Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

by Rem Koolhaas

  If this infrastructure supports a largely cardboard reality, that is exactly the point. Luna Park is the first manifestation of a curse that is to haunt the architectural profession for the rest of its life, the formula: technology + cardboard (or any other flimsy material) = reality.

  APPEARANCE

  Thompson has designed and built the appearance, the exterior, of a magic city. But most of his needles are too narrow to have an interior, not hollow enough to accommodate function. Like Tilyou he is finally unable or unwilling to use his private realm, with all its metaphorical potential, for the design, of culture. He is still an architectural Frankenstein whose talent for, creating the new far exceeds his ability to control its contents. Luna’s astronauts may be stranded on another planet, in a magic city, but they discover in the skyscraper forest the over-familiar instruments of pleasure—the Bunny Hug, the Burros, the Circus, the German Village, the Fall of Port Arthur, the Gates of Hell, the Great Train Robbery, the Whirl-the-Whirl.

  Luna Park suffers from the self-defeating laws that govern entertainment: it can only skirt the surface of myth, only hint at the anxieties accumulated in the collective unconscious.

  If there is a development beyond Steeplechase, it is in the explicit ambition of the new devices to turn the provincialism of the masses into cosmopolitanism.

  In the Tango, for instance: “The principle of the famous dances that have monopolized society has been utilized in the more modern rides. One need not be adept in the terpsichorean arts to be up-to-date. Convenient cars in which one comfortably reclines go through the motions of the dance.

  “They also wind through the wilds of South America, where the Tango originated…. This ride is a feast and a cure for all digestive ills….”11

  From the mere imitation of a single experience such as horseback riding, the Irresistible Synthetic has progressed to the fusion of previously separate categories. The Tango combines technical emancipation—a machine performing cultivated rituals; an educational experience—a journey through the tropical jungle; and a medical benefit.

  In the Fishing Pond, “live and mechanical” fish cohabit in a new round of Darwinian evolution.

  For the 1906 season, Thompson injects the myth of Babylon’s Hanging Gardens almost casually into Manhattan’s bloodstream, growing 160,000 plants on the roofs of his enclave. This green carpet introduces a strategy of “layering” Luna, of improving its performance by superimposing an artificial plane on its original surface: “By the erection of an extremely ingenious and picturesque roof garden that will be known as the Babylonian Hanging Gardens, the capacity of Luna Park has been increased seventy thousand, while at the same time these gardens will afford protection for an even greater number of people in case of rain.”12

  ROOF

  Tilyou, upstaged by Luna Park, retaliates with a gesture that anticipates the dilemmas of Modernism; if he encloses all his facilities in a single glass shed not unlike the Crystal Palace and advertises it as “the largest fireproof Amusement Building in the World,” the utilitarian iconography of the glass box clashes with the entertainment inside.

  The single roof drastically reduces the opportunities for individual facilities to display their own characters; now that they do not have to develop their own skins, they blur together like many molluscs in one gigantic shell in which the public is lost.

  Outside, the naked facades repress all signs of pleasure; only one of the mechanical horses jumps through the frigid membrane of this early curtain wall to escape the fun factory.

  LEAP

  After two years of staggering success, Thompson finally zeroes in on his real target: Manhattan.

  The isolation of Luna Park within Coney makes it an ideal architectural testing ground, but also insulates the results of any tests from direct confrontation with reality.

  In 1904 Thompson buys part of a Manhattan block on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets so that he can apply his multiple talents to a more critical test of his theories.

  DESK

  As Thompson plans the conquest of Manhattan from the confinement of his lunar Reich on Coney, Sen. William H. Reynolds plots the park to end all parks from behind his desk on the top floor of Manhattan’s brand-new Flatiron Building. It is to be the conclusion of a sequence that has begun with Steeplechase and Luna.

  Sen. William H. Reynolds—real-estate promoter and president of Dreamland.

  Reynolds is a former Republican state senator and real-estate promoter, “always promoting himself into trouble”;13 after rejecting “Wonderland” as too inexact, he chooses the name “Dreamland” for his venture.

  The triad of personalities and professions that Tilyou, Thompson and Reynolds represent—amusement expert/professional architect/developer-politician—is reflected in the character of the three parks:

  Steeplechase, where the park format is invented almost by accident under the pressure of a hysterical demand for entertainment;

  Luna, where this format is invested with thematic and architectural coherence; and finally

  Dreamland, where the preceding breakthroughs are elevated to an ideological plane by a professional politician.

  Reynolds realizes that to succeed, Dreamland must transcend its compromised origins and become a post-proletarian park, the first time in the History of Coney Island Amusement that an effort has been made to provide a place of Amusement that appeals to all classes.”14

  Reynolds lifts many of Dreamland’s components from the typology of pleasure established by its predecessors but arranges them in a single programmatic composition in which the presence of each attraction is indispensable to the impact of the others.

  Metaphoric entrance to Dreamland—entire park is “underwater.”

