Notes on Delirious New York I

Manhattanism — delerious urgency of isolation and automonument; enabled by and support by the grid, that is, brutal rationality which has become irrational — sanity which becomes, under repetition, insane.

The 21^st-century city — delirious and raucous expansion, growth for growth; expanded Manhattanism, perfected Manhattanism; Manhattan as a model to overtake in leaps and bounds. Manhattan delerium, amplified, without the grid. The automonument is no longer only its own island universe, it is as well the sum and description of the universe, its reality, its persuasion.

Architecture returns to urbanism — the slum, the tower, the park, the parkway...

Each contains and extends a sphere of bitter reality, crowded and clamouring.

The city of the new is Manhattanism without buildings. The façade is a fiction, is no longer useful ——— the façade becomes the street.

The grid is vestigial, happenstance, authored and atomic. No armature can withstand the 21^st-century city.

Douala = Dakar = Dubai = Shenzhen

The city is unique and transparent but also the same everywhere. The city cannot be tamed and resists architects as superfluous and petty creatures.

... They came to the city to find wealth and power, they travelled for years over dusty paths towards a city built in their dreams.

But when the horizon broke and they arrived at the cracking concrete rings imprinted in the ground they found that there was no city.

And so, finding no city, they resolved that the only logical thing to do was to construct one.

Not knowing what a city was, they build a dream of a city — houses, expensive storefronts empty of customers, ditto soaring glass apartment towers. They build an arcade and a swimming pool and a bowling alley and a boardwalk. They build a park in the business district and a skyscraper jutting out into the ocean. ...