Iconic. Slick with smarm and courtly cliché, it’s a word we at New York Review of Architecture programmatically pooh-pooh. But Madelon Vriesendorp’s jacket for the original 1978 edition of Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York forces our hand. In this pomo cult image, a peeping 30 Rock catches the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in flagrante delicto, the delineator’s lubricious late surrealism elucidating the Dutchman’s “Retroactive Manifesto” for the city formerly known as New Amsterdam. Vriesendorp obligingly revisits the primal scene on our present cover, which finds NYRA’s mascot ménageing with Van Alen’s tower and the Statue of Liberty under a preparatory study for Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943), Piet’s primaries translated into startling black and white. Lady Liberty forgoes the pillow talk for some meta reading material, tipping the vignette into mise en abyme.
Delirious substituted a program for what New York should be with a description of what it already was: a “culture of congestion” in thrall to the stacked densities and infrastructural collisions maligned by the eggheads as failures of planning. On paper, its laissez-faire postmodernism is a strange inheritance for NYRA, which as of this writing—and against odds that would make Polymarket’s bookmakers blush—celebrates its fiftieth issue. Much of what is published in our pages, including those to follow, reflects an aspiration toward the collective provisions of democratic socialism and a sympathy, belated as it is, with modernism’s utopian imagination. Where Koolhaas suspended a rhetoric of improvement for one of attention, NYRA asks—attentively, even anxiously—what improvement might still mean today.
Sometimes, it might mean building nothing at all. In #50, Paul Goldberger and Mark Krotov debate the ambivalent achievement] of Foster + Partners’ $3 billion monument to Jamie Dimon at 270 Park Avenue. JPMorgan Chase’s harlequin corporate headquarters is the city’s buzziest new building in a decade. It also replaces a recently renovated (!) midcentury high-rise by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that once stood on the site, a loss that indexes the environmental and cultural costs embedded in the cycle of demolition and rebuilding that passes, with ever-diminishing persuasiveness, for progress.
Careful readers will recognize this line of argument from the criticism of Thomas de Monchaux, for whom the vast expenditures of energy embodied in any new construction—irrespective of its ballyhooed efficiencies or biophilic décor (vide Ann Manov’s WRECKING BALL in this issue)—amount to a catastrophic indictment of the building art. Reviewing two recent projects by Adjaye Associates, whose founder stepped out of the public eye following sexual assault allegations made against him in 2023, de Monchaux maintains that architecture cannot be extricated from the circumstances of its making; its professed improvements must be weighed against its procedural cruelties—to “places, to planets, to people.”
Preservation, if it is to preserve anything besides antiquarian fauxtopias for the elite, must extend beyond physical buildings to the systems that make a place livable. In her essay on Ditmas Park and its environs], Randle Browning dilates from a sagging Victorian on Ocean Avenue to the histories of exclusion and erasure that shaped this sylvan pocket of South Brooklyn, where affordability is unevenly distributed beneath the canopy of conservation. And in a warm and wonky CONVERSATION, urban planner Jonathan Tarleton and policy analyst Oksana Mironova untangle the city’s fragile safety net of social housing, from Mitchell-Lama co-ops to rent stabilization to public ownership. Tarleton and Mironova converge on a shared vision of homes as public goods rather than speculative assets, and on a cautious hope stirred by Mamdani’s young mayoralty.
You may have noticed that NYRA #50 brought company. To supplement our fiftieth edition, we invited writers, architects, and artists to collaborate on a wayward guide to New York, one that trades Chrysler’s spire and Dimon’s demesne for diamonds in the rough that make daily life in our difficult, at times deleterious New York nonetheless worth living. These excursions take the place of SHORTCUTS and ADDRESS A BUILDING in this issue; we invite you enjoy them under separate cover.