Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

by Rem Koolhaas

  —Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Demons

  We take from you what we need and we hurl back in your face what we do not need.

  Stone by stone we shall remove the Alhambra, the Kremlin and the Louvre and build them anew on the banks of the Hudson.

  —Benjamin de Casseres, Mirrors of New York

  The Frontier in the Sky

  The Manhattan Skyscraper is born in installments between 1900 and 1910. It represents the fortuitous meeting of three distinct urbanistic breakthroughs that, after relatively independent lives, converge to form a single mechanism: the reproduction of the World; the annexation of the Tower; the block alone.

  To understand the promise and potential of the New York Skyscraper (as distinct from the reality of its now common performance), it is necessary to define these three architectural mutations separately, before they were integrated into a “glorious whole” by the builders of Manhattan.

  1. THE REPRODUCTION OF THE WORLD

  In the era of the staircase all floors above the second were considered unfit for commercial purposes, and all those above the fifth, uninhabitable.

  Since the 1870s in Manhattan, the elevator has been the great emancipator of all horizontal surfaces above the ground floor.

  Otis’ apparatus recovers the uncounted planes that have been floating in the thin air of speculation and reveals their superiority in a metropolitan paradox: the greater the distance from the earth, the closer the communication with what remains of nature (i.e., light and air).

  The elevator is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy: the further it goes up, the more undesirable the circumstances it leaves behind.

  It also establishes a direct relationship between repetition and architectural quality: the greater the number of floors stacked around the shaft, the more spontaneously they congeal into a single form. The elevator generates the first aesthetic based on the absence of articulation.

  In the early 1880s the elevator meets the steel frame, able to support the newly discovered territories without itself taking up space.

  Through the mutual reinforcement of these two breakthroughs, any given site can now be multiplied ad infinitum to produce the proliferation of floor space called Skyscraper.

  THEOREM

  By 1909 the promised rebirth of the world, as announced by the Globe Tower, reaches Manhattan in the form of a cartoon that is actually a theorem that describes the ideal performance of the Skyscraper: a slender steel structure supports 84 horizontal planes, all the size of the original plot.

  Each of these artificial levels is treated as a virgin site as if the others did not exist, to establish a strictly private realm around a single country house and its attendant facilities, stable, servants’ cottages, etc. Villas on the 84 platforms display a range of social aspiration from the rustic to the palatial; emphatic permutations of their architectural styles, variations in gardens, gazebos, and so on, create at each elevator stop a different lifestyle and thus an implied ideology, all supported with complete neutrality by the rack.

  “THE COSMOPOLIS OF THE FUTURE. A weird thought of the frenzied heart of the world in later times, incessantly crowding the possibilities of aerial and inter-terrestrial construction, when the wonders of 1908…will be far out‑done, and the 1,000 foot structure realized; now nearly a million people do business here each day; by 1930 it is estimated the number will be doubled, necessitating tiers of sidewalks, with elevated lines and new creations to supplement subway and surface cars, with bridges between the structural heights. Airships, too, may connect us with all the world. What will posterity develop?” (Published by Moses King, rendered by Harry M. Petit.)

  The “life” inside the building is correspondingly fractured: on level 82 a donkey shrinks back from the void, on 81 a cosmopolitan couple hails an airplane. Incidents on the floors are so brutally disjointed that they cannot conceivably be part of a single scenario. The disconnectedness of the aerial plots seemingly conflicts with the fact that together, they add up to a single building. The diagram strongly suggests even that the structure is a whole exactly to the extent that the individuality of the platforms is preserved and exploited, that its success should be measured by the degree to which the structure frames their coexistence without interfering with their destinies, The building becomes a stack of individual privacies. Only five of the 84 platforms are visible; lower in the clouds other activities occupy remaining plots; the use of each, platform can never be known in advance of its construction. Villas may go up and collapse, other facilities may replace them, but that will not affect the framework.

  In terms of urbanism, this indeterminacy means that a particular site can no longer be matched with any single predetermined purpose.

  From now on each metropolitan lot accommodates—in theory at least—an unforeseeable and unstable combination of simultaneous activities, which makes architecture less an act of foresight than before and planning an act of only limited prediction.

  It has become impossible to “plot” culture.

  The fact that the 1909 “project” is published in the old Life,1 a popular magazine, and drawn by a cartoonist—while the architectural magazines of the time are still devoted to Beaux-Arts—suggests that early in the century “the people” intuit the promise of the Skyscraper more profoundly than Manhattan’s architects, that there exists a subterranean collective dialogue about the new form from which the official architect is excluded.

  1909 theorem: the Skyscraper as utopian device for the production of unlimited numbers of virgin sites on a single metropolitan location.

  ALIBIS

  The skeleton of the 1909 theorem postulates the Manhattan Skyscraper as a utopian formula for the unlimited creation of virgin sites on a single urban location.

