Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Oxford University Press: New York, 1978.

This book is a must read.

Rem Koolhaas takes an irreverent look at the architectural history of Manhattan. He presents the city as world of the "fantastic" disguised as the pragmatic, terming it the Rosetta stone of the 20th Century. Unlike books which look at the architectural growth in Manhattan in terms of the skyscraper, Rem Koolhaas looks at it in terms of Coney Island (a "foetal" Manhattan), and as a world of illusion brought to life, but still lacking a sense of the real. The processes he proposes are not those of the invention of the elevator and steel frame construction but rather the cardboard of Coney Island mixed with the block grid that is Manhattan.

The block grid was conceived of in 1807, breaking the island into 2028 blocks, totally indifferent to topography. It was the imposition of the mental over the real that forms the basis of Manhattan. Like Coney Island, the form the city took overlaid on that grid shifted out of the real into the fantastic with the advent of the skyscraper. In Koolhaas's terms, the architecture of Manhattan became lobotomized. The external presenting the illusion of what a proper and monumental urban structure was, the internal being divorced entirely from the external and being only what it was, be it fantasy or the mundaneness of everyday life. Entering a building in Manhattan, even changing floors, could become an act of moving between worlds. The entire conception of the skyscraper was a shell housing layers of reality, each spanning an urban island of the city block, each layer virgin in relation to those around it.

What keeps Manhattan running, in his view, is congestion, a world constantly on the edge of total gridlock. The reason Le Corbusier could not conquer Manhattan is that his urban form removed the congestion. This congestion, in a realm divorced from reality, forces the metropolis ever upward into the speculative, into a world of towers filled with, built on, and peopled with human desires.

Some salient quotes:

Especially between 1890 and 1940 a new culture (the Machine Age?) selected Manhattan as a laboratory: a mythical island where the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture could be pursued as a collective experiment in which the entire city became a factory of man-made experience, where the real and the natural ceased to exist. [p.6]

Manhattan is an accumulation of disasters that never happen. [p.20]

Beyond a certain critical mass each structure becomes a monument. This category of monument presents a radical, morally traumatic break with the conventions of symbolism [...] it merely is itself. [p.81]

The sub-utopian fragments are all the more seductive for having no territorial ambitions beyond filling their interior allotments with a hyperdensity of private meanings. By leaving intact the illusions of a traditional urban landscape on the outside, this revolution insures its acceptance through its inconspicuousness. [p.87]

[...] a new routine that is, in a sense, a record of the crisis: a systemization of the concept of "lack of inspiration"; variations on the theme of "no content", founded on a process, a display of inhuman coordination that relies on frenzied synchronization, an exhilerating surrender of individuality to the automatism of a synthetic year-round rite of spring. [p.184]

Dali's 'discovery' of an anti-modern Manhattan has been strictly verbal, its conquest therefore complete. Without tampering with its physique he has recast the Metropolis as an anti-functional accumulation of atavistic monuments engaged in a process of continuous poetic reproduction. [p.224]

The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires. [p.242]