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Rem Koolhaas, 1994 [1978]:
"How to write a manifesto - on a form of urbanism for what remains of the 20th century - in an age disgusted with them? The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence.
Manhattan's problem is the opposite: it is a mountain range of evidence without manifesto.
This book was conceived at the intersection of these two observations: it is a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan.
Manhattan is the 20th century's Rosetta Stone."
"This book is an interpretation of that Manhattan which gives its seemingly discontinuous - even irreconcilable - episodes a degree of consistency and coherence, an interpretation that intends to establish Manhattan as the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism, whose program - to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, i.e., to live inside fantasy - was so ambitious that to be realized, it could never be openly stated."
"Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition - hyper-density - without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.
The retroactive formulation of Manhattan's program is a polemical operation.
It reveals a number of strategies, theorems and breakthroughs that not only give logic and pattern to the city's past performance, but whose continuing validity is itself an argument for a second coming of Manhattanism, this time as an explicit doctrine that can transcend the island of its origin to claim its pace among contemporary urbanisms. With Manhattan as example, this book is a blueprint for a ‘Culture of Congestion'." [p. 10]
KOOLHAAS, Rem. Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan. 2. ed. Nova York : The Monacelli Press, 1994, grifos do autor.
"NEW YORK 1
Ten years ago, I wrote a book about New York which was an investigation into another kind of modernity - not the European modernity of the twenties and thirties which consisted of a dream that was not realized. What fascinated me about New York was that in the twenties and thirties, buildings like Rockefeller Center were as revolutionary as the architecture in Europe, but built, realized, and maybe more important - popular. So New York's great virtue, in my eyes, is that it presents a modernity that is not alienated from the population but is in fact, populistic."
KOOLHAAS, Rem apud OMA; KOOLHAAS, Rem; MAU, Bruce. S, M, L, XL. 2. ed. Nova York: The Monacelli Press, 1997.
"Rem Koolhaas: I discovered Learning from Las Vegas in 1972 as a Cornell student. For me, the book was both inspiration and threat: your work constituted a manifesto for the shift from substance to sign precisely at the moment that I was beginning, in what would become Delirious New York, to decipher the impact of substance on culture. Paradoxically, I sensed in your book a pair of architects who, in spite of their love of architecture, were horribly fascinated by its opposite - while I was becoming fascinated by architecture, coming from its opposite.
Hans Ulrich Obrist: On a related note, I was wondering about the fact that after your text, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, it's very difficult to find another manifesto about architecture. Rem was noticing that since then, most manifestoes were about the city.
RK: The point is not that manifestoes are about the city, but that there are no manifestoes - only books about cities that imply manifestoes. [...]
Robert Venturi: Our approach, currently, is one which really relates to what we have been saying all along, but says it in a different way. The essential element of architecture for our time is no longer space, it's no longer abstract form in industrial drag; the essential architectural element is iconography. But people today don't even know what iconography means. I wrote a book on iconography and, in America, it has been reviewed only once - by Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books."
SCOT BROWN, Denise; VENTURI, Robert; OBRIST, Hans Ulrich; KOOLHAAS, Rem. Re-Learning from Las Vegas. In: CHUNG, Chuihua Judy et al. (Ed.).The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping. Köln: Taschen, 2001. p. 590-617, grifos dos autores. Col. Project on the City, v. 2.
"In Delirious New York Koolhaas celebrates Manhattan for its ‘culture of congestion.' The skyscraper is the crux of this culture, and he sees it as a mating of two emblematic forms that appear in various guises from the first New York Fair of 1853 to the World Fair of 1939 - ‘the needle' and ‘the globe.' The needle in the skyscraper is what demands ‘attention,' the globe is what promises ‘receptivity,' and ‘the history of Manhattanism is a dialectic between these two forms.' After 11 September the discursive frame of this Manhattanism has shifted somewhat. New fears cling to the skyscraper as a terrorist target, and the values of ‘attention' and ‘receptivity' are rendered suspicious. The same holds for the values of congestion and ‘delirious space'; they are overshadowed by calls for surveillance and ‘defensible space.' In short, the ‘urbanistic ego' and cultural diversity that Koolhaas celebrates in Delirious New York are under enormous pressure. They need advocates like never before, for, to paraphrase the Surrealists, New York Beauty will be delirious or will not be."
