Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978/1994)

Since its original publication in 1978, Delirious New York has attained mythic status. Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas’s celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle — “the culture of congestion” — and its architecture.

“Manhattan,” he writes, “is the 20th century’s Rosetta Stone … occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall).” Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York’s history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper. Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.

Originally published by Thames & Hudson, 1978
Publisher Monacelli Press, 1994
ISBN 1885254008, 9781885254009
317 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Le Corbusier: When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People (1937–) [EN, ES]

“In his brilliant and incisive style, Le Corbusier examines the architecture and people of New York. He loves the people but finds the architecture haphazard and in need of planning. Through provocative prose and revealing drawings, he proposes a new, beautiful, vertical New York.” (from the back cover)

First published in French as Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches. Voyage au pays des timides, Plon, Paris, 1937.

English edition
Translated by Francis E. Hyslop, Jr.
First published by Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947
Publisher McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, 1964
243 pages

Review (Gaither Stewart, Southern Cross Review, 2003)

Google books (EN)

When the Cathedrals Were White (English, trans. Francis E. Hyslop, Jr., 1947/1964)
Cuando las catedrales eran blancas (Spanish, trans. Julio E. Payró, 2nd ed., 1948/1958)

Le Corbusier: Towards a New Architecture (1923–)

“For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier, architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher mathematics to go beyond mere utilitarian needs, beyond ‘style,’ to achieve a pure creation of the spirit which established ’emotional relationships by mean of raw materials.’

The first major exposition of his ideas appeared in Vers une Architecture (1923), a compilation of articles originally written by Le Corbusier for his own avant-garde magazine L’Esprit Nouveau. The present volume is an unabridged English translation of the 13th French edition of that historic manifesto, in which Le Corbusier expounded his technical and aesthetic theories, views on industry, economics, relation of form to function, the “mass production spirit,” and much else. A principal prophet of the “modern” movement in architecture, and a new-legendary figure at the “International School,” he designed some of the twentieth century’s most memorable buildings: Chapel at Ronchamp; Swiss dormitory at the Cite Universitaire, Paris; Unite d’Habitation, Marseilles; and many more.

Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style, studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations: ‘American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture.’ ‘Architecture is stifled by custom. It is the only profession in which progress is not considered necessary.’ ‘…a cathedral is not very beautiful…’ and ‘Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life.’

Profusely illustrated with over 200 line drawings and photographs of his own works and other structures he considered important, Towards a New Architecture is indispensable reading for architects, city planners, and cultural historians – but will intrigue anyone fascinated by the wide-ranging ideas, unvarnished opinions and innovative theories of one of this century’s master builders.” (from the back cover)

Note: This translation of the book has also been a source of controversy with regard to its change of style and very specific alterations to the text. The alterations have generated criticism and required correction, even as some of them began to define architectural language. A new translation was released in 2007 that is meant to be truer to Le Corbusier’s intention. (from Wikipedia)

Originally published in French under the title Vers une architecture, Paris, 1923.

This edition, first published in 1986, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work originally published by John Rodker, London, in 1931, as translated from the thirteenth French edition and given an English introduction by Frederick Etchells
Publisher Dover Publications, New York
ISBN 0486250237, 9780486250236
320 pages

Wikipedia

PDF (no OCR)