  Dreamland is located on the sea. Instead of the shapeless pond or would-be lagoon that is the center of Luna, Dreamland is planned around an actual inlet of the Atlantic, a genuine reservoir, of the Oceanic with its well-tested catalytic potential to trigger fantasies. Where Luna insists on its otherworldliness by claiming an outrageous alien location, Dreamland relies on a more subliminal and plausible dissociation: its entrance porches are underneath gigantic plaster-of-paris ships under full sail, so that metaphorically the surface of the entire park is “underwater,” an Atlantis found before it has ever been lost.

  This is only one of the strategies Senator Reynolds employs to exclude reality from his state. In a flash-forward to the formal policies of Modernism, he chooses to identify his terrain by the absence of color. In contrast to the garishness of the two other parks, the whole of Dreamland is painted snow white, thus laundering whatever concepts it has borrowed through a graphic process of purification.

  CARTOGRAPHY

  According to an intuitive cartography of the subconscious, Reynolds arranges 15 facilities around his lagoon in a Beaux-Arts horseshoe and connects them with a completely even supersurface that flows from one facility to the next without a single step, threshold or other articulation—an architectural approximation of the stream of consciousness.

  All the walks are level, or inclined. The park being so laid out that there is no possibility of congestion of the crowds, 250,000 people can see everything and move around without fear of congestion.”

  Scattered across this Wonderpavement are small boys selling popcorn and peanuts, dressed as Mephistopheles to stress the Faustian nature of Dreamland’s bargain. They constitute a proto-Dadaist army: every morning their supervisor, Marie Dressler, the famous Broadway actress, instructs them in “nonsense”—meaningless, enigmatic jokes and slogans that will sow uncertainty in the crowds throughout the day.

  There is no plan left of Dreamland; what follows is a reconstruction based on the best available evidence.

  Plan of Dreamland.

  1. Steel Pier

  2. Shoot-the-Chutes leading into Lagoon

  3
. Ballroom

  4. Lilliputia

  5. Fall of Pompeii

  6. Ride in a Submarine

  7. Incubator Building

  8. End of the World

  9. Circus

  10. Creation

  11. Flight Over Manhattan

  12. Canals of Venice

  13. Coasting Through Switzerland

  14. Fighting the Flames

  15. Japanese Teahouse with Santos Dumont Airship No. 9

  16. Leap Frog Railway

  17. Beacon Tower

  1. Dreamland’s steel pier, projecting half a mile into the ocean, is two stories high, with broad walks for 60,000 people. An excursion steamer leaves Manhattan’s Battery every hour, so that Dreamland can be visited without setting foot on Coney.

  2.The final manifestation of the Shoot-the-Chutes: “The largest ever built…Two boats will descend side by side, and a moving staircase will take…7,000 people an hour to the top….”15

  Located for the first time on the main axis of a park, the Chutes reinforce Dreamland’s underwater metaphor; its toboggans are the perfect vehicles for descent into a world below the world.

  3.Straddling the arrival pier is “the largest ballroom in the World” (25,000 square feet), a space so enormous that the intimate patterns of traditional ballroom dancing become meaningless.

  In the technological frenzy of the time, the natural movement of the human body appears slow and clumsy. Roller skates are introduced into the delicate formal textures of the ballroom. Their speed and curvilinear trajectories strain the original conventions beyond the breaking point, atomize the dancers and create fresh and random rhythms of coupling and uncoupling between the sexes.

  Tracing its own abstract course through this pandemonium, oblivious to the movements of the dancers, is an independent architectural satellite, “a novel contrivance consisting of a motor propelled platform [that] is run out on the floor with the [orchestra and] singers on it so that the entertainment can be enjoyed by everyone.”16 This platform is the harbinger of a truly mobile architecture, a generation of self-propelled tectonic satellites that can be summoned to any location on the globe to perform their particular functions.

  View of Lilliputia—parliament in background.

  4. Lilliputia, the Midget City: if Dreamland is a laboratory for Manhattan, Midget City is a laboratory for Dreamland. Three hundred midgets who had been scattered across the continent as attractions at World’s Fairs are offered a permanent experimental community here “a bit of old Nuremberg in the fifteenth century.”

  Since the scale of Midget City is half the scale of the real world, the cost of building this cardboard utopia is, at least theoretically, quartered, so that extravagant architectural effects can be tested cheaply. The midgets of Dreamland have their own parliament, their own beach complete with midget lifeguard and “a miniature Midget City Fire Department responding [every hour] to a false alarm”—effective reminder of man’s existential futility.

  But the true spectacle of Midget City is social experimentation.

  “Aristocratic” midgets in deceptive pose: the institutionalization of misbehavior.

  Within the walls of the midget capital, the laws of conventional morality are systematically ignored, a fact advertised to attract visitors. Promiscuity, homosexuality, nymphomania and so on are encouraged and flaunted: marriages collapse almost as soon as they are celebrated; 80 percent of newborn babies are illegitimate. To increase the frisson induced by this organized anarchy, the midgets are showered with aristocratic titles, highlighting the gap between implied and actual behavior.

