Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

by Rem Koolhaas

  The Grid is, above all, a conceptual speculation.

  In spite of its apparent neutrality, it implies an intellectual program for the island: in its indifference to topography, to what exists, it claims the superiority of mental construction over reality.

  The plotting of its streets and blocks announces that the subjugation, if not obliteration, of nature is its true ambition.

  All blocks are the same; their equivalence invalidates, at once, all the systems of articulation and differentiation that have guided the design of traditional cities. The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan’s builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another.

  The Grid’s two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. 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.

  With its imposition, Manhattan is forever immunized against any (further) totalitarian intervention. In the single block—the largest possible area that can fall under architectural control—it develops a maximum unit of urbanistic Ego.

  Since there is no hope that larger parts of the island can ever be dominated by a single client or architect, each intention—each architectural ideology—has to be realized fully within the limitations of the block. Since Manhattan is finite and the number of its blocks forever fixed, the city cannot grow in any conventional manner.

  Its planning therefore can never describe a specific built configuration that is to remain static through the ages; it can only predict that whatever happens, it will have to happen somewhere within the 2,028 blocks of the Grid.

  It follows that one form of human occupancy can only be established at the expense of another. The city becomes a mosaic of episodes, each with its own particular life span, that contest each other through the medium of the Grid.

  IDOL

  In 1845 a model of the city is exhibited, first in the city itself, then as a traveling object to substantiate Manhattan’s growing self-idolatry.

  The “counterpart to the great Metropolis” is “a perfect facsimile of New York, representing every street, land, building, shed, park, fence, tree, and every other object in the city…. Over the model is a canopy of carved ornamental woodwork in Gothic architecture representing in the finest oil-painting the leading business establishments of the city… ”6

  The icons of religion are replaced by those of building.

  Architecture is Manhattan’s new religion.

  CARPET

  By 1850, the possibility that New York’s exploding population could engulf the remaining space in the Grid like a freak wave seems real. Urgent plans are made to reserve sites that are still available for parks, but “while we are discussing the subject the advancing population of the city is sweeping over them and covering them for our reach….”7

  In 1853 this danger is averted with the appointment of the Commissioners of Estimate and Assessment, who are to acquire and survey land for a park in a designated area between Fifth and Eighth avenues and 59th and 104th (later 110th) streets.

  Central Park is not only the major recreational facility of Manhattan but also the record of its progress: a taxidermic preservation of nature that exhibits forever the drama of culture outdistancing nature. Like the Grid, it is a colossal leap of faith; the contrast it describes—between the built and the unbuilt—hardly exists at the time of its creation.

  “The time will come when New York will be built up, when all the grading and filling will be done, and the picturesquely-varied, rocky formation of the island will have been converted into formations of rows and rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of erect buildings. There will be no suggestion left of its present varied surface, with the exception of a few acres contained in the park.

  Manipulation of nature: “Tree moving Machine…larger trees could be transplanted and the lag between planting and finished appearance reduced….”

  “Then the priceless value of the present picturesque outlines of the ground will be distinctly perceived, and its adaptability for its purpose more fully recognized. It therefore seems desirable to interfere with its easy, undulating outlines, and picturesque, rocky, scenery as little as possible, and, on the other hand, to endeavor rapidly, and by every legitimate means, to increase and judiciously develop these particularly individual and characteristic sources of landscape effects….”8

  “To interfere as little as possible,” but on the other hand “to increase and develop landscape effects”: if Central Park can be read as an operation of preservation, it is, even more, a series of manipulations and transformations performed on the nature “saved” by its designers. Its lakes are artificial, its trees (trans)planted, its accidents engineered, its incidents supported by an invisible infrastructure that controls their assembly. A catalogue of natural elements is taken from its original context, reconstituted and compressed into a system of nature that makes the rectilinearity of the Mall no more formal than the planned informality of the Ramble.

  Central Park is a synthetic Arcadian Carpet.

  Central Park, synthetic Arcadian Carpet grafted onto the Grid (plan c.1870).

  TOWER

  The inspiring example of London’s International Exhibition, held in 1851 in the Crystal Palace, triggers Manhattan’s ambition. Two years later, it has organized its own fair, staking a claim for its superiority. in almost every respect, over all other American cities. At this time, the city hardly extends north of 42nd Street—apart from the omnipresent Grid. Except near Wall Street it looks almost rural: single houses scattered on the grass-covered blocks. The fair, implanted on what will become Bryant Park, is marked by two colossal structures that completely overwhelm their surroundings, introducing a new scale into the island’s skyline, which they dominate easily. The first is a version of London’s Crystal Palace; but since the division into blocks precludes structures beyond a certain length, it is a cruciform whose intersection is topped by an enormous dome: “Its slender ribs seem inadequate to sustain its vast size and it presents the appearance of a balloon expanded and impatient for a flight into the far-off sky…. ”9

  Latting Observatory.

