Shortly after moving to New York I read (and re-read) Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York. He wrote it as a retroactive manifesto for the city that needed one and didn’t have one, but to me it reads like this really poetic and at times existential critique of the absurdity of NYC. The scale, the numbers and statistics, the unprecedented “grid”, why the city is the way it is, what lie beneath, and so on. Dave and I work in historic building restoration and getting to see the intricate inner-workings of how these old wooden structures are built is both deeply fascinating and horrifying.
