Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas
Published 1978 · 320 pages · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Arts & Culture, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is Delirious New York to read?
Delirious New York scores 68 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Architectural and cultural theory vocabulary. Some neologisms.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Theoretical framework imposed retroactively on built reality.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with architectural history, cultural analysis, and theoretical invention.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Part history, part theory, part fiction. Freely mixes registers.
- Symbolic density: 28 out of 100
- Manhattan as organism. The grid as destiny. Congestion as culture.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Deadpan wit throughout. Celebrates what critics deplore.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- A 'retroactive manifesto' that describes rather than prescribes.
- Structural complexity: 32 out of 100
- Four sections mixing historical case studies with theoretical invention.
How Delirious New York is regarded
Delirious New York holds a literary regard score of 68 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.