by Rem Koolhaas
RESEARCH
Simultaneously with his commercial work, Ferriss investigates the true issues of Manhattanism with several progressive architects, such as Raymond Hood and Harvey Wiley Corbett. This research centers on the unexplored potential of the 1916 Zoning Law and the theoretical envelope it describes on each Manhattan block.
Ferriss’ drawings are the first revelations of the infinite variations—both formal and psychological—contained within its basic legal shape. After exhausting the individual categories, he produces the first concrete image of their final assembly: the Mega-Village that is Manhattan’s final destiny.
For Ferriss, this new city of untouched forms is the real new Athens: “As one contemplates these shapes, images may begin to form in the mind of novel types of building which are no longer a compilation of items of familiar styles but are, simply, the subtleizing of these crude masses….”
That city would establish him, Ferriss the renderer, as its chief architect, since its drastic nakedness is what his charcoal medium has always anticipated.
Signs of its imminence are already in the air, baffling the traditional architects; “conservative architectural standards were thrown into confusion. At point after point designers found themselves faced with restrictions which made the erecting of familiar forms impossible….”
LABORS
In 1929 Ferriss publishes the summation of his labors, The Metropolis of Tomorrow.
The book is divided into three parts:
Cities of Today, a collection of his renderings for other architects; Projected Trends, his variations on the theme of the 1916 law; and An Imaginary Metropolis, Ferriss’ new Athens.
There are 50 drawings in the book, each “explained” by a text that is the verbal equivalent of the drawings’ charcoal vagueness.
The structure of the book is modeled on the clearing of a persistent fog bank: from “it is again dawn, with an early mist enveloping the scene,” via “as the mist begins to disperse,” to “a little later, the general clearing of the air allows us to check upon our first impressions….”
This “plot line” corresponds to the three parts of the book: an, imperfect past—the work of the other architects; a promising present—the annunciation and theoretical elaboration of the Mega-Village of the 1916 Zoning Law; and the shining future of Ferriss’ imaginary Metropolis, which is one version of that village: “a wide plain, not lacking in vegetation, from which rise, at considerable intervals, towering mountain peaks….”20
“Crude Clay for Architects”: Manhattan as “Ghost Town of the Future,” Ferriss’ first image of the Mega-Village. “If the maximum masses which are permitted …were erected over all the blocks of a city, an impression not unlike the one opposite would be produced….”
WOMB
But actually, the divisions are less important than the continuity of all these quasi-nocturnal images. The, genius of Ferriss’ production is in the medium of his renderings itself, the creation of an artificial night that leaves all architectural incidents vague and ambiguous in a mist of charcoal particles that thickens or thins whenever necessary.
Ferriss’ most important contribution to the theory of Manhattan is exactly the creation of an illuminated night inside a cosmic container, the murky Ferrissian Void: a pitch black architectural womb that gives birth to the consecutive stages of the Skyscraper in a sequence of sometimes overlapping pregnancies, and that promises to generate ever-new ones.
Each of Ferriss’ drawings records a moment of that never-ending gestation. The promiscuity of the Ferrissian womb blurs the issue of paternity.
The womb absorbs multiple impregnation by any number of alien and foreign influences—Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism, even Functionalism—all are effortlessly accommodated in the expanding receptacle of Ferriss’ vision.
Manhattanism is conceived in Ferriss’ womb.
Man inside the Ferrissian Void, the womb of Manhattanism.
CRASH
Ferriss’ book appears in the year of the crash, 1929.
That is not a totally negative coincidence. “It was soon apparent …that the depression had at least one good side: if architects, for the time being, could not do any real building, at least they could do a lot of real thinking. The skyscraper spree was over; a time for sober reflection had set in.” From his studio Ferriss now looks down on “a strangely quiet Manhattan. The sound of the riveting machines had died upon the air. The architecture of the metropolis, divested of glamor, was telling a story hitherto unsuspected by minds that had been preoccupied with the picturesque…. Of long range planning there was not a Vestige….”21
Ferriss’ time has come.
CLARIFICATION
In the late twenties most of Manhattan’s thinkers and theoreticians are assembled in the committee that prepares—for the Regional Plan Association of New York—a volume on “The Building of the City.” Their formal task is to establish pragmatic guidelines for its further development. But in fact their activity contributes to the cloud of unknowing that shields Manhattanism from the glare of objectivity. Like Ferriss, they pretend an interest in planning that cloaks their efforts to promote that climate of obscurity in which the Skyscraper will flourish. This complex ambition—to stimulate confusion while paying lip service to clarification—marks the transition between the first, unconscious phase of Manhattanism and the second, quasi-conscious phase. With the first paragraph of their deliberations, the thinkers of the Regional Plan establish the ambiguity of their venture: it is to be an investigation undertaken with the explicit intention of avoiding its logical conclusion.
