Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

In Delirious New York Rem Koolhaas celebrates the "chance-like" nature of city life: "The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape" "Koolhaas . . . defined the city as a collection of "red hot spots." As he himself has acknowledged, this approach had already been evident in the Japanese Metabolist Movement in the '60s and early '70s. A key aspect of architecture that Koolhaas interrogates is the "Program": with the rise of modernism in the 20th century the "Program" became the key theme of architectural design. The notion of the Program involves "an act to edit function and human activities" as the pretext of architectural design: epitomized in the maxim Form follows function, first popularized by architect Louis Sullivan at the beginning of the 20th century. The notion was first questioned in Delirious New York, in his analysis of high-rise architecture in Manhattan. An early design method derived from such thinking was "cross-programming", introducing unexpected functions in room programs, such as running tracks in skyscrapers. More recently, Koolhaas (unsuccessfully) proposed the inclusion of hospital units for the homeless into the Seattle Public Library project (2003). Remment Lucas "Rem" Koolhaas (born 17 November 1944) is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist, and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Koolhaas studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Cornell University. Koolhaas is the founding partner of OMA, and of its research-oriented counterpart AMO based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 2005, he co-founded Volume Magazine together with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman. In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize and in 2008, Time put him in their top 100 of The World's Most Influential People.