presupposition, a speculative bombardment that systematically emphasizes the topicality of urban
reality more than its potentiality. The story of New York is a story of visions promising something that already exists, something that has been in the
DNA of the city since its origin. Delirious New York is as much the chronicle of the autochthonous events of the city as it is the tale of the European
attempts to lay claim to Manhattan (from the first delirious map of New Amsterdam by Jollain in 1672 to the work of Koolhaas and OMAs
theoretical projects for the city). An important position in these events is held by two influential personalities who arrived in New York from the
Continent: Le Corbusier and Salvador Dal. Their stories demonstrate two latent aspects of New Yorks modernity as read by Koolhaas: the first is
precisely that both arrived in New York (from Paris) not as simple flneurs, but with the intention of capturing the city. As true modern men at the
hour when the world awakes from sleep, they set to work to transfigure the city through their work. This transfiguration does not invalidate reality, but
rather strengthens it precisely through the filter of the authors observation: it is exactly what makes things appear endowed with an impulsive life like
the soul of their creator.47For the modern attitude, Foucault continues, the value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine
it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in
which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. 48
The second consequential aspect is that this stubbornness toward reality implies a shift in focus. Modernity is not, in fact, simply a form of relating with
the present, but also a type of relationship that one must establish with oneself. Here it is once again necessary to turn to Foucault:

To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as the object of a complex and difficult
elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. . . . Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover
himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. 49

The implicit message of Delirious New York is that the real project is oneself.50 In modern culture with so-called postmodern culture, despite a
number of farcical aspects, being nothing more than its apotheosis there is no possible project outside of this condition. In fact, the elaboration of
subjectivities is the space in which to measure the expansive and hegemonic strength of the forces of modernity. This is valid also for architecture,

despite its irreducibly objective character. Or better yet, precisely this objectivity is the key to understanding the potential of architecture, and more in
general of art.51The objectual value of architecture is not limited to concrete or material data the original data, as in the line of thinking that can be
traced as far back as Laugiers primitive hut; rather, it truly takes form when architecture becomes a speculative object, the support for an intellectual
projection that consents the attribution of a mythical value. Shared, and thus social, this value is, in the end, historical. It is in this moment that
architecture reveals itself in all of its productive dimension as a machine for the creation of new subjectivities.

Besides, Foucault points out, a true elaboration of oneself as an autonomous subject cannot be immune to a permanent criticism of our being historical.
The modern ethos implies an analysis of the subject as historically determined, and thus it cannot rest atop any original certainty. On the contrary, it
consists of a critique of what we are saying, thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves. 52 This produces a side effect that impacts
the architect-theoretician. It forces him to constantly update his own observation of reality and his capacity to generalize its characteristics. If the
objective of a theory lies in its duration in time in its hieratic character, as Le Corbusier would say53 then at the same time its destiny is that of never
being fully verified. The approach adopted by Koolhaas is a perfect demonstration. The writings and research that succeeded Delirious New
York demonstrate an attempt to problematize the very field of theoretical action. This is clearly visible, for example, in the passage from a reflection on
specific urban situations (Singapore, Atlanta, the Pearl River Delta) to their more generalizable and a-topical aspects (Bigness, The Generic City),
concluding with the destruction of the limit conditions of modernization, now independent of any form, structure or history of architecture or the city
(Junkspace). In the end, beyond the specific outcomes, and setting aside the (many) dfaillances, the positive value we can extract from Koolhaass
approach to architecture is precisely the act of questioning architectures own presuppositions, an approach that treats theory as neither a doctrine nor
even a permanent body of accumulated knowledge: instead, theory is an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at
one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. 54

Notes

1
Elia Zenghelis, Text and Architecture: Architecture as Text, in Martin van Schaik and Otakar Mel, eds., Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations,
195676 (Munich: Prestel and IHAUUTU Delft, 2006), 255.

2
Epigraph to Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 6.

3
Writing is still, in a certain way, the most important thing for me. In a very simple way, because it is one area in which I am solely responsible. It is also
the area in which issues like genre, simulation, and deliberate manipulation of voice are the most exciting things to experiment with. I must say that I
am utterly surprised that very few people have really understood that its a literary voice, not necessarily an objective voice, that pronounces
architectural issues. Koolhaas interviewed by Beatriz Colomina, Rem Koolhaas AY, El Croquis, nos. 13435 (2007), 379.

