Ran Fu
Reading Delirious New York
PROFESSOR: Felicity Dale Scott
STUDENT: Fu Ran NY/Paris GSAPP
Final Paper for AA4705
Architectural publication is certainly a good way to know about one architect and his or her works. However, to know about different architects, you may need different types of publication.
To know Frank Gehry, you need an album of his Bilbao Guggenheim Museum while to know
Sejima Kazuyo, you need one issue of EL Croquis. The situation may get a little bit more
complicated when it comes to Rem Koolhaas’s case in which you may need several monographs
and a pile of books written by him. Among the books written by him, the 1978 book Delirious
New York is definitely the key to understanding his works. Here in this paper, while unfolding the
book, I will not limit my scope to conveying his ideas and my reading of them and also try to
demonstrate why Delirious NewYork is important to Rem Koolhaas and his practice.
As Jonathan Crary puts it, Delirious New York is frequently read as a manifesto outlining how
architecture could become immanent to a mutating field of modernization rather than function as
static or enduring monuments exterior to it. 1 Then we have to ask what was written in this book
and how it was written. Delirious New York, more precisely Delirious New York, A Retroactive Manifesto for
Manhattan. By simply repeating the title, we can find some information about what is inside the
book. Apparently, it is a book on New York, it is about the city’s past and process of formation
toward the present condition. It is a manifesto, a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan (or
Manhattanism). But why a young architect at the beginning of his career chose to write a city’s
history?
In an interview for the magazine ANY, Koolhaas explained why he wrote Delirious New
PROFESSOR: Felicity Dale Scott
STUDENT: Fu Ran NY/Paris GSAPP
Final Paper for AA4705
Architectural publication is certainly a good way to know about one architect and his or her works. However, to know about different architects, you may need different types of publication.
To know Frank Gehry, you need an album of his Bilbao Guggenheim Museum while to know
Sejima Kazuyo, you need one issue of EL Croquis. The situation may get a little bit more
complicated when it comes to Rem Koolhaas’s case in which you may need several monographs
and a pile of books written by him. Among the books written by him, the 1978 book Delirious
New York is definitely the key to understanding his works. Here in this paper, while unfolding the
book, I will not limit my scope to conveying his ideas and my reading of them and also try to
demonstrate why Delirious NewYork is important to Rem Koolhaas and his practice.
As Jonathan Crary puts it, Delirious New York is frequently read as a manifesto outlining how
architecture could become immanent to a mutating field of modernization rather than function as
static or enduring monuments exterior to it. 1 Then we have to ask what was written in this book
and how it was written. Delirious New York, more precisely Delirious New York, A Retroactive Manifesto for
Manhattan. By simply repeating the title, we can find some information about what is inside the
book. Apparently, it is a book on New York, it is about the city’s past and process of formation
toward the present condition. It is a manifesto, a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan (or
Manhattanism). But why a young architect at the beginning of his career chose to write a city’s
history?
In an interview for the magazine ANY, Koolhaas explained why he wrote Delirious New