In 1972 a young Dutch architect with a Cornell University grant moved to New York, joined a postcard collectors’ club and started collecting magazines, books and cards about Manhattan. Six years later that archive became Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (Oxford University Press, 1978, 320 pages). Usually a manifesto comes first and the city follows. Rem Koolhaas did the reverse: he took the Manhattan built between 1850 and 1960 and wrote its theory afterwards.

According to the book’s Wikipedia entry, the first drafts go back to ‘The Surface’, a 1969 manifesto Koolhaas wrote at the Architectural Association in London. In New York he joined the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. In a 1993 interview with the critic Cynthia Davidson, Koolhaas said the book was meant as a written foundation to work from as an architect, before he started out as one. His first built design came in 1985. Research came first and practice second, which is why PAZ’s own library lists the book under architecture as research.

The system under the delirium

If you read it as a systems diagram, Manhattanism has three layers:

• Protocol: the 1811 Commissioners’ grid. Its identical blocks let each lot be an independent experiment inside a fixed frame.
• Transport: Elisha Otis’s safety elevator and the steel frame. Together they freed every floor from the ground and from the floor below.
• Application: the skyscraper as a stack of unrelated programmes. The section of the Downtown Athletic Club reads like a list of very different lives sharing one core.

Coney Island’s Luna Park and Dreamland were the test bench. Those technologies ran there as fantasy before they ran in Midtown as real estate. The book calls the result the Culture of Congestion: density is not a problem to cure but the product the whole machine was built to make.

The book has more authors than the one on its spine. In 1975 Madelon Vriesendorp co-founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in London with Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis and Zoe Zenghelis. She also painted the first-edition cover, Flagrant Délit. It shows the Chrysler and Empire State buildings in bed, interrupted by 30 Rockefeller Plaza, with the grid visible through the window. According to Archinect’s 2019 profile, she is ‘architecture’s lost heroine’. Nigel Smith, Donald Chong, Bob Gundu, Chris Rowat and Nazik Tahri made the drawings. Behind all of them are the unnamed printers and photographers of a century of postcards. When you cite the book, name these people too.

←TODAY: The book was reprinted in 1994, 1997, 2005 and 2014 (ISBN 978-1885254009) with the text unchanged, and it still shapes how offices argue about density.
→3012: Zurich-3012 publishes a dependency graph for every stacked district: Koolhaas’s section, with lifts, risers and cooling drawn as the links between floors.
Fulcrum: Congestion stays a culture only while the shared core keeps working. Looking both back and forward shows that the core is what you are really designing.

From Manhattan to a Zürich Wettbewerb

Take a 12-person studio in Zürich working on a mixed-use Wettbewerb. It gets a site plan, a zoning floor-area ratio, and SIA 416 for measuring its areas. Those numbers tell the jury how much floor area there is. They say nothing about which programmes share a core, and that was the question Koolhaas asked of every Manhattan section.

If ten programmes share one lift-and-riser core, that core is the building’s single point of failure. When the lifts stop, congestion stops being a culture and turns into a queue.

Looking back from the late 2070s, the pattern is clear. The dense mixed-use buildings that aged well were the ones where someone drew the dependency graph early. That graph covered lifts, risers, cooling, power, and the one technician who knew how the controls really worked.

Atelier: Offices that use AI tools to generate massing options now get volume quickly but learn about the site slowly, because the model has read the zoning table and not the place. Koolhaas’s order still works as an office rule: archive the site before you design. Monday move: before anyone opens Archicad, have one person collect 30 historical images of your competition site from the ETH Library image archive and pin them to the project wall.

Hack: Read your competition model the way Koolhaas read the Downtown Athletic Club: storey by storey, as a list of programmes stacked on one core. Archicad exports zones as IfcSpace objects under each IfcBuildingStorey. IfcOpenShell, the open-source IFC library started by Thomas Krijnen and maintained by volunteers, can walk that structure in five lines:

import ifcopenshell
m = ifcopenshell.open('competition.ifc')
for st in sorted(m.by_type('IfcBuildingStorey'), key=lambda s: s.Elevation or 0):
    uses = {str(sp.LongName or sp.Name) for r in st.IsDecomposedBy for sp in r.RelatedObjects if sp.is_a('IfcSpace')}
    print(st.Name, len(uses), sorted(uses))

The number of uses on each storey is your congestion profile. A column of 1s means a stacked office block. A column of 3s and 4s on one core is a Koolhaas section, and it shows you which core needs a second lift and a backup riser before the jury asks.

Open the IFC for the scheme on your desk today, run the count, and draw the core that all those programmes depend on.

Source: en.wikipedia.org