  Midget City represents Reynolds’ institutionalization of misbehavior, a continuing vicarious experience for a society preparing to shed the remnants of Victorianism.

  Fall of Pompeii—“new inventions which have Just been put into practical effect.”

  5. The Fall of Pompeii is the perfectionist culmination of a series of simulated disasters that have apparently become a psychological addiction for the metropolitan public. In a single day on Coney Island it is possible to “experience” the San Francisco earthquake, the burnings of Rome and Moscow, various naval battles, episodes from the Boer War, the Galveston Flood and (inside a Classical Greek temple decorated with a fresco of a dormant volcano) the eruption of Vesuvius, realized “with scenic and mechanical equipment coupled with a most extraordinary electric display…new inventions which have just been put into practical effect.”17

  Each nightmare exorcised in Dreamland is a disaster averted in Manhattan.

  6.Simulated ride in a submarine—and confrontation with “the inhabitants of the deep.”

  7. The Incubator Building: here most of the premature babies, of the Greater New York area are collected and nursed to health in incubator facilities superior to those of any hospital at the time, in a benevolent variation of the Frankenstein theme. To soften the radicalism of an enterprise that deals openly with the issue of life, and death, the exterior of the building is disguised as “an old German Farmhouse,” on its roof “a stork overlooking a nest of cherubs” old mythology sanctioning new technology.

  “Preemies” in incubator—the creation of a private race.

  Inside is an ultra-modern hospital divided into two parts, “a large clean room where almost motionless prematures doze in incubators” 18and a nursery for the “incubator graduates” who have survived the first critical weeks of existence.

  “As a scientific demonstration for the nurture of feeble infantile life, it is…a practical, educational life-saving station….”19

  Martin Arthur Couney, the first pediatrician in Paris, tries to establish his incubator institute there in the 1890s, but that project is aborted by medical conservatism. Convinced that his invention is an essential contribution to Progress, he exhibits his Kinderbrut-Anstalt (“Baby-Hatching Apparatus”) at the International Exhibition in Berlin in 1896. Follows the familiar odyssey of a progressive idea/exhibit across the globe—to Rio de Janeiro, then Moscow—with Manhattan as its inevitable destination.

  Only in the New Metropolis can Couney find and exploit the confluence of proper conditions: a limitless supply of “preemies”, a passion for technology and, especially in Coney Island’s middle zone—premature Manhattan—ideological sympathy.

  Couney’s installation gives the Irresistible Synthetic a new dimension, in which it directly affects the fate of human beings.

  In the preemies Dreamland nurtures a private race whose graduates celebrate their survival in a yearly Dreamland reunion sponsored by Reynolds.

  8, 9, 10. By the turn of the century it is evident that creation and destruction are the poles defining the field of Manhattan’s abrasive culture; three separate spectacles show this awareness.

  10. The Blue Dome of Creation, “Largest Dome in the World,” represents the universe. “The visitor to this illusion glides backwards through sixty centuries in a grotesque craft along a water canal encircling the dome for a distance of one thousand feet. A moving panorama of the centuries is passed until the grand spectacular and dramatic climax, the portrayal of the actual Creation, is reached…. The waters part, the earth arises, inanimate and human life appear.”20

  Creation.

  8. Creation’s mirror-image is the “End of the World—according to the Dream of Dante.” In Dreamland, only 150 feet separate Beginning and End.

  9. The Circus, featuring the “greatest aggregation of educated animals on earth,” acts as a buffer in between.

  The three spectacles unfold simultaneously in apparent independence, but their stages are connected by underground passages so that the casts, human and animal, can shuttle freely between them. An exit from one performance allows reappearance seconds later in another, and so on.

  The three theaters—architecturally separate on the
surface—form, through invisible connections, one histrionic cluster, prototype of a multiple play with a single cast. The subterranean traffic introduces a new model of theatrical economy where an infinite number of simultaneous performances can be given by a single rotating cast, each play both isolated from and intertwined with all the others.

  Reynolds’ triple arena is thus a precise metaphor of life in the Metropolis, whose inhabitants are a single cast performing an infinite number of plays.

  11. A simulated flight over Manhattan, before the first airplane has ever flown.

  12.The Canals of Venice is a gigantic model of Venice inside a reduced version of the Ducal Palace, the largest building in Dreamland. Inside it is night, “with the soft moonlight typical of the city of‘ Water Streets’…accomplished by a newly invented electrical device.”

  “Real gondolas carry the visitors through a Grand Canal reproduced with faithful regard for detail” The miniature palace is an architectural compression chamber: “all the most famous buildings are here reproduced…on 54,000 square feet of canvas” mounted in receding planes on both sides of the Grand Canal.

  The Canals of Venice.

  Life in Venice is simulated too. “All along the line of progress [of the gondolas] are the natives of the city engaged in their various occupations, coming and going just as the traveler would find them in a real city… ”21