Rem Koolhaas
Jan 14, 2020
3 minutes
TEXT BY William Hanley
ILLUSTRATION BY Sam Kerr
a “starchitect”—before anyone called them starchitects—Rem Koolhaas made his mark as a theorist of the city. His 1978 book, , pointed out a fundamental irony of Manhattan: that its rational, officially imposed grid of streets and stacked cubes of apartments allowed, enabled, and even generated the teeming, unruly chaos of urban life that takes place inside its orderly framework. This wild, polemical celebration of New York, which he called a “retroactive manifesto for Manhattan,” positioned the metropolis as the defining
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