Reviewed by Carrie Bayley
“Manhattan is the arena for the
terminal stage of western civilisation... a mountain range of evidence without
manifesto”, Koolhaas observes, and so begins his retroactive manifesto, a
scripted chronology of the stages of Manhattanism, its’ permutations and
lasting legacies; notably the culture of congestion, Manhattans own
“metropolitan urbanism” and revolutionary lifestyle. Through his optimistic
narrative “Delirious New York”, Koolhaas, a former screenwriter, sets about investigating
the underlying and ironic truths of Manhattan, from the first signs of
architecturally applicable technologies, through the great crash and to the
present day, 1978. Through a pragmatic approach in understanding external
factors and a series of case studies, he documents the reoccurring elements and
themes in New York’s development and decline that make it “a theatre of
progress” and “the capital of perpetual crisis”. This focuses in particular on
the skyscraper as a product of the physical manifestation of Manhattanism on
the grid, along with the relationship between this density-focused architecture
and the culture of congestion.
At a time where New York had gained
a reputation as “a graffiti-covered, crime-ridden relic of history”, Koolhaas,
then the recent founder of OMA and visiting lecturer at Eisenman’s Institute
for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, begins to assess and promote
what it took to make the capital of invention the ideal precedent and,
therefore, what it would take to regain its rightful place on the world stage.
He is reconstructing the “perfect Manhattan” so that it’s monumental successes
and failures become more evident and it is by selecting New York as the focus
of his first major work that Koolhaas sets a foundation for his career.
Split into five distinct “blocks”,
an anthology covering “Coney Island, The Skyscraper, Rockefeller Center …
Europeans ” and a fictional appendix, each with further component parts, the
book acknowledges its affiliation with the Manhattan grid as “a collection of
blocks whose proximity and juxtaposition reinforce their separate meanings”. In
1807-1811 “the final and conclusive” plan for Manhattan was made, resulting in
the 2028 blocks of the grid to which Koolhaas pays a particular critical focus,
labelling it an “artificial domain planned for nonexistent clients in
anticipation”, a negative symbol of the short-sightedness of commercial
interests with no regard for interaction between fragments or spontaneity. It
is with an ever-growing population in a “metropolis of rigid chaos” that the
skyscraper then becomes inevitable, forcing an upward extrusion of the grid to
maximise profit, often without regard for the art of designing buildings. With
the introduction of the 1916 zoning law comes a level of control on the cities
scale explosion, without being too restrictive and therefore unintentionally
providing a basis for intelligent architectural invention. “The metropolis
needs/deserves its own specialized architecture”. When, through his work and
with several other architects, Hugh Ferris investigates, but doesn’t solve, the
true issues of Manhattan, focusing on the unexplored potential of zoning law,
he famously creates the first concrete image of the “mega village” and later
the “Ferrisian Void”. “Manhattanism is conceived in Ferriss’ womb”.
From Manhatta to Manhattan, the
continuous experiment begins with its discovery by the Dutch in 1609, a link
with the Europeans that continues through the rise and fall of the enterprise.
“Manhattan is a theater of progress...the cyclical restatement of a single
theme: creation and destruction irrevocably interlocked”, a quote which applies
to many other scenarios throughout the text. An overview of Manhattans answer
to the Crystal Palace introduces the reader to invention as a public spectacle,
isolated from direct confrontation with reality. This is further explored in
the section “Coney island: the technology of the fantastic”, a resort for the
testing of ideas, social experimentation and surrealism in the form of reality.
“ A resort implies the presence, not too far away, of a reservoir of people
existing under conditions that require to escape occasionally to recover their
equilibrium” and to survive as a place offering contrast from the reality shortage
in the city, Coney contrasts the natural with the supernatural. To give an idea
of scale, the infrastructure and communications networks contained within Luna
Park are far superior and more energy consuming that most contemporary American
cities. When the centennial tower arrives “it also offers an additional
direction of escape: mass ascension”.
Through the accidental and planned
inventions of its three parks, infrastructure is created to meet the demands of
it’s overtaxed system and, becoming less popular the more people it attracts,
Coney island develops bizarre and outrageous technologies, concepts and urban
scenarios that eventually become applied in a normal context as the focus
shifts to Manhattan. This establishes an urbanism based on the technology of
the fantastic- defining completely new relationships between site, program,
form and technology. As it is sent crashing back to reality after fire, that
even its well-practised fire-fighter cast can’t extinguish, Coney meets its
downfall. More ironically, it is proposed that the land should be turned into a
public park, becoming a model for the modern Manhattan of grass, exactly what
it was providing an alternative to. But the precedent doesn’t work second time
around, the testing ground has to adapt with the times. Where Coney Island is
the testing ground for the skyscraper, Manhattan then continues to be a testing
ground for urbanism. And who is to argue that Manhattan wasn’t the inventor of
these things? If not, Koolhaas is very convincing.
