by Rem Koolhaas
The Crash—an enforced break in the previous frenzy of production—demands new directions. The reservoir of historical styles is finally depleted. Various versions of Modernism announce themselves with increasing urgency.
“Fête Moderne: A Fantasie in Flame and Silver” is the theme for the
12th ball, to be held on January 23, 1931: an invitation to the Beaux-Arts architects and artists to participate in a collective search for the “Spirit of the Age.”
It is research, disguised as costume ball.
“What is the modern spirit in art? No one knows. It is something toward which a lot of people are groping and in the course of this groping interesting and amusing things should be developed….”
To preclude superficial interpretations of their theme, the organizers warn that “the modern spirit in art is not a new recipe for designing buildings, sculpture and painted decoration but is a quest for something more characteristic and more vital as an expression of modern activity and thought….
“In the decoration, as in the costumes, the effect sought is a rhythmic, vibrant quality expressive of the feverish activity which characterizes our work and our play, our shop windows and our advertisements, the froth and the jazz of modern life….”24
Weeks in advance, the public is informed of this manifesto by a press release. “The Fête Moderne is to be modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic…. Fantasy is the note, originality will be rewarded….”25
VOID
On the night of the ball, 3,000 guests come to the Hotel Astor on Broadway for “a program of eventful events and delightful delights.” The familiar interior of the hotel has disappeared and is replaced by a pitch black void that suggests the infinity of the universe, or that of Ferriss’ womb.
“From the darkness above prismatic lanterns stab the gloom like great projectiles from the sky….”
Guests, in their two-tone silver- and flame-colored costumes, trace rocket-like trajectories. Weightless pieces of decor float in midair. A “cubistic main-street” seems a fragment of a future USA distorted by Modernism. “Futuristic refreshments”—a drink that looks like liquid metal—and “miniature meteorites”—roasted marshmallows—are served by silent servants dressed in black and thus almost invisible. Familiar melodies collide with the sounds of a frantic Metropolis; “the orchestra will be assisted by nine riveting machines, a three-inch pipe for live-steam, four ocean-liner whistles, three sledge hammers and a few rock drillers.
The music however will penetrate through all this on account of the modernistic quality of the dissonances.”
Certain subliminal but serious messages float around and can be isolated from the overdose of suggestive information. They remind New York’s architects that this ball is in reality a congress—that this ceremony is Manhattan’s counterpart of the CIAM Congress on the other side of the Atlantic: a delirious grope after the Spirit of the Age and its implications for their increasingly megalomaniac profession.
“Painted upon a great draped frieze, level with the third balcony, a vague procession of colossal figures rushes as through space with silver arrows poised for flight. These are the guards of the void, the inhabitants of the upper air, charged with the duty of placing some limit upon the vaulting ambition of our builders whose works are soaring ever nearer to the stars.”26
BALLET
Now Manhattan’s builders gather in the wings of the small stage to prepare for the climax of the evening: becoming their own Skyscrapers, they will perform a “Skyline of New York” ballet.
Manhattan’s architects perform “The Skyline of New York.” From left: A. Stewart Walker as the Fuller Building, Leonard Schultze as the new Waldorf-Astoria, Ely Jacques Kahn as the Squibb Building, William Van Alen as the Chrysler Building, Ralph Walker as One Wall Street, D. E. Ward as the Metropolitan Tower and Joseph H. Freedlander as the Museum of the City of New York—research, disguised as costume ball.
Like their towers, the men are dressed in costumes whose essential characteristics are similar; only their most gratuitous features are involved in fierce competition. Their identical “Skyscraper dresses” taper upward in attempted conformity to the 1916 Zoning Law. Differences occur only at the top.
This agreement is unfair to some of the participants. Joseph H. Freedlander, who has only designed the four-story Museum of the City of New York, never a Skyscraper, nevertheless prefers the embarrassment of the shared Skyscraper dress to the alternative of being alone but honest in his evening costume. His headdress represents the whole building. Leonard Schultze, designer of the soon-to-be-opened Waldorf-Astoria, has had to represent that twin tower structure in a single headdress. He has settled for one.
The elegant top of A. Stewart Walker’s Fuller Building has so few openings that faithfulness to its design now condemns its designer to temporary blindness.
The close fit of head- and Skyscraper-dress on Ely Jacques Kahn reflects the nature of his buildings: never straining for dramatic pinnacles, they are squat mountains.
Ralph Walker appears as One Wall Street, Harvey Wiley Corbett as his Bush Terminal; James O’Connor and John Kilpatrick are inseparable as the twin Beaux-Arts Apartments. Thomas Gillespie has managed the impossible: he is dressed as a void to represent an unnamed subway station.
Raymond Hood has come as his Daily News Building. (He works day and night on the design of Rockefeller Center, a project so complex and “modern” that it would resist translation into a single costume.)
