“Rem Koolhaas and the Place of Public Architecture” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. November 3, 1994–January 31, 1995
The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) in Rotterdam, is best known in America for his remarkable book Delirious New York (1978). A manifesto in celebration of the urban density of Manhattan, which the fifty-year-old Koolhaas calls the culture of congestion and finds “exhilarating,” it begins with the startling premise that Manhattan is actually an urban-design masterpiece, one without a genius. That its concentrated mythical splendor exists at all, Koolhaas contends, is proof of an unformulated theory too revolutionary to ever be openly stated—that human beings flourish ever so well in a heavily populated, nature free, totally man-made world. Places to thrive include the Waldorf Astoria, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and the United Nations. To be sure, Harlem is outside the boundaries of the packed utopia.
Delirious New York has been reissued by the Monacelli Press to coincide with this exhibition of Koolhaas’s recent work at the Museum of Modern Art. Although New York City has been displaced at MOMAby the European and Japanese cities in which Koolhaas has recently done major work—Paris, Lille, Melun-Sénart; Rotterdam, Karlsruhe, and Yokohama—Koolhaas’s sixteen-year-old book provides the rationale for the exhibition. Its curator, Terence Riley, believes with Koolhaas that the chaotic city is a survivor, and in no need of being seen as a problem to be mitigated by