by Rem Koolhaas
For Erkins, this cross-fertilization represents a true modernity—the creation of “situations” that have never existed before but are made to look as if they have. It is as if history has been given an extension in which each episode can be rewritten or redesigned in retrospect, all past mistakes erased, imperfections corrected: “The latest evolution of the art of past ages, applied to the creation of a veritable modern place of recreation [is] modern, or modernized art….” Murray’s Roman Gardens is a second chance for the past, a retroactive utopia.
Murray’s Roman Gardens, first autonomous metropolitan interior generated through architectural lobotomy: view of the “Atrium” with reflected barge, fountain, artificial sky. Further escalation of the Irresistible Synthetic: fabricated history for Manhattan’s population. “Take away the scions of the four hundred in their gloomy evening attire, looking like so many scarecrows or undertakers, and the sober-faced attendants, equally sombre as to apparel, and replace them with figures tricked out in the many-hued raiment of ancient days…. Substitute for the begoggled chauffeur, the Roman charioteer, and for the blue-coated guardian of the peace…the mail clad Roman legionary, and but for such improvements as we owe to our mechanical progress, the visitor to Murray’s might readily imagine himself‘ turned back’ two thousand years to the city of the Caesars at the Zenith of its wealth and splendor…
HOUSE
Perhaps most original about the tumult of frozen lust of Murray’s decoration is its consistent quasi-three-dimensionality: a whole population (the original inhabitants of the villa) is arranged along the walls to enliven the social transactions in the rooms and apartments.
They make the “upper ten…dressed in somewhat sombre colors” intruders in the sanctity of their empire of the senses. The public are only guests. Reinforcing the house metaphor, relationships generated in the oversaturated downstairs can be consummated upstairs: “In the upper part of the building are twenty-four luxurious bachelor apartments of parlor and bedroom provided with every comfort and convenience, including separate bath room accommodations….”
With the Gardens, Erkins and Murray have stretched the private format of the house to absorb the public. Such is the collective realm in Manhattan: its scattered episodes can never be more than a series of bloated private enclaves that admit “houseguests.”
PRIDE
After performing his architectural lobotomy Erkins’ pride is that of a successful surgeon.
“The fact that all ingenuity of plan, the wealth of artistic elaboration and the profusion of gorgeous ornamentation, revealed in this unique establishment, have really been‘ grafted’ as it were onto a building of essentially plain and formal character, planned and erected originally for a purpose absolutely foreign to that for which it is today utilized, lends additional interest to the results achieved and reflects the greater credit of the author and originator of this superb exemplification of Modern taste and skill.
“Henry Erkins…was constrained to adopt, as the basis for this beautiful production, a building originally planned for use as a schoolhouse, but which the magic wand of Mr. Erkins’ genius has transformed so happily that in its present arrangement, equipment, adornment and ornamentation, it nowhere betrays the slightest trace of its original purpose in any way….” Lobotomy satisfies the two incompatible demands imposed on the Automonument by generating two separate architectures.
One is the architecture of metropolitan exteriors whose responsibility is to the city as sculptural experience.
The other is a mutant branch of interior design that, using the most modern technologies, recycles, converts and fabricates memories and supportive iconographies that register and manipulate shifts in metropolitan culture.
A system of Murray’s is planned throughout Manhattan. An Italian Garden on 34th Street and Murray’s New Broadway—“3 acres of floor space devoted to Dining Room”—are planned to open in 1909.
From the beginning of the 20th century architectural Lobotomy permits an urbanistic revolution in installments. Through the establishment of enclaves such as the Roman Gardens—emotional shelters for the metropolitan masses that represent ideal worlds removed in time and space, insulated against the corrosion of reality—the fantastic supplants the utilitarian in Manhattan.
These subutopian fragments are all the more seductive for having no territorial ambitions beyond filling their interior allotments with a hyper-density of private meanings. By leaving intact the illusion of a traditional urban landscape outside, this revolution ensures its acceptance through its inconspicuousness.
The Grid is the neutralizing agent that structures these episodes. Within the network of its rectilinearity, movement becomes ideological navigation between the conflicting claims and promises of each block.
CAVE
In 1908 a delegation of American businessmen visits Antonio Gaudí in Barcelona and asks him to design a Grand Hotel in Manhattan. No site is known for the project; the businessmen may merely want an initial sketch, to raise money on and match later with a location. It is unlikely that Gaudí is aware of the quantum leaps and breakthroughs Manhattanism has produced; the businessmen themselves must have recognized the affinity between Gaudí’s hysteria and Manhattan’s frenzy.
But in his European isolation, Gaudí is like the man in Plato’s cave; from the shadows of the businessmen’s descriptions and requirements he is forced to reconstruct a reality outside the cave, that of an ideal Manhattan. He synthesizes a premonition of the true Skyscraper that applies both the lobotomy and the mutant branch of interior design not only on the ground floor but in layers throughout the interior.
