Delirious New York (1978) by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is subtitled a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, reading the borough's twentieth-century development as an unwritten theory of metropolitan life. Koolhaas argued that Manhattan's relentless grid, its skyscrapers and its sheer congestion produced a distinctive culture of congestion in which density generated programmatic invention. He celebrated buildings such as the Downtown Athletic Club and structures of Coney Island as expressions of this logic. The book treated the speculative, commercial city as a serious cultural and architectural subject.
It reframed density and bigness as creative and generative rather than as problems to be cured, challenging the prevailing anti-urban modernist suspicion of crowding. The argument shaped later debates on the large building and metropolitan form and helped launch Koolhaas's influential theoretical career.