4
See the interview with Rem Koolhaas, La deuxime chance del larchitecture moderne . . . , Larchitecture daujourdhui, no. 238 (1985), 29.

5
It must be remembered that prior to becoming an architect Rem Koolhaas worked as a journalist, a career he began in 1963 with the Dutch daily De
Haagse Post as editor of the People, Animals, and Things column. It was here that he began writing articles on emerging lifestyles, only rarely
examining the world of architecture. In the meantime, he founded the group of film buffs called 1, 2, 3, enz. (1, 2, 3, etc.). The name is an allusion to
both the groups variable number of members and the fact that they enjoyed exchanging roles as actors, cameramen, directors and screenwriters. The
group included Ren Daalder, a friend of Koolhaas since high school, and other friends from the Amsterdam Film Academy, directed at the time by
Koolhaass father, Anton Koolhaas, a playwright known for his stories about animals. The group created a number of short films and, in 1969, the
ambitious though unsuccessful full-length feature The White Slave. See Bart Lootsma, Now Switch off the Sound and Reverse the Film: Koolhaas,
Constant, and Dutch Culture in the 1960s, Hunch, no. 1 (1999), 15473.

6
In his famous poem of 1968 Il PCI ai giovani! (The PCI to Young People!), Pier Paolo Pasolini commented on the clashes between students and the
police at Valle Giulia in Rome, mocking the bourgeois students revolutionary aspirations, referring to them as figli di pap, or spoiled children,
unaware that their protest was inscribed within the very power structure they were fighting against. Although the poem can be interpreted on many
levels, it clearly shows Pasolinis critique of the bourgeoises normalizing culture. See Pier Paolo Pasolini, The PCI to Young People!, in In Danger: A
Pasolini Anthology, introduction and ed. by Jack Hirschman (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010), 84.

7
Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], abridged and trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 151.

8
See Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?, in idem, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 48.

9
Koolhaas began studying architecture in London at the Architectural Association in the fall of 1968. Twenty-five at the time, he had already become
interested in architecture, acquiring a certain knowledge of the subject. During his first year at the AA, Koolhaas attended the course taught by Tony
Dugdale, an architect from the circle of Archigram, which left him deluded and frustrated. In the fall of 1969 he showed Elia Zenghelis his story The
Surface, asking to join his second year Unit, and received an enthusiastic yes. This was the beginning of the collaboration that would lead the duo, in
1975, to officially found OMA together with Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis. This information was obtained from a conversation between the
author and Elia Zenghelis in September 2013.

10
Rem Koolhaas, The Surface, unpublished manuscript, unpaginated.

11
By analogy, the redundant, ambiguous centrality Koolhaas assigns to the notion of red hot spots of urban intensity recalls, even if in a completely
different theoretical frame, the urban fact proposed by Aldo Rossi in The Architecture of the City.

12
Koolhaas, The Surface, 6.

13
In Paris, instead of putting up pompous towers and office blocks, closing of the whole site for the public and not trying in any way to clarify the existing
situation, a platform would open up the whole site, while being economically at least as feasible. The same goes for the Covent Garden area, now to be
redeveloped. One could preserve the original market buildings and church in a square in the platform. Koolhaas, The Surface, 29.

14
Ivan Leonidov was one of Koolhaass first interests in the field of architecture. In 1966, as a representative of the group 1, 2, 3 enz., he participated in a
seminar at the TU Delft on cinema and architecture organized by Gerrit Oorthuys, a professor of history and an expert on Constructivism. The two
travelled to Russia various times to study Leonidovs work with the plan to publish a book.

15
Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture was published in 1972 for the La citt come ambiente significante competition organized
by Casabella magazine. The team consisted of Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis. See Exodus, or the Voluntary
Prisoners of Architecture, in Schaik and Mel, Exit Utopia, 23653.

