“Delirious New York is an attempt at developing a new form of the historiography of the city whose structural principle is montage. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project led the way in representing the material history of modernity on the basis of a montage of fragments. In the 1970s, when Delirious New York was conceived, the distrust in modernity’s “master narratives” (as Jean-François Lyotard called them in his seminal report on postmodernism first published in 1979) became a key philosophical issue. By basing a historiographical account of (architectural) modernity on the concept of montage rather than on linear narration, and by allowing the resulting image of the city to include anonymous structures, the “unconscious” products of capital alongside the conscious products of art, he undertook a critical reassessment of received modernist master narratives. Ironically, Koolhaas’s irreverent perspective went on to be installed as a new hegemonic discourse and methodology for the study of the contemporary city.”