  Since each of these sites is to meet its own particular programmatic destiny—beyond the architect’s control—the Skyscraper is the instrument of a new form of unknowable urbanism. In spite of its physical solidity, the Skyscraper is the great metropolitan destabilizer: it promises perpetual programmatic instability.

  The subversiveness of the Skyscraper’s true nature—the ultimate unpredictability of its performance—is inadmissible to its own makers; their campaign to implant the new giants within the Grid therefore proceeds in a climate of dissimulation, if not self-imposed unconsciousness. From the supposedly insatiable demands of “business” and from the fact that Manhattan is an island, the builders construct the twin alibis that lend the Skyscraper the legitimacy of being inevitable.

  “The situation of [Manhattan’s] financial district with rivers on either side forbidding lateral expansion has encouraged architectural and engineering skill to find room aloft for the vast interests that demand office space in the heart of the New World.”2 In other words: Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

  CAMOUFLAGE

  To support the alibi of “business,” the incipient tradition of Fantastic Technology is disguised as pragmatic technology. The paraphernalia of illusion that have just subverted Coney Island’s nature into an artificial paradise—electricity, air-conditioning, tubes, telegraphs, tracks and elevators—reappear in Manhattan as paraphernalia of efficiency to convert raw space into office suites. Suppressing their irrational potential, they now become merely the agents of banal changes such as improving illumination levels, temperature, humidity, communications, etc., all to facilitate the processes of business. But as a spectral alternative, the diversity of the 84 platforms of the 1909 Skyscraper holds out the promise that all this business is only a phase, a provisional occupation that anticipates the Skyscraper’s conquest by other forms of culture, floor by floor if necessary. Then the man-made territories of the frontier in the sky could be settled by the Irresistible Synthetic to establish alternative realities on any level.
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  “I am business.

  “I am Profit and Loss.

  “I am Beauty come into the Hell of the Practical.”3

  Such is the lament of the Skyscraper in its pragmatic camouflage.

  TRIUMPH

  In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.

  Flatiron (Fuller) Building, 1902, 22 stories (Daniel Burnham, architect).

  • In 1902 the Flatiron Building is a model of such sheer multiplication—300 feet of upward extrusion—nothing more than 22 times its triangular site, made accessible by six elevators. Only its photogenic razor-blade elevation reveals it as the mutation it is: the earth reproducing itself. For seven years “the most famous building in the world,” it is the first icon of the double life of utopia.

  World Tower Building, 1915, 30 stories (Edward West, “builder, and owner”).

  • At 40 West 40th Street the World Tower Building repeats its site 30 times, “one of the highest buildings on so small a plot.”4 As an image, it is evidence of the revolutionary quality of the architecture of sheer territorial multiplication: it looks impossible, but it exists.

  Benenson (City Investing) Building, 1908 (Francis H. Kimball, architect). Irregular plot extruded to a height of 480 feet, “13 acres of floor space, and room for 6,000 tenants….”

  • The builders of the Benenson (City Investing) Building multiply their lot 34 times. The site they extrude is irregular in plan; the building they generate therefore even more arbitrary. This flawed shape is compensated for by the perfection of the interior: The lobby…is finished in solid marble, 30 to 50 feet wide and 40 feet high [and] extends [the] entire length of the Building, a full block….”5

  Through volume alone, life inside the Skyscraper is involved in a hostile relationship with life outside: the lobby competes with the street, presenting a linear display of the building’s pretensions and seductions, marked by those frequent points of ascent—the elevators—that will transport the visitor even further into the building’s subjectivity.

  Equitable Building, 1915, 39 stories “straight up…. The most valuable Office Building in the World—up until 1931….” (E. R. Graham, architect.)

  • In 1915 the Equitable Building repeats its block 39 times, “straight up,” as it boasts. Its lobby is a sybaritic arcade lined with social facilities such as shops, bars, etc. The surrounding streets are deserted. The higher the Skyscraper goes, the harder it becomes to suppress its latent revolutionary ambition; when the Equitable is completed its true nature stuns even its builders. “For a while our 1,200,000 square feet of rentable area seemed almost like a new continent, so vast and vacant were its many floors….”6

  More than the sum of its floors, the Equitable is promoted as a “City in Itself, housing 16,000 souls.”’7

  That is a prophetic claim that unleashes one of Manhattanism’s most insistent themes: from now on each new building of the mutant kind strives to be “a City within a City.” This truculent ambition makes the Metropolis a collection of architectural city-states, all potentially at war with each other.

  MODEL

  By 1910 the process of territorial multiplication has become inexorable. The entire Wall Street area is on its way to a grotesque saturation point of total extrusion where “eventually, the only space not occupied by enormous buildings in Lower Manhattan would be the streets….” There is no manifesto, no architectural debate, no doctrine, no law, no planning, no ideology, no theory; there is only—Skyscraper.