16
Koolhaas, The Surface, 6.

17
In 1972 Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp moved to the United States. They originally settled in Ithaca, where Koolhaas spent time with O.M.
Ungers at Cornell University. In 1973 they moved to New York, where they began their research for the book. The discovery of the illustrated postcards
of the city from the 1920s and 30s spurred the couple to join the Metropolitan Postcards Collectors Club. It was meeting once every month in a huge

building downtown. One floor was turned into the Metropolitan Postcards Collectors Club once a month. It was in a way like a city, everyone has a table
and you would circulate between the destinations of those tables on which the postcards were arranged in shoeboxes. On each table all finds of
possible fetishisms were arranged and indexed. . . . It was an invaluable resource, because one third of Delirious New York is based, both in its
iconography and even in its information, on postcards I discovered there. Koolhaas interviewed by Beatriz Colomina, The Architecture of
Publications: Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Beatriz Colomina,El Croquis, no. 13435 (2007), 355.

18
Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], abridged and trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 107. By Koolhaass own admission the
work of Roland Barthes served as a crucial reference during the construction of Delirious New York: In 1970, Lempire des signes, about Japan, by
Roland Barthes, made an absolutely devastating impression on me. Barthes demonstrates and this may apply to all of his work, including the more
famous Mythologies, from 1957 that there is no distinction between significant and insignificant content, and that what we should take note of and
decipher are signs. In the process he abolished a whole moralistic dimension in the assessment of facts and conditions at a single stroke. It was an
insight that enabled me to devote six years to a phenomenon that at the time held extraordinarily little prestige: New York. Rem Koolhaas,
Bookmark, Mark 10 (2007), 199.

19
Koolhaas points out that even the hot dog was invented on Coney Island (in 1871).

20
Some 210 metres in height and the result of an encounter between the Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace, the Globe Tower was designed in 1906 for
Coney Island as an enormous vertical fun park. Set atop a train and bus station, it contained hotels, restaurants, theatres, a hippodrome, a circus, the
largest ballroom in the world, a palm grove and an observatory, among other things. The project was abandoned in 1908 after the completion of its
foundations. See Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 5862.

21
Ibid., 10.

22
Ibid., 13.

23
Barthes, Mythologies, 139.

24
Ibid., 140.

25
An interesting example on the theme of bourgeois ideology as the new nature of the city can be found in the term employed today to describe those who
intend to acquire citizenship in a foreign country: naturalization.

26
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 242.

27
Barthes, Mythologies, 159.

28
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 242.

29
Ibid., 8.

30
Ibid., 242.

31
The five projects are: The City of the Captive Globe (Rem Koolhaas with Zoe Zenghelis; 1972), Hotel Sphinx (Elia and Zoe Zenghelis; 197576),
New Welfare Island (Rem Koolhaas with German Martinez and Richard Perlmutter, with paintings by Zoe Zenghelis; 197576), Welfare Palace
Hotel (Rem Koolhaas with Derrick Snare, Richard Perlmutter, with paintings by Madelon Vriesendorp; 1976) and The Story of the Pool (Rem
Koolhaas, with paintings by Madelon Vriesendorp; 1977). See ibid., 27589. The credits can be found in OMA, monographic issue, Architectural
Design 47, no. 5 (1977), 330.

32
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 244. Surprisingly, the project was developed in 1972, before Koolhaas arrived in the United States to gather material
for Delirious New York. He began writing only in 1975, after returning to London. See Koolhaas interviewed by Beatriz Colomina, The Architecture of
Publications, 356.

33
The drawing of the city features illustrations, presented as examples, of fourteen buildings representing the same number of ideologies, a sort of private
Valhalla of OMA at the time and a sampling of the theoretical ingredients destined to nurture the notion of Manhattanism. Stand-outs among the
architectural references include: a hypothetical building by O.M. Ungers; two towers from Le Corbusiers Plan Voisin; the Waldorf Astoria Hotel; two
Miesian towers; Leonidovs Ministry of Heavy Industry; El Lissitskys Tribune; one of Malevics Architektons; the Rockefeller Center; a histogram by
Superstudio; and the Trylon and Perisfera of Wallace Harrison. See The City of the Captive Globe, in OMA, 33133.