“All accept the skyscraper as something which serves human needs, but judge it differently as to the value of this service. All know that it has become the dominant feature in the structural composition of large American cities. But is it also to be the dominant feature in the social organization of all urban life in America?… If we attempt to answer this question we would have had to go deeper than we have dared to go in the Regional Survey and Plan….”
This early apology sets the tone: everything may be questioned within the framework of the Regional Plan, except the Skyscraper, which remains inviolate. Theory, if there is to be any, will be adapted to the Skyscraper, not the Skyscraper to the theory.
“We will have to accept the skyscraper as inevitable and proceed to consider how it can be made healthy and beautiful….”
QUICKSAND
In the chapter “Magnificence and Limitations of Skyscrapers,” the thinkers of the Regional Plan sink still deeper into the quicksand of their own ambivalence. To secure the Skyscraper’s continuing license to create congestion, they embark, ostensibly, on a crusade of decongestion.
“There are two aspects in which the bold magnificence of New York skyscrapers cannot be questioned. The great isolated tower that thrusts itself into the clouds and is surrounded by open spaces or very low buildings, so that its shadow does no injury to neighbouring buildings, may in the hands of an artist be an ennobling structure.
“Secondly, the mass effect of a mountain of building, such as is obtained by looking at lower Manhattan from the wide expanse of the Upper Bay, is recognized as one of the great wonders of the world as an artificial creation.
“The pity of it is not that the towers are surging upward beyond 800 feet. but that they are so near to each other; and not that Manhattan has its artificial mountain ranges, but that they are so compact that they keep out light and air from their separate units of building.
“The beauty of both features could have been retained, with more added beauty as a result of greater, display of individual buildings, had more open areas been preserved in proportion as greater heights were permitted.
As it is…more is lost in the closing of the sky between them; in the consequent dinginess of street and building; in the destruction of many beautiful low building
s either by dwarfing them or superseding them; and in want of display of individual skyscrapers and other buildings that are worthy to be seen, than is gained by magnificence of the great building masses….”22
The “planning” of Manhattanism: studies for the Regional Plan Commission. Models showing maximum bulk of suggested business buildings for central area, subcentral area, intermediate area, suburban area. Appropriateness of the Skyscraper was never questioned; it only became taller or shorter to respond to local pressure or lack of pressure.
VENICE
A hundred profound solitudes together constitute the city of Venice. That is its charm. A model for the men of the future.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
But New York, in addition to being a lot of other things, is a Venice in the making, and all the ugly paraphernalia by means of which this making is slowly going forward, all the unlovely processes, physical and chemical, structural and commercial, must be recognized and expressed and by the light of poetic vision be made a part of its beauty and romance.
—J. Monroe Hewlett, President, Architectural League of New York, New York: The Nation’s Metropolis
The most precise and literal proposal to solve the problem of congestion comes from Harvey Wiley Corbett, prominent thinker about Manhattan and the Skyscraper, and teacher of the younger generation at Columbia University.
In his scheme for elevated and arcaded walkways (first proposed in 1923), the entire ground plane of the city—now a chaos of all modes of transportation—would gradually be surrendered solely to automotive traffic. Trenches in this plane would allow fast traffic to rush through the Metropolis even faster. If cars needed more room again, the edges of existing buildings could be set back to create still larger areas for circulation.
On the second story pedestrians walk along arcades carved out of the buildings. The arcades form a continuous network on both sides of streets and avenues; bridges provide its continuity. Along the arcades, shops and other public facilities are embedded in the buildings.
Through this separation, the capacity of the original street is increased at least 200 percent, more if the road consumes still larger sections of the ground plane.
Harvey Wiley Corbett, prominent Manhattan theoretician, after a lifetime of “visioning.”
Ultimately, Corbett calculates, the entire surface of the city could be a single traffic plane, an ocean of cars, increasing the traffic potential 700 percent.
“We see a city of sidewalks, arcaded within the building lines, and one story above the present street grade. We see bridges at all corners, the width of the arcades and with solid railings. We see the smaller parks of the city (of which we trust there will be many more than at present) raised to this same side-walk arcade level…and the whole aspect becomes that of a very modernized Venice, a city of arcades, plazas and bridges, with canals for streets, only the canals will not be filled with real water but with freely flowing motor traffic, the sun glistening on the black tops of the cars and the buildings reflecting in this waving flood of rapidly rolling vehicles.
