2019 Aperture Summer Open: Delirious Cities

The 2019 Aperture Summer Open theme, inspired by the 1978 manifesto Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas, asked photographers to submit photographs defining metropolitan life in the twenty-first century.

The graphic identity was based on an excerpt from the manifesto, in which Koolhaas talks about the organization of the city and his notion of “rigid chaos.” He notes that the layout of Manhattan’s two-dimensional grid helps to create order, and the buildings that rise from it in the three-dimensional space create a sense of freedom or disorder. In his words, “The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.”