PAROXYSM
Outshining all of these, as it has since 1929 on the stage of mid-Manhattan, is the Chrysler Building.
Its architect, William Van Alen, has spurned the Skyscraper dress: his costume—like his tower—is a paroxysm of detail. “The entire costume, including the hat, was of silver metal cloth trimmed with black patent leather; the sash and lining were of flame-colored silk. The cape, puttees and cuffs are of flexible wood, the wood having been selected from trees from all over the world (India, Australia, Philippine Islands, South America, Africa, Honduras and North America). These woods were teakwood, Philippine mahogany, American walnut, African prima vera, South American prima vera, Huya and Aspen, maple and ebony, lace wood and Australian silky oak. The costume was made possible by the use of‘ Flexwood; a wall material of a thin veneer of wood with a fabric backing. The costume was designed to represent the Chrysler Building, the characteristic features in the composition being carried out by using the exact facsimile of the top of the building as a headpiece; the vertical
and horizontal lines of the tower were carried out by the patent leather bands running up the front and around the sleeves. The cape embodied the design of the first floor elevator doors, using the same woods as were used in the elevator doors themselves, and the front was a replica of the elevator doors on the upper floors of the building. The shoulder ornaments were the eagles’ heads appearing at the 61st-floor setback of the building….”27
This evening is Van Alen’s swan song, a brittle triumph. Inconspicuous on this stage, but undeniable on the Grid at 34th Street, the Empire State Building already dominates Manhattan’s skyline, outranking the Chrysler by (1,250-1,046 =) 204 feet. It is almost complete now, except for the shameless airship mooring mast that grows taller every day.
WOMAN
Architecture, especially its Manhattan mutation, has been a pursuit strictly for men. For those aiming at the sky, away from the earth’s surface and the natural, there has been no female company.
Yet among the 44 men on the stage, there is a single woman, Miss Edna Cowan, the “Basin Girl.”
“The new age is…feministic”: Miss Edna Cowan as the Basin Girl—apparition straight from the men’s subconscious.
She carries a basin as an extension of her belly; two taps seem even further entwined with her insides. An apparition straight from the men’s subconscious, she stands there on
the stage to symbolize the entrails of architecture, or more precisely: she stands for the continuing embarrassment caused by the biological functions of the human body that have proved resistant to lofty aspirations and technological sublimation. Man’s rush to, the nth floor is a neck-and-neck race between plumbing and abstraction. Like an unwanted shadow, plumbing will always finish a close second.
CONTEST
In retrospect it is clear that the laws of the costume ball have governed Manhattan’s architecture.
Only in New York has architecture become the design of costumes that do not reveal the true nature of repetitive interiors but slip smoothly into the subconscious to perform their roles as symbols. The costume ball is the one formal convention in which the desire for individuality and extreme originality does not endanger collective performance but is actually a condition for it.
Like the beauty contest, it is a rare format in which collective success is directly proportionate to the ferocity of individual competition.
New York’s architects, by making their Skyscrapers compulsively competitive, have turned the entire population into a jury. That is the secret of its continuing architectural suspense.
The Lives of a Block:The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the Empire State Building
A well-planned life should have an effective climax.
—Paul Starrett, Changing the Skyline
SITE
One of the 2,028 blocks defined by the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan lies west of Middle (Fifth) Avenue between 33rd and 34th streets.
The transformations of this one block in a period of less than 150 years—from virgin nature to launching pad of two of Manhattan’s most definitive Skyscrapers, the Empire State Building and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel—represent a summary of the phases of Manhattan’s urbanism, featuring all the strategies, theorems, paradigms and ambitions that sustain the inexorable progress of Manhattanism. The layers of its past occupancies still exist on the block as an invisible archaeology, no less real for being disembodied.
In 1799 John Thompson acquires (for $2,500) 20 acres of wilderness—“fertile, partly wooded and eminently suitable for the raising of various produce”—to cultivate as farmland. He builds “a new and convenient house, barn and several out-houses.”28
In 1827 the site ends up, via two other owners, in the possession of William B. Astor for $20,000.
The Astors’ myth is young and fresh. “From the humblest beginnings, John Jacob Astor (William B.'s father) lifted himself upward and placed his family at the topmost peak of wealth, of influence, of power, of social importance….”
Myth meets Block when William B. builds the first Astor Mansion on the new property. Only five stories tall, it represents a monument of social climbing that “fixes the seal of perpetual prestige on the famous site.” Its emanations make the corner one of New York’s major attractions.
“Many an arriving immigrant looked on the Astor Mansions as a promise of what America might yield to him, too, through work and energy and through determination….”29
SPLIT
William B. Astor dies.
The block is divided between branches of his family that quarrel, grow apart and finally stop communicating altogether. But they still share the block.