34
As pointed out by Pier Vittorio Aureli, the blocks of The City of the Captive Globe function not as islands but as enclaves, strictly dependent on the
model of exploitation of the territory precisely as devices of urbanisation. See Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2011), 25.

35
Superstudio, New York of Brains, Architectural Design 41, no. 12 (December 1971), 73742 and 785.

36
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 244.

37
See, for example, the construction of Radio City Music Hall; ibid., 167.

38
Ibid., 206.

39
Ibid., 201.

40
See Changement de dimensions: Rem Koolhaas sentretient avec Jean-Franois Chevrier, Larchitecture daujourdhui, no. 361 (2005), 101.

41
Rem Koolhaas, Life in the Metropolis, or the Culture of Congestion, in OMAArchitectural Design 47, no. 5 (1977), 325.

42
See Salvador Dal, De la beaut terrifiante et comestible, de larchitecture modern style, Minotaur, nos. 34 (December 1933); reprinted
in Architectural Design 48, nos. 23 (1978), 13940.

43
Dalibor Veseley, Surrealism, Myth & Modernity, Architectural Design 48, nos. 23 (1978), 95.

44
Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment? (Quest-ce que les Lumires?), in idem, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1984), 39. In passing, it must be recalled that Koolhaas met Foucault during his time in Ithaca: It was an incredible year in Cornell because
Foucault was teaching there, and also was Hubert Damisch. We became friends with Hubert and Teri. We once picnicked with the Damisches and
Foucault. See Koolhaas interviewed by Beatriz Colomina, The Architecture of Publications, 355.

45
Philosophers and philologists should be concerned in the first place with poetic metaphysics, that is, the science that looks for proof not in the external
world, but in the very modifications of the mind that meditates on it. Since the world of nations is made by men, it is inside their minds that its
principles should be sought. Giambattista Vico, Principi di una scienza nuova(Naples: Felice Mosca, 1725), translation by the author. In the books
epigraph, Koolhaas erroneously lists the publication date as 1759. In reality, it is important to underline how Vichian philosophy, with regard to the
theory of knowledge, anticipates Kants Critique of Pure Reason by more than half a century. Already in 1710, Vico affirmed that: As Gods truth is
what God comes to know as he creates and assembles it, so human truth is what man comes to know as he builds it shaping it by his actions. See Ernst
von Glaserfeld, An Introduction to Radical Constructivism, in Paul Watzlawick, ed., Invented Reality (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984).

46
Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 40.

47
Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, quoted in Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?, 40. It is not possible here to avoid considering the
explicitly design-oriented role of the observation referred to by Le Corbusier in the chapter Eyes That Do Not See in Toward an Architecture.
Koolhaass judgement, which appears in the book to be pitiless in Le Corbusiers case and enthusiastic in Dals, must be reconsidered. Le Corbusier,
whom Koolhaas sees as the first to have intended architecture as an activity of the substantial overvaluation of the existing, is Koolhaass true hero:
Dals strategic formula offers in practice the best model for understanding architectural procedures: making the world accept visions that it does not
want, and building them in the city. And Im not the only one to have picked it up just think of Le Corbusier for example. Koolhaas in Changement
de dimensions, 101.

48
Ibid.

49
Ibid.

50
In this sense we could say that the true latent project of Delirious New York is precisely the design of OMA, officially founded on 1 January 1975 by
Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, together with Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis. See O.M.A., Lotus International, no. 11 (1976), 3437.

51
According to Baudelaire art is the only field in which it is possible to bring about a true historicization of the present, a game between freedom and
reality for its transfiguration and, thus, an aesthetic elaboration of the self. See Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 42.

52
Ibid., 46.

53
The condition in which a civilisation finds itself when, leaving behind an empirical period, it becomes conscious of something that, in precedence, it
had only intuited. An hieratic attitude as opposed to the imposing nature of the new, because contrary to the intermittency of the latter, it is first and
foremost knowledge of the self, the final moment in a lengthy period of research toward which acquired knowledge leads. See Le Corbusier (Ozenfant
& Jeanneret), La Peinture moderne (Paris: Crs & C., 1925), 153.

54
Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?, 52.