His hotel is a sheaf of stalagmites, combined to form a single conoid that is, unmistakably, a Tower. It inhabits a podium or island, connected by bridges to the other islands. It stands aggressively alone.16
Gaudí’s design is a paradigm of floor-by-floor conquest of the Skyscraper by social activities. On the outer surface of the structure, low floors provide individual accommodation, the hotel rooms; the public life of the hotel is located at the core, on enormous interior planes that admit no daylight.
Gaudí’s Grand Hotel, European restaurant on the fifth floor.
This inner core of the Grand Hotel is a sequence of six superimposed restaurants. The first is decorated with a concentrate of European mythologies that will be reinforced by the choice of menu and European music, played by a large symphony orchestra. Each of the other restaurants, with its own hermetic iconography, represents another continent; the stack together represents the World.
A theater and exhibition hall are superimposed over the world of the restaurants. The whole is topped by a small observation sphere that awaits the moment when the conquest of gravity will be no longer metaphor but fact.
SCHISM
There is to be no seepage of symbolism between floors. In fact, the schizoid arrangement of thematic planes implies an architectural strategy for planning the interior of the Skyscraper, which has become autonomous through the lobotomy: the Vertical Schism, a systematic exploitation of the deliberate disconnection between stories.
Gaudí’s Grand Hotel, section. Through the lobotomy, the interior of the hotel is disconnected from the reality outside by a skin of bedrooms. As in the 1909 theorem, the central floors are stacked on top of each other as self-contained thematic planes in an essentially random sequence. Through this vertical disconnection, local changes in iconography, function, use can be effected without any impact on the structure as a whole.
By denying the dependence of one floor on any other, the Vertical Schism allows their arbitrary distribution within a single building. It is an essential strategy for the development of the cultural potential of the Skyscraper: it accepts the instability of a Skyscraper’s definitive composition beyond a single floor, while at the same time counteracting it by housing each known designation with maximum specificity, if not
overdetermination.
Relative size of Gaudí’s Grand Hotel compared to Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and Eiffel Tower.
SHADOW
For a time “real” Skyscrapers like the Woolworth and versions of the older type are erected simultaneously; in the latter the simple operation of extrusion takes more and more grotesque proportions. With the Equitable Building (1915) the process of reproduction loses its credibility through the grim deterioration—both financial and environmental—it inflicts on its surroundings. Its shadow alone reduces rents in a vast area of adjoining properties, while the vacuum of its interior is filled at the expense of its neighbors. Its success is measured by the destruction of its context. The time has come to subject this form of architectural aggression to regulation. “It became increasingly evident that the large project was a concern not only of an individual, but of the community, and that some form of restriction must be adopted….”17
LAW
The 1916 Zoning Law describes on each plot or block of Manhattan’s surface an imaginary envelope that defines the outlines of the maximum allowable construction.
The law takes the Woolworth as norm: the process of sheer multiplication is allowed to proceed up to a certain height; then the building must step back from the plot line at a certain angle to admit light to the streets.
A Tower may then carry 25 percent of the plot area to unlimited heights. The last clause encourages the tendency of single structures to conquer the vastest possible area, i.e., a whole block, in order to make the 25 percent that can be Tower as large (profitable) as possible.
In fact, the 1916 Zoning Law is a back-dated birth certificate that lends retroactive legitimacy to the Skyscraper.
VILLAGE
The Zoning Law is not only a legal document; it is also a design project. In a climate of commercial exhilaration where the maximum legally allowable is immediately translated into reality, the “limiting” three-dimensional parameters of the law suggest a whole new idea of Metropolis.
If Manhattan was in the beginning only a collection of 2,028 blocks, it is now an assembly of as many invisible envelopes. Even if it is still a ghost town of the future, the outlines of the ultimate Manhattan have been drawn once and for all:
The 1916 Zoning Law defines Manhattan for all time as a collection of 2,028 colossal phantom “houses” that together form a Mega-Village. Even as each “house” fills up with accommodation, program, facilities, infrastructures, machineries and technologies of unprecedented originality and complexity, the primordial format of “village” is never endangered.
The city’s scale explosion is controlled through the drastic assertion of the most primitive model of human cohabitation.
This radical simplification of concept is the secret formula that allows its infinite growth without corresponding loss of legibility, intimacy or coherence.
(As a simple section reveals, each envelope is a gigantic enlargement of the original Dutch gable house with the tower as an endless chimney.
The City of the Zoning Law—the Mega-Village—is a fantastic enlargement of the original New Amsterdam.)
Theoretical envelope of 1916 Zoning Law appearing between the Municipal Building and the Woolworth (rendering by Hugh Ferriss). “The New York Law, formulated by a group of technical experts, was based on purely practical considerations…. By limiting the bulk of a building, the number of occupants was limited; fewer people required access and egress; traffic on adjoining streets was lightened. The limitation in mass had also of course the effect of permitting more light and air into the streets as well as into the buildings themselves…. The Zoning Law was not at all inspired by concern for its possible effect on architecture….” (Ferriss, Metropolis of Tomorrow.) After 1916, no structure in Manhattan could exceed the limitations of this spectral shape. To exploit maximum financial return on any given block, Manhattan’s architects were forced to approximate it as closely as possible.