“From an architectural viewpoint, and in regard to form, decoration and proportion, the idea presents all the loveliness, and more, of Venice. There is nothing incongruous about it, nothing strange….”23
“Towers on a Hudson River Bridge Between New York and New Jersey-1975, as visioned and designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett.” “Very modernized Venice” in full operation: 20-lane streets, pedestrians walking from “island” to “island” in a “system of 2,028 solitudes.”
Corbett’s “solution” for New York’s traffic problem is the most blatant case of disingenuity in Manhattanism’s history. Pragmatism so distorted becomes pure poetry.
Not for a moment does the theorist intend to relieve congestion: his true ambition is to escalate it to such intensity that it generates—as in a quantum leap—a completely new condition, where congestion becomes mysteriously positive.
Far from solving any problems, his proposal is a metaphor that orders and interprets an otherwise incomprehensible Metropolis.
With this metaphor, many of Manhattan’s latent themes are substantiated: in Corbett’s “very modernized Venice” each block has become an island with its own lighthouse, the Ferrissian phantom “house.” The population of Manhattan—journeying from block to block—would finally, and literally, inhabit a metropolitan archipelago of 2,028 islands of its own making.
CONGESTION
Ferriss, Corbett and the authors of the Regional Plan have invented a method to deal rationally with the fundamentally irrational.
They know instinctively that it would be suicide to solve Manhattan’s problems, that they exist by the grace of these problems, that it is their duty to make its problems, if anything, forever insurmountable, that the only solution for Manhattan is the extrapolation of its freakish history, that Manhattan is the city of the perpetual flight forward.
The planning of these architects—assembled in the Regional Plan Committee—must be the opposite of objective. It consists of the imposition on the explosive substance of Manhattan of a series of metaphoric models as primitive as they are efficient—that substitute for literal organization= impossible in any case—a form of poetic control. The “house” and “village” of the 1916 Zoning Law, Ferriss’ “buildings like mountains” and finally Corbett’s Manhattan as a “very modernized Venice” together form a deadly serious matrix of frivolity, a vocabulary of poetic formulas that replaces traditional objective planning in favor of a new discipline of metaphoric planning to deal with a metropolitan situation fundamentally beyond the quantifiable.
Harvey Wiley Corbett, Proposals for Relieving Traffic Congestion in New York by Separating Pedestrians and Vehicular Traffic, sections Present situation. First step: pedestrians are removed from grade level to move along bridges cantilevered from the buildings; cars invade their former domain. Second step, “showing Building cut-ins. Six motor cars moving abreast—parking space for two on each side…” Final stage: “Pedestrians cross streets on overhead bridges and the cities of the future become reincarnations of the City of the lagoons….”
Congestion itself is the essential condition for realizing each of these metaphors in the reality of the Grid. Only congestion can generate the super-house, the Mega-Village, the Mountain and finally the modernized automotive Venice.
Together, these metaphors are the foundation of a Culture of Congestion, which is the real enterprise of Manhattan’s architects.
Unexpected serenity in the heart of the Metropolis: Manhattan after Corbett’s metamorphosis—“Looking Down a Future New York Street in 1975.”
“General view of a city square showing the additional possibility of a second level of pedestrian traffic at the height of a ten story setback.”
CULTURE
The Culture of Congestion proposes the conquest of each block by a single structure.
Each Building will become a “house”—a private realm inflated to admit houseguests but not to the point of pretending universality in the spectrum of its offerings. Each “house” will represent a different lifestyle and different ideology.
On each floor, the Culture of Congestion will arrange new and exhilarating human activities in unprecedented combinations. Through Fantastic Technology it will be possible to reproduce all “situations”—from the most natural to the most artificial—wherever and whenever desired.
Each City within a City will be so unique that it will naturally attract its own inhabitants.
Each Skyscraper, reflected in the roofs of an endless flow of black limousines, is an island of the “very modernized Venice”—a system of 2,028 solitudes.
The Culture of Congestion is the culture of the 20th century.
1931
In the chill of the crash, Ferriss and Manhattan’s theoreticians have successfully negotiated the tra
nsition between Manhattanism’s preconscious phase to a stage of quasi-consciousness. Amid all the signs of demystification, they have preserved the essential mysteries intact.
Now, Manhattan’s other architects have an equally delicate rite of “modernization” to perform, without succumbing to self-consciousness. After 11 Beaux-Arts costume balls devoted to nostalgic historical tableaux (“A Pageant of Ancient France,” “The Gardens of Versailles,” “Napoleon,” “Northern Africa”) that serve as opportunities for the Beaux-Arts graduates of New York to reconsummate their love affair with French culture, the backward-looking flow is reversed in 1931, when the organizers admit that the future cannot be delayed forever.
They decide to use the format of the ball this time to probe the Future. It is an appropriate beginning for 1931.