Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978/1994)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, city, new york, urbanism
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
J. K. Birksted: Le Corbusier and the Occult (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, occultism
When Charles-Édouard Jeanneret reinvented himself as Le Corbusier in Paris, he also carefully reinvented the first thirty years of his life by highlighting some events and hiding others. As he explained in a letter: “Le Corbusier is a pseudonym. Le Corbusier creates architecture recklessly. He pursues disinterested ideas; he does not wish to compromise himself…. He is an entity free of the burdens of carnality.”
Le Corbusier grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a city described by Karl Marx as “one unified watchmaking industry.” Among the unifying social structures of La Chaux-de-Fonds was the Loge L’Amitié, the Masonic lodge with its francophone moral, social, and philosophical ideas, including the symbolic iconography of the right angle (rectitude) and the compass (exactitude). Le Corbusier would later describe these as “my guide, my choice” and as his “time-honored ideas, ingrained and deep-rooted in the intellect, like entries from a catechism.”
Through exhaustive research that challenges long-held beliefs, J. K. Birksted’s Le Corbusier and the Occult traces the structure of Le Corbusier’s brand of modernist spatial and architectural ideas based on startling new documents in hitherto undiscovered family and local archives. Le Corbusier and the Occult thus answers the conundrum set by Reyner Banham (Birksted’s predecessor at the Bartlett School of Architecture) who, fifty years ago, wrote that Le Corbusier’s book Towards a New Architecture “was to prove to be one of the most influential, widely read and least understood of all the architectural writings of the twentieth century.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262026481, 9780262026482
416 pages
review (Flora Samuel, Times Higher Education)
review (James Rossant, Hyperion)
interview with the author (Rorotoko)
Le Corbusier: When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People (1937–) [EN, ES]
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, city, new york, urbanism
“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)