The Skyscraper Theorists
Our role is not to retreat back to the catacombs, but to become more human in skyscrapers….
—Regional Plan Association of New York, The Building of the City
OBFUSCATION
In the early twenties identifiable personalities begin to disengage themselves from the nebulae of Manhattanism’s collective fantasy to play more individual roles. They are the Skyscraper theorists.
But each attempt, written or drawn, to create consciousness about the Skyscraper, its use and design, is at least as much an exercise in obfuscation: under Manhattanism—doctrine of indefinitely postponed consciousness—the greatest theoretician is the greatest obscurantist.
ATHENS
As a boy—“where the bias, they say, is set”—Hugh Ferriss is given a picture of the Parthenon for his birthday.
It become his first paradigm. “The building seemed to be built of stone. Its columns seemed to be designed to support a roof. It looked like some sort of temple…. 1 learned in due time that all those impressions were true….”
“It was an honest building,” built “in one of those fortunate periods when engineers and artists worked enthusiastically together and when the populace warmly, appreciated and applauded their alliance….”
The image of the Parthenon inspires Ferriss to become an architect; when he gets his degree he leaves his hometown, St. Louis, for Manhattan. For him, New York represents a new Athens, the only possible birthplace of new Parthenons.
“One wanted to get to the Metropolis. In New York…an indigenous American architecture would be in the making, with engineers and artists working enthusiastically together—and maybe even with the populace warmly appreciating and applauding their alliance….” But at his first job at Cass Gilbert’s office—then designing the Woolworth Building—Ferriss’ “juvenile enthusiasm is in for a jolt.”18 The contemporary architecture of Manhattan does not consist of the production of new Parthenons but of the pilferage of all useful elements of past “Parthenons,” which are then reassembled and wrapped around steel skeletons.
Instead of a new Athens, Ferriss finds ersatz antiquity. Instead of contributing to the design of dishonest buildings, Ferriss prefers the technical and strictly neutral role of renderer; he is made “delineator” in Gilbert’s office.
The “automatic pilot” at the controls: Hugh Ferriss at work in his studio, applying finishing touch to “A Street Vista of the Future”; his paintings together form a fabled series, Vision of the Titan City—1975, based on the research of Manhattanism’s progressive thinkers such as Corbett, Hood and Ferriss. Partly hidden against the wall, unfinished version of “Crude Clay for Architects.” On shelf, remnants of the Parthenon witness birth of the New Athens.
PILOT
By the early twenties he has established himself as independent artist in his own studio. As a renderer Ferriss is the puritanical instrument of a coalition of permissive eclectics: the more convincing his work, the more he promotes the realization of proposals he dislikes.
But Ferriss discovers an escape from this dilemma: a technique that isolates his own intentions from those of his clients.
He draws in charcoal, an imprecise, impressionistic medium that relies on the suggestiveness of planes and the manipulation of what are, essentially, smudges.
By using the one medium incapable of depicting the eclectic surface trivia that preoccupy Manhattan’s architects, Ferriss’ drawings strip as much as render. With each representation he liberates an “honest” building from under the surface excess.
Ferriss’ delineations, even as they are intended to seduce clients for Manhattan’s architects—and through them, the larger population—are critiques of the projects that they pretend to embody, polemical “corrections” of the reactionary blueprints on which they are based. That Manhattan’s architects have only their dependence on Ferriss’ services in common reinforces the cumulative impact o
f these corrected projects. They coalesce into a coherent vision of a future Manhattan.
That vision becomes increasingly popular with Manhattan’s inhabitants—to the point where Ferriss’ drawings alone represent Manhattan’s architecture, regardless of the individual architect who designed each project.
In their calculated vagueness Ferriss’ images create exactly that “warmly appreciative and applauding” audience that he has identified in his youth as the condition for the birth of a new Athens. From being a helper, the great delineator becomes a leader.
“He can pump perspective poetry into the most unpromising composition…. The best way to utilize his talent would be to toss over the plans, go to bed and turn up the next morning to find the design all done.
“He is the perfect automatic pilot….”19
Evolution of the setback building: Ferriss’ variations on the 1916 Zoning Law, in four parts. First stage: “A representation of the maximum mass which, under the Zoning Law, it would be permissible to build over an entire city block…. Not an architects’ design, it is simply a form that results from legal specifications….” Second stage: “The first step taken by the architect is to cut into the mass to admit daylight…. [He] is not permitting himself any prevision of its final form…. He is accepting, simply, a mass which has been put into his hands; he proposes to modify it step by step…. He is prepared to view the progress impartially and to abide by whatever result is finally reached….” Third stage: The great slopes of the second stage “cut into the rectangular forms which will provide more conventional interior spaces…” Fourth stage: “After removing those parts which were found to be undesirable, the mass which finally remains… This is not intended as a finished and habitable building; it still awaits articulation at the hands of the individual designer…” The renderer as chief architect: in spite of his verbal modesty, Ferriss indirectly circumscribes the role of the individual architect to the point of nonexistence; clearly, the “delineator” would prefer it if architects left him and the Zoning Law alone.