Delirious New York - A Retoactive Manifesto for Manhattan

Manhattan is the arena for the terminal stage of Western civilization. Through the simultaneous explosion of human density and invasion of new technologies, Manhattan became, from 1850 on, a mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a revolutionary lifestyle: the Culture of Congestion. First published in 1978, this is a polemical investigation of that Manhattan: it documents the symbiotic relationship between its mutant metropolitan culture and the unique architecture to which it gave rise - though this book argues that it often appears that the architecture generated the culture. This book exposes the consistency and coherence of the seemingly unrelated episodes of Manhattan's urbanism: it is an interpretation that establishes New York as the product of an unformed movement, Manhattanism, whose true programme was so outrageous that in order for it to be realised it could never be openly declared. Delirious New York is the retroactive manifesto of Manhattan's architectural enterprise: it untangles theories, tactics and dissimulations to establish the desires of Manhattan's collective unconscious as realities in the Grid...