FOSTER, Hal. Design and crime (and other diatribes). Londres: Verso, 2002, grifos do autor.
"[BC] [...] I'm interested in the connection between city and publication, from Groszstadt to Lagos. [...] What is the relationship between the founding of OMA and the research that led to Delirious New York? Which came first?
[RK] Delirious New York came first... The vague idea to do ‘something' on New York dates from 1972. That is why I came to America... but at the same time there was a parallel notion to start an office with Elia [Zenghelis] and then - I think it was in 1975 - the two came together in ‘The Sparkling Metropolis', an exhibition in the Guggenheim museum for which we made a poster. It depicted the arrival of the floating pool in Manhattan."
"[BC] How about writing and architecture, did you see them as incompatible? [...] Is architecture for you intuition and writing reason? In any case, what is the relationship between writing and architecture. What comes first?
[RK] Technically, writing. I first wrote to create a credibility for the kind of architecture I wanted to do. Now it has become more diverse. Part of it is to describe architecture's evolving present... Part of it-like the Harvard work-is to prepare ourselves to deal with issues, like the Chinese city, that you can feel are imminent in the practice. Part of it I consider like pure 'writing', literary, like 'Generic City' or 'Junk Space'. I think that is very confusing to people. I try out different genres, different tones, clinical -Generic city, or hysterical-Junk Space."
KOOLHAAS, Rem; COLOMINA, Beatriz. La arquitectura de las publicaciones: conversación entre Beatriz Colomina y Rem Koolhaas / The architecture of publication: Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Beatriz Colomina. El Croquis, Madri, n. 134-135, "OMA [II], 1996-2007", p. 350-377, 2007, grifos dos autores.
"From the very first pages, Delirious New York reveals its character as another of the ‘conceptual-metaphorical projects' of OMA listed in the appendix. Its ‘structure' is based on the ‘grid' of Manhattan, and its chapters are ‘blocks'. New York is presented as the incarnation of the prescient visions of the European avant-gardes ‘still in search of a theory': that of ‘Manhattanism'. But it is Koolhaas, stepping forward as the Foucaultian archaeologist, discoverer of the secret for deciphering contemporary architectural culture - ‘Manhattan is the twentieth century's Rosetta Stone' - who requires that exceptional metropolis to form a foundation of certainties, even a ‘mountain range of evidence', on which to build his own ‘retroactive manifesto for Manhattan'. This manifesto is written with the unabashed polemical purpose of rejecting the Ville Radieuse and the cities of the CIAM, replacing them with the fantastic, playful and surreal qualities discovered in the very dense settlement of Manhattan, forming the basis of the Culture of Congestion."
GARGIANI, Roberto. Rem Koolhaas | OMA: the construction of merveilles. Lausanne; Abingdon: EPFL Press; Routledge, 2008, grifos do autor.
"Though the book is a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, the city is not described in its entirety but rather is represented through a series of exceptional and idiosyncratic architectural visions, such as Coney Island, the RCA Building, and Rockefeller Center, and through the contrasting ideologies of [Salvador] Dalí and Le Corbusier. Similarly, in the 1960s and 1970s Ungers worked on several projects (both with his office and with his students at TU Berlin and Cornell) based on the idea of the city of contrasting parts. [...] Ungers's concept of the archipelago as a city made of radically different parts juxtaposed in the same space was the primary influence on Koolhaas's idea of New York as an urban paradigm. While for Ungers the parts that compose the city are meant to oppose each other, and are thus bound to the dialectical principle that something is united by being separated, for Koolhaas, the difference between the blocks is difference itself, where variations can unfold infinitely without affecting the general principle. [...]"
AURELI, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture. Cambridge; Londres: MIT Press, 2011.