  The second, complementary structure is a tower on the other side of 42nd Street: the Latting Observatory, 350 feet high. “If we except the Tower of Babel, this may perhaps be called the World’s first Skyscraper….”10

  It is built of iron-braced timber, and its base accommodates shops. A steam elevator gives access to the first- and second-floor landings, where telescopes are installed.

  For the first time, Manhattan’s inhabitants can inspect their domain. To have a sense of the island as a whole is also to be aware of its limitations, the irrevocability of its containment.

  If this new consciousness limits the field of their ambition, it can only increase its intensity.

  Such inspections from above become a recurrent theme under

  Manhattanism; the geographical self-consciousness they generate is translated into spurts of collective energy, shared megalomaniac goals.

  SPHERE

  Manhattan’s Crystal Palace contains, like all early Exhibitions, an implausible juxtaposition of the demented production of useless Victorian items celebrating (now that machines can mimic the techniques of uniqueness) the democratization of the object; at the same time it is a Pandora’s box of genuinely new and revolutionary techniques and inventions, all of which eventually will be turned loose on the island even though they are strictly incompatible.

  For new modes of mass transportation alone, there are proposals for underground, on-grade and elevated systems, which—though in themselves rational—would, if applied simultaneously, utterly destroy each other’s logic.

  As yet contain
ed in the colossal cage of the dome, they will turn Manhattan into a Galapagos Island of new technologies, where a new chapter in the survival of the fittest, this time a battle among species of machines, is imminent.

  Among the exhibits in the sphere is one invention that above all others will change the face of Manhattan (and, to a lesser degree, of the world): the elevator.

  It is presented to the public as a theatrical spectacle.

  Elisha Otis, the inventor, mounts a platform that ascends—the major part, it seems, of the demonstration. But when it has reached its highest level, an assistant presents Otis with a dagger on a velvet cushion.

  Elisha Otis presents the elevator—anticlimax as denouement.

  The inventor takes the knife, seemingly to attack the crucial element of his own invention: the cable that has hoisted the platform upward and that now prevents its fall. Otis cuts the cable; it snaps.

  Nothing happens, to platform or inventor.

  Invisible safety catches—the essence of Otis’ brilliance—prevent the platform from rejoining the surface of the earth.

  Thus Otis introduces an invention in urban theatricality: the anticlimax as denouement, the non-event as triumph.

  Like the elevator, each technological invention is pregnant with a double image: contained in its success is the specter of its possible failure.

  The means of averting that phantom disaster are almost as important as the original invention itself.

  Otis has introduced a theme that will be a leitmotiv of the island’s future development: Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.

  Crystal Palace and Latting Observatory at first New York World’s Fair, 1853. Double image appearing in background: Trylon and Perisphere, theme exhibit of 1939 World’s Fair. At the beginning and the end of Manhattanism: needle and globe.

  CONTRAST

  The Latting Observatory and the dome of the Crystal Palace introduce an archetypal contrast that will appear and reappear throughout Manhattan’s history in ever-new incarnations.

  The needle and the globe represent the two extremes of Manhattan’s formal vocabulary and describe the outer limits of its architectural choices. The needle is the thinnest, least voluminous structure to mark a location within the Grid.

  It combines maximum physical impact with a negligible consumption of ground. It is essentially, a building without an interior.

  The globe is mathematically, the form that encloses the maximum interior volume with the least external skin. It has a promiscuous capacity to absorb objects, people, iconographies, symbolisms; it relates them through the mere fact of their coexistence in its interior. In many ways, the history of Manhattanism as a separate, identifiable architecture is a dialectic between these two forms, with the needle wanting to become a globe and the globe trying, from time to time, to turn into a needle—a cross-fertilization that results in a series of successful hybrids in which the needle’s capacity for attracting attention and its territorial modesty are matched with the consummate receptivity of the sphere.

  Location of Coney Island vis à vis Manhattan Toward the end of the 19th century, Manhattan’s new bridges and modern transportation technologies made Coney Island accessible to the masses. Visible on Coney: on the left, Sandy Hook, refuge for the criminal element of the Greater New York area; at right, the Synthetic Arcadia of the Grand Hotels; between them, the “middle zone” of the three great parks—an embryonic Manhattan.

  Coney Island: The Technology of the Fantastic

  The glare is everywhere, and nowhere a shadow.

  —Maxim Gorky, “Boredom”

  What a sight the poor make in the moonlight.