  By 1911 the Skyscraper reaches the conceptual barrier of the 100th floor; “when Real Estate brokers shall have found a suitable City Block…the men and the millions will be ready… ”8

  A coalition of draftsmen, led by Theodore Starrett—member of the construction dynasty already responsible for half Manhattan’s Skyscrapers (and which intends to remain in the advance guard of territorial reproduction)—”is working out the plans for the 100-story building….” Work out is the right verb; there is no “design,” only the extrapolation of Manhattan’s irrepressible tendencies and themes; it is no accident that the team lacks architects.

  Starrett too believes in metropolitan Manifest Destiny: “Our civilization is progressing wonderfully. In New York—by that I mean Manhattan

  Island—we must keep building and we must build upward. Step by step we have advanced from the wooden but to the thirty story Skyscraper…. Now we must develop something different, something larger….”

  As the conceptual stratosphere of the 100th floor is approached, the programmatic settlement of the platforms according to the 1909 theorem imposes itself: filling the interior with business alone is inconceivable.

  Theodore Starrett’s proposal for 100-story building, 1906.

  The 100-building, detail of nine revolutionary “temperature and atmosphere regulating tubes” emerging in otherwise conventional office suite with fireplace.”A. salt air, B. fresh air, C. dry salt air, D. dry fresh air, E. medicated air (to suit disease), F. temperature switch, G.H.I. perfumes.”

  If the 39 floors of the Equitable constitute a “City in Itself,” the 100-story building is a Metropolis on its own, “a mammoth structure, towering into the clouds and containing within its walls the cultural, commercial and industrial activities of a great city….” Its size alone will explode the texture of normal life. “In New York we travel heavenward as well as on the surface,” explains Starrett the futurist. “In the 100 story Building we shall be shot upward with the rapidity that letters are sent across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  This ascent is interrupted every 20th floor by public plazas that articulate the demarcations between the different functional sectors: industry at the bottom, business in the second quarter, living in the third and a hotel in the fourth.

  The 20th floor is a general market, the 40th a cluster of theaters, the 60th a “shopping district,” the entire 80th floor a hotel and the 100th an “amusement park, roof garden and swimming pool.”

  To make these programmatic enrichments possible, the implements of efficiency reassume their original identity as paraphernalia of illusion: “Another interesting feature is the made to order climate we shall have. When we shall have at last reached the ideal construction, we shall have perfect control of the atmosphere, so that there will be no need of going to Florida in the winter or to Canada in the summer. We shall have all varieties to order in our big buildings of Manhattan….

  “Total Architecture!” That is Starrett’s antihumanistic proposal as he reveals the essence of his Manhattan project: a diagram of “temperature and atmosphere regulating tubes” that are supposed to emerge from the oak-paneled partitions—complete with fireplaces—of his structure.

  The outlets of this psychosomatic battery are keys to a scale of experiences that range from the hedonistic to the medical.

  The Irresistible Synthetic pervades every corner; each compartment is, equipped to pursue its private existential journey: the building has become a laboratory, the ultimate vehicle of emotional and intellectual adventure.

  Its occupants are at once the researchers and the researched.

  Such structures as Starrett’s 100-story building would be definitive; they would mark the point where the index of Manhattan’s vitality—”the sound of New York tossing its traditions in the air and devouring its own landmarks”9—would be silenced. In the absence of that roar, the 100-story building needs a new index to measure its achievement. “What would become of the present skyscrapers?” asks the reporter apprehensively. “Some of them would doubtless have to be torn down, but no doubt many of them, on the corners of blocks, could be used in the new structures,” reassures Starrett.

  This is not generosity; the 100-story building needs an archaeology of dw
arfs to tie it down to earth, to remain convinced of its own scale.

  2. THE ANNEXATION OF THE TOWER

  • In 1853 the Latting Observatory offers Manhattanites the first comprehensive inspection of their domain; it confronts them with the limitation of Manhattan’s islandness, the excuse for all subsequent developments.

  • In 1876 the Centennial Tower in Philadelphia is the second needlelike celebrant of Progress, hauled to Coney Island in 1878 to trigger its stampede toward the controlled irrationality of Fantastic Technology.

  • From 1904 Luna Park is a breeding ground for Towers, discovering in the clash of Towers the source of architectural drama.

  • In 1905 Dreamland’s Beacon Tower tries to lure innocent ships aground to flaunt Reynolds’ contempt for so-called Reality.

  • In 1906 the Globe Tower reveals the potential of the Tower to be—literally—a world on its own.

  In 50 years the Tower has accumulated the meanings of: catalyst of consciousness, symbol of technological progress, marker of pleasure zones, subversive short-circuiter of convention and finally self-contained universe. Towers now indicate acute breaks in the homogeneous pattern of everyday life, marking the scattered outposts of a new culture.

  BUILDINGS

  Manhattan’s early tall buildings are often taller than many of these Towers, but there is nothing in their cubic outlines to remind anyone of a Tower. They are consistently called buildings, not Skyscrapers. But in 1908 Ernest Flagg designs a Tower and places it on top of his existing Singer Building, a 14-story block built in 1899. This architectural afterthought alone makes it “from 1908 to 1913 America’s most famous building.”