Greed AKA New York Doom by Madelon Vriesendorp, 1973. Photograph: courtesy of the artist View image in fullscreen Greed AKA New York Doom by Madelon Vriesendorp, 1973. Photograph: courtesy of the artist Art and design Review Madelon Vriesendorp review – sex-crazed visions of skyscrapers copulating Sir John Soane’s Museum, London The Empire State building is caught in bed with the Chrysler Building and a milk bottle turns into a dragon in the raunchy and cheekily provocative work of the Dutch artist and architect
Jonathan Jones Thu 16 Jul 2026 12.04 CEST Last modified on Thu 16 Jul 2026 12.05 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I n a high-rise New York apartment with a wide window that surveys the Manhattan grid below, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings are in bed together. The Chrysler melts in a silvery swoon, shagged out, while the beacon atop the Empire State Building still glows fiery red and on the bedside table the Statue of Liberty’s arm holds up a torch suggesting more passion to come. But oh no! The lovers have been caught at it. At the door is the forbidding RCA Building, which has left its usual station at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to see this!
Madelon Vriesendorp ’s 1975 skyscraper sex romp drawing Flagrant Délit – “caught in the act” – can be seen 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 that is both a surreal history of the city and a subversive manifesto for a new kind of modern architecture. Vriesendorp is what exactly? An architectural cartoonist? A cartoonist architect? She is certainly more than just a graphic prankster, and won the 2025 Soane Medal given to visionaries who have “furthered and enriched the public understanding of architecture”. Hence this show. And it all started with skyscrapers copulating.
View image in fullscreen A silvery swoon … two post-coital skyscrapers in Flagrant Delit, 1975. Photograph: courtesy of Madelon Vriesendorp In 1975, Vriesendorp co-founded OMA – the Office of Metropolitan Architecture – with Koolhaas and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis. Today, OMA is a leading global architectural firm responsible for Euralille and the Beverly Hills Prada Store : the ultra-urban sublime is OMA’s forte, though it doesn’t feel that sublime when you’re waiting for a train in Lille. Back in the 1970s, when all this was a dream, OMA produced provocative, unbuilt projects and Vriesendorp’s cheeky drawings gave their radical, ironic vision a suitably comedic form. In another of her sexed-up dreams, Manhattan itself becomes a bed floating among phallic half-sunken skyscrapers in a post-coital apocalyptic reverie.
The drawings and prints of New York that dominate the first part of this show wittily expound the thesis of Delirious New York, which argues that Manhattan’s chaotic, egregiously capitalist development in the 20th century produced a much more livable, lovable, 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 and rich as medieval castles, inviting fantasy. Vriesendorp’s cartoons delight in that. The Statue of Liberty sits sad and naked on a bed among modernist fragments, while elsewhere the Chrysler and Empire State are in bed again, this time undisturbed.
View image in fullscreen Cardboard figures play Critical Pursuit Home Analys…