Salvador Dalí in Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York

Abstract

The penultimate chapter of Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York (1978) begins with: ‘In the mid-thirties both Salvador Dali and Le Corbusier — they hate each other — visit New York for the first time’. Koolhaas inventively rewrites Dalí’s ‘paranoid critical method’, then announces in the part ‘Combat’ that Le Corbusier is diagnosed paranoid, followed in ‘Otherwordliness’, by the claim that architecture is inevitably the result of paranoid critical activity, and concrete is described as the method’s purest embodiment. Anyone familiar with Dalí’s writings would recognise Koolhaas’ choice of Le Corbusier as an opponent. In the 1920s, Dalí wrote admiringly of Le Corbusier, but in the 1950s Dalí wrote about Le Corbusier so critically that by the 60s it turned comically vicious. Dali advocated light, soft, and curved buildings, and found Le Corbusier’s concrete architecture horribly heavy, materially and metaphorically. When Koolhaas introduces the antagonism between Dalí and Le Corbusier in Delirious New York, no mention is made of Dalí’s remarks about concrete. Instead, concrete is Koolhaas’ choice as the exemplar of the paranoid critical method. Dalí wrote about his surrealist creative process — the paranoiac-critical method — in the 1930s, amid two theories of paranoia: constructionalist and anti-constructionalist. Dalí, along with Jacques Lacan, was resolutely anti-constructionalist. Neither of these terms has any currency in contemporary theories of paranoia, but Surrealism valued the mythos of the mad artist and these two theories of paranoia had artistic practices associated with them. By avoiding Dalí’s disdain for Le Corbusier’s concrete architecture, Koolhaas’ theory for an architectural surrealism of paranoid critical activity extends Dalí’s anti-constructionalist method into a distinctly new architectural surrealism.