The lost history of the City of the Captive Globe Project. Architectural myths and a forgotten heroine

Abstract

In 1972, still a student, Rem Koolhaas moved to New York with artist and wife Madelon Vriesendorp. Here they started the research that would become the “Appendix: A Fictional Conclusion”, the final section of the book “Delirious New York - A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan”, where Koolhaas combined the ideas from the text to shape a fictional city, The City of the Captive Globe. At the same time, Madelon Vriesendorp was producing what would be her New York Series, a collection of paintings illustrating her impressions of the city, the most famous of which is Flagrant Delit, the iconic cover of the 1978 first edition of Delirious New York. The aim of this article is to explore the project The City of the Captive Globe, appearing in Delirious New York as the main illustration of the homonymous text, analysing the pictorial representation of the project while focusing on its story, in order to better understand the pro-cess that led to its drafting, who were the people involved, its meaning and to rise up again the question of its authorship.