Book excerpt: This book is a testament to the brilliant London-based Dutch artist who has made a unique contribution to the visual culture of architecture. Vriesendorp is best known as one of the co-founders of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in the early 1970s, and her paintings and drawings from this period (published in Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York, 1978) are widely acknowledged as beguiling and beautiful masterpieces. Images of Vriesendorp's idiosyncratic collection of drawings, paintings, postcards and paraphernalia are combined in this volume, alongside texts that illuminate her work. Charles Jencks ruminates on Vriesendorp's cosmology of symbols; the novelist and artist Douglas Coupland writes on the pathology of collecting; Beatriz Colomina re-treads the 'delirious' 1970s in New York; and Rem and Charlotte Koolhaas reframe the domestic environment that has been both the family home and Vriesendorp's studio archive for 30 years.