A review by jbrandmd
Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan by Rem Koolhaas

4.0

This book is fascinating, albeit quite dense and a bit strange to read. Koolhaas weaves together a history of modern New York City and how its architecture and culture have developed and influenced each other, with a focus on certain particularly significant works, such as Rockefeller Center and the Waldorf-Astoria. Much of the book is impressionistic and heavy on theory, which made it slow going for me. However, some of the fascinating historical anecdotes that Koolhaas dredges up, like a 1931 costume ball where a number of New York's premier architects dressed up as their buildings, help keep things grounded.

If you're someone who loves deconstructing the deeper meanings of cultural institutions and interrogating artistic dialectics, this is the book for you...although in that case, you've probably read it already. For everyone else, it's still very interesting, but know that you're in for passages like this: "Paranoid-Critical activity is the fabrication of evidence for unprovable speculations and the subsequent grafting of this evidence on the world, so that a 'false' fact takes its unlawful place among the real facts."

Worth a read, especially for architecture and design buffs. Enjoy!