The inception of the culture of
congestion and the technologies developed, notably the elevator and steel,
facilitate the rise of the Manhattan skyscraper, “born in instalments between
1900 and 1910”. This represents the meeting of three breakthroughs, “the
reproduction of the world”, “the annexation of the tower” and “the block
alone”, each defined separately by Koolhaas “before they were integrated into a
‘glorious whole’”. As the demand for office space rises in an emerging
metropolis with a restrictive grid, created there is a need for the production
of an unlimited number of virgin sites in a single location, each with it’s own
destiny outside of the control of the architect. Koolhaas describes the “ideal
performance of the skyscraper” in its initial stages as a concept, existing in
1909, as 84 disconnected virgin sites stacked on top of each other- “a new form
of unknowable urbanism”. As models of this descent manifest themselves within
the grid, so presents itself one of Manhattans most intense themes- “a city in
a building”. As the concept of the 100th floor approaches and the skyscraper
becomes even more the product of an architecture by economy and with it comes
what Koolhaas terms “Lobotomy”, that is, “less and less surface has to
represent more and more interior activity”, a container for undetermined
interior activity rather than the expression of that externally, a still
relevant scenario characterising today’s urban fabric. At the point where the
1916 zoning law is introduced, the culture of congestion becomes an enterprise,
an indication of the culture of the 21st century. “Congestion itself is the
essential condition for realising each of these metaphors in the reality of the
grid”.
Koolhaas explains a “summary of the
phases of Manhattans urbanism, featuring all the strategies, theorems,
paradigms and ambitions that sustain the inexorable progress of Manhattanism”.
Portrayed in the creation of the Waldorf Astoria hotel and the Empire State
building, “a skyscraper surpassing in height anything ever constructed by man”,
is the conversion from virgin site to skyscraper in 150 years, an example of
what he terms an auto monument. The problem at the beginning is simply that it
isn’t a skyscraper and should become one in order to reap the financial harvest
permitted by the 1916 law. There is no room for nostalgia. The Empire State is
the last manifestation of Manhattanism as pure and thoughtless process, the
climax of subconscious Manhattan and the first example of what was to come.
Through a description of the life
of the Rockefeller Center we begin to understand Koolhaas’ intentions. By this
point, he has introduced key characters and themes which are optimised in the
creation of the Rockefeller Center, a city within a city exemplifying the
financial viability of the skyscraper and representing congestion on all
possible levels. As a hybrid building, the building isn’t assigned a hierarchy,
nor does it follow a specific typology, but parts of the mountain are assigned
to necessary functions, what Koolhaas terms the “the vertical schism, which
creates the freedom to stack such disparate activities directly on top of each
other without any concern for their symbolic compatibility”. To fit a brief
“the center must combine the maximum of congestion with the maximum of light
and space”, an achievable target given the great depression of the 1930’s which
represented time to think, “an enforced break in the frenzy of production”, and
for the principals of the center to become more idealistic than commercial. It
is described as “a masterpiece without a genius”, a result of the work of the
associated architects, formed in part during the crash and proof for Koolhaas
of the advantages of architecture by committee. “There is at least one idea for
each of its 250million dollars”. “Rockefeller Center is the fulfilment of the
promise of Manhattan. All paradoxes have been resolved. From now on the
metropolis is perfect.”. It promises a significant contribution to the city
planning of an unfolding future.
The end is marked with the invasion
of the Europeans who come to “reclaim” Manhattan and adapt it to their own
needs. “A tourist returns from foreign unrecognisable” and so did the
skyscraper once it had been to Europe”. Through a bizarre cross fertilization
of misunderstood rhetoric, American pragmatism and European idealism have
exchanged ethos”. A particular emphasis on Dali and Le Corbusier represents
Koolhaas’ apparent aversion to Le Corbusier. Where Dali does not attempt to
tamper “with its physique”, Le Corbusier “proposes literally to destroy it” and
in doing so first attempts to disprove the existence of the city as machine
before he can create his own alternative where there is no place for the
technology of the fantastic only business, the result being the anti
skyscraper. After a “worldwide journey of paranoia” Corbusier brings the
Radiant city, a theoretical metropolis in search of location and the anti
Manhattan, to New York. But the scheme possesses no metaphor and by proposing
to literally solves congestion and kills it, so creating the urban non event
New York’s own planners have always avoided, a result of excluding of the
factors that have built the Ferissian mountain. In the late thirties
Manhattanism is waning. Post-war architecture is the accountants’ revenge on
pre-war businessmen’s dreams. The formula “technology + cardboard = reality”
created in the early days of Coney Island has retuned to haunt Manhattan, the
result being not “peeling white paint but disintegrating curtain walls of the
cheap skyscraper”. “Through its amnesia, Manhattan no longer supports an
infinite number of superimposed and unpredictable activates on a single site;
it has regressed back to the clarity and predictability of univalence- to the
known.”
In a fictional conclusion, Koolhaas
demonstrates a series of four ironic, speculative and hypothetical projects for
New York which encompass all the themes in the book and are “an interpretation
of the same material”. With the story of the pool, the last metaphor raises its
head, representing the new influx of designers escaping to the freedom of New
York but who will inevitably find it destroyed when they present themselves as
scriptwriters for the New York stage.
