In a high-rise New York apartment with a wide window surveying the Manhattan grid below, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings are in bed together. The Chrysler melts in a silvery swoon, while the beacon atop the Empire State Building glows fiery red. On the bedside table, the Statue of Liberty's arm holds up a torch suggesting more passion to come. But the lovers have been caught at it: at the door stands the forbidding RCA Building, which has left its usual station at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to witness this scene.
Flagrant Délit and Delirious New York
Madelon Vriesendorp's 1975 drawing Flagrant Délit – French for 'caught in the act' – appears twice in her exhibition Mind Games: as a standalone print and as the cover of Delirious New York, the 1978 book by her ex-husband Rem Koolhaas. The book is both a surreal history of New York and a subversive manifesto for a new kind of modern architecture. Vriesendorp, an architectural cartoonist or cartoonist architect, won the 2025 Soane Medal for furthering public understanding of architecture, and this show celebrates her work, which began with skyscrapers copulating.
From OMA to Surreal Skyscrapers
In 1975, Vriesendorp co-founded OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture) with Koolhaas and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis. Today, OMA is a leading global architectural firm responsible for projects like Euralille and the Beverly Hills Prada Store. In the 1970s, OMA produced provocative, unbuilt projects, and Vriesendorp's cheeky drawings gave their radical vision a comedic form. In another sexed-up dream, Manhattan becomes a bed floating among phallic half-sunken skyscrapers in a post-coital apocalyptic reverie.
The drawings and prints of New York dominating the first part of the show wittily expound the thesis of Delirious New York, which argues that Manhattan's chaotic, capitalist development produced more livable, psychically satisfying architecture than the cold rational utopias of Le Corbusier. European modernists tried to discipline the future, but New York's architectural pirates built sensual modern structures as anarchic as medieval castles. Vriesendorp's cartoons delight in that: the Statue of Liberty sits sad and naked on a bed among modernist fragments, while the Chrysler and Empire State are in bed again, this time undisturbed.
Climate Crisis and Recycled Sculptures
While rampant skyscrapers are all very well, modernity has left a big cleaning bill as the climate gasps under its excesses. In the second part of the show, recent creations by Vriesendorp reveal an optimistic, witty approach to the climate crisis in sculptures made from recycled materials. Egg cartons become monster masks and plastic milk bottles become dragons. According to the exhibition notes, these works reflect her ongoing interest in transformation and play.
In a separate space adjacent to the central delirious lightwell of Soane's museum, Vriesendorp creates a surreal Freudian tableau from cardboard. Two people sit at a table playing a game in which they move 'symbolic objects' around a model room, while around them are large colourful versions of the same objects, including a stripy snake and patchy dog. It is a recreation of a mind game she likes to play with visitors and friends.
Comparisons with Surrealists and Private Jokes
Comparisons with the original surrealists are unfortunate. Vriesendorp's art is too relaxed to stir the unconscious, too rational to tap the irrational. At times, you feel you are overhearing private jokes between architects – if you haven't read Delirious New York, you may be nonplussed by all the high-rise rumpy-pumpy. And is it really that thrilling that she designed a book with postmodernist guru Charles Jencks, or has worked with a member of Turner-winning urban regeneration outfit Assemble?
Soane's Museum and the Legacy of Imagination
Still, no visit to this magical museum-cum-home in Lincoln's Inn Fields is ever wasted. The architectural visions Vriesendorp has illustrated all reject straight-lined purist modernism for building styles that rejoice in imagination and unreason. John Soane fought a similar battle: working in the Georgian age at the height of neoclassicism, he twisted this style into a melancholic poetry. When he designed a vast new Bank of England, he not only gave it the scale of an ancient Roman basilica but commissioned a painting of what it might look like in ruins far in the future.
Vriesendorp's erotic skyscrapers fit right into Soane's mirrored spaces. Her show is an intriguing postmodern footnote to his premodern wonderland. Madelon Vriesendorp: Mind Games is at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, until 20 September.
