Chilean architect and Fulbright scholar Francisco Javier Rencoret published this 1991 visual essay through Princeton Architectural Press, employing over 70 paintings to construct a speculative narrative around New York City’s mythological foundations and urban development. The work draws formally from Madelon Vriesendorp’s surrealist architectural illustrations created for Rem Koolhaas, situating the city as a site of imaginative contestation rather than documentary record. Rencoret’s painterly approach transforms architectural history into a dreamlike, allegorical register, using axonometric projection and layered urban cartography to interrogate the relationship between visionary urban theory and material reality. The project engages with the post-structuralist architectural discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the lineage of ‘Delirious New York,’ extending that genealogy through a distinctly surrealist visual language that prioritizes enigma and mythic substrata over functional clarity.
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