Wright Auction

This carpet design was created after artist Madelon Vriesendorp's cover for the 1978 book Delirious New York by architect Rem Koolhaas — a “retroactive manifesto for Manhattan.” Koolhaas’ dense, idiosyncratic history of architecture and urban planning starts in 1850 in Coney Island and weaves its way through the “metropolis of the irrational,” detailing how Manhattan is the culmination of a “culture of congestion.” 

Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, cover by Madelon Vriesendorp
Vriesendorp's illustration, Flagrant délit (1975) is part of a larger series she did on anthropomorphized New York City architecture and shows the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, caught in bed together by the Rockefeller Center (present in the original drawing but not the book cover). Vriesendorp and her husband Koolhaas would go on to found the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). 

The present owner commissioned the carpet from Sigrid Wylach's studio, Unikate, with the intention of creating an edition of designs inspired by architecture. Ultimately, the project never made it past the prototype phase.