KOOLHAAS URBANISM

Metropolis: The Culture of Congestion

 

Delirious New York: a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan chronicles the growth and development of the Metropolis through its purest example, New York City. Rem Koolhaas examines the forces at work in the world’s densest organization, arguing that such radical densification degrades the nature of reality, and that a city’s driving forces lie in the mechanisms for creating the blunt architectural devices of “fantasy” to alleviate the dismal realities of metropolitan compartmentalization and standardization and to entertain new possibilities. In his words, “Such an architecture not only creates the “sets” of everyday life, but it also defines its contents with all possible means and disciplines such as literature, psychology, etc. Through the magical arrangement of human activities on all possible levels, it writes a scenario for the scriptless Metropolitan extras.”

 

The vast, growing number of “scriptless Metropolitan extras,” coupled with the volatility and pace of culture in the era of the mega-city, give rise to a mechanism of urbanism, the Culture of Congestion, whose complexity cannot fully be comprehended by the architect or urban planner.