  —James Huneker, The New Cosmopolis

  Hell is very badly done.

  —Maxim Gorky, “Boredom”

  MODEL

  “Now, where the waste was…rise to the sky a thousand glittering towers and minarets, graceful, stately and imposing. The morning sun looks down on these as it might upon the magically realized dream of a poet or painter.

  “At night, the radiance of the millions of electric lights which glow at every point and line and curve of the great play city’s outlines lights up the sky and welcomes the home coming mariner thirty miles from the shore.”1

  Or:

  “With the advent of night a fantastic city of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky. Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning in fine, sensitive outline on the black background of the sky shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces and temples.

  “Golden gossamer threads tremble in the air. They intertwine in transparent flaming patterns, which flutter and melt away, in love with their own beauty mirrored in the waters.

  “Fabulous beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful, is this fiery scintillation.”2

  Coney Island around 1905: it is no coincidence that the countless “impressions of Coney Island”—products of a hopelessly obstinate desire to record and preserve a mirage can all be substituted not only for each other but also for the flood of later descriptions of Manhattan. At the junction of the 19th and 20th centuries, Coney Island is the incubator for Manhattan’s incipient themes and infant mythology. The strategies and mechanisms that later shape Manhattan are tested in the laboratory of Coney Island before they finally leap toward the larger island.

  Coney Island is a fetal Manhattan.

  “Where the waste was…”

  STRIP

  Coney Island is discovered one day before Manhattan - in 1609, by Hudson—a clitoral appendage at the mouth of New York’s natural harbor, a “strip of glistening sand, with the blue waves curling over its outer edge and the marsh creeks lazily lying at its back, tufted in summer by green sedge grass, frosted in winter by the pure white snow….” The Canarsie Indians, the original inhabitants of the peninsula, have named it Narrioch—“Place Without Shadows”—an early recognition that it is to be a stage for certain unnatural phenomena.

  In 1654 the Indian Guilaouch trades the peninsula, which he claims is his, for guns, gunpowder and beads in a scaled-down version of the “sale” of Manhattan. It then assumes a long sequence of names, none of which stick until it becomes famous for the unexplained density of konijnen (Dutch for “rabbits”).

  Between 1600 and 1800 the actual physical shape of Coney Island changes under the combined impact of human use and shifting sands, turning it, as if by design, into a miniature Manhattan.

  In 1750 a canal cutting the peninsula loose from the mainland is “the last touch in fashioning what is now Coney Island….”

  Coney Island: a clitoral appendage at the entrance to New York Harbor.

  CONNECTION

  In 1823 the Coney Island Bridge Company constructs “the first artificial connection between the mainland and the island,”3 allowing it to consummate its relationship with Manhattan, where humans have by now congregated in densities as unprecedented as that of Coney’s rabbits. Coney is the logical choice for Manhattan’s resort: the nearest zone of virgin nature that can counteract the enervations of urban civilization. A resort implies the presence, not too far away, of a reservoir of people existing under conditions that require them to escape occasionally to recover their equilibrium.

  Access must be carefully calculated: the channels from reservoir to resort must be wide enough to feed the resort with a continuous flow of visitors, yet narrow enough to keep a majority of urban inmates in place. Otherwise the reservoir will, engulf the resort. Coney Island can be reached by an increasing number of artificial connections, but not too easily; at least two consecutive modes of transport are required. Between 1823 and around 1860, as Manhattan changes from a city into a metropolis, the need for escape becomes more urgent. The cosmopolites who love Coney’s scenery and its isolation construct, on its eastern end—the part furthest from Manhattan—a civilized Arcadia
of large resort hotels full of brand-new 19th-century comforts, planted on unspoiled grounds that restore them to their senses.

  At the opposite end of the island, that same isolation attracts another community of fugitives: criminals, misfits, corrupt politicians, united by their common dislike for law and order. For them the island is unspoiled by the law.

  These two parties are now locked in an unspoken battle for the island—the threat of more corruption emanating from the western end competes with the puritanism of good taste in the east.

  TRACKS

  The battle becomes critical when the first railroad reaches the middle of the island in 1865, its tracks stopping dead at the surf line. The trains put the oceanfront finally within the reach of the new metropolitan masses; the beach becomes the finish line for a weekly exodus that has the urgency of a jailbreak.

  Like an army, the new visitors bring a parasitic infrastructure in their wake: bath houses (where the largest number can change in the smallest possible space in the shortest possible time), food supplies (1871: the hot dog is invented on Coney Island) and primitive accommodation (Peter Tilyou builds Surf House, a tavern/hot dog stand, next to the railroad’s abrupt terminus).