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…
