Rem's books: From Delirious New York to a new Arab World

摘要

'Books are more important than buildings -without the four books of architecture no one would have cared about Palladio,' wrote Peter Eisenman in the 2009 Unpacking My Library exhibition.rnEisenman gets an acknowledgment in the endpapers of Rem Koolhaas' 1979 debut, Delirious New York, and the output of the Dutch journalist-turned-architect follows the sentiment of Eisenman's maxim.rnKoolhaas' first significant foray into architectural polemic posits New York as the 'arena for the terminal stage of Western civilisation'. Manhattan - an island defined by its 1807 division into a 2,028-block grid indifferent to topography - becomes 'the 20th century's Rosetta Stone' in his entertaining warts-and-all romp through the city's history.