In the 1880s the 33rd Street corner carries the original Astor Mansion, now inhabited by grandson William Waldorf Astor; the other Fifth Avenue corner accommodates the almost identical residence of his cousin Jacob Astor. Separated by a walled garden, the cousins are not on speaking terms. The spirit of the block is split.
Toward the nineties, William Waldorf Astor decides to go to England. A new destiny awaits his half of the block.
First Waldorf-Astoria Hotel: Waldorf built in 1893, Astoria (taller part) three years later—“a distinctive change in the Urban Civilization of America.”
AURA
Throughout the century, the aura of the Astor Mansions has attracted an assembly of similar residences; the block has become the heart of
Manhattan’s more desirable area, its famous Astor ballroom the epicenter of New York’s high society.
But now Astor and his advisers sense that an extraordinary growth would take place in the ranks of society—the rich were springing up, in the East and West alike, like mushrooms after a rain—that a quicker tempo would infect the life in the city…that the nineties were ushering in a whole new era.”30
In a single gesture, he exploits both the old cachet and the imminence of new times: the house will be replaced by a hotel, but a hotel that will remain, in. Astor’s instructions, “a house…with as little of the typically hotel features in evidence as humanly possible,” so that it can preserve the Astor aura.
For Astor, the destruction of a structure does not preclude the preservation of its spirit; with his Waldorf he injects the concept of reincarnation into architecture.
After finding a manager to run the new type of “house”—George Boldt, “a man who could stand on the blueprint plan of a hotel and see the folks come piling in the front doors”—Astor finally leaves for England. Further suggestions for the hotel arrive by cable—architecture in Morse code. The 20th century is approaching.
New Waldorf-Astoria as reincarnation of the old, “pictured by Lloyd Morgan.”
TWIN
As soon as the 13-story Waldorf is finished, Boldt diverts his attention to the other half of the block. He knows that he can only realize the full potential of location and site by reuniting the two halves.
After years of negotiations he convinces Jacob Astor to sell. Now the Astoria, postponed twin of the Waldorf, can be built. (In secret anticipation Boldt has already counteracted the slope of Fifth Avenue and “caused the main floor of the Waldorf to be set high enough to come just even with the pavement of Thirty-fourth Street…. It meant that the ground floor of the combined hotels could be at an absolute single level.”)
In 1896, three years after the opening of the Waldorf, the 16-story Astoria is completed. On the ground floor its dominant feature is Peacock Alley, an interior arcade that runs parallel to 34th Street for more than 300 feet, from an interior carriage driveway to the Rose Room on Fifth Avenue.
On the ground floor the two hotels are joined by shared facilities that puncture the dividing wall: the two-story Palm Room, a branch of Peacock Alley, kitchens. On the second and third floors are the Ballroom—democratic enlargement of the famous Astor ballroom—and the Astor Gallery, “an almost exact replica of the historic Soubise ballroom in Paris.”
The transplantations from the Astor mansions—literal or merely by nomenclature—suggest that the Waldorf-Astoria is conceived by its promoters as a haunted house, rife with the ghosts of its predecessors. To construct a House haunted by its own past and those of other buildings: such is the Man hattanist strategy for the production of vicarious history, “age” and respectability. In Manhattan the new and revolutionary is presented, always, in the false light of familiarity.
CAMPAIGN
As William Waldorf Astor intended, the “very coming [of the united hotels] seemed to mark a distinctive change in the Urban Civilization of America.” In spite of the reassurance of its iconographies, the program of the new hotel involves it in a campaign to change and manipulate the social
patterns of the new Metropolis by offering services that implicitly attack the domain of the individual household to the point where they challenge its reason for being.
To those without the space at their apartments, the Waldorf-Astoria offers modern accommodation for entertainment and social functions; and to those encumbered with mansions, the sophisticated services that liberate their energies from the logistics of running a small private palace.
Day after day the Waldorf pulls society from its hiding places to what becomes in effect a colossal collective salon for exhibiting and introducing new urban manners (such as women alone—yet clearly respe
ctable—smoking in public).
As it becomes, in a few years, “the accepted scene of a great variety of concerts, dances, suppers and theatrical entertainments,” the Waldorf-Astoria can claim to be Manhattan’s social center of gravity, “a semi‑public institution designed for furnishing the prosperous residents of the New York metropolitan district with all of the luxuries of urban life.” Block makes good: in the twenties the Waldorf-Astoria has become “the Unofficial Palace of New York.”
DEATH
But two parallel tendencies announce the death of the hotel, or at least the end of its material being.
The Waldorf has instigated a paradoxical tradition of the last word (in creature comfort, supportive technologies, decor, entertainments, metropolitan lifestyles, etc.) which, to preserve itself, is forced continuously to self-destruct, eternally to shed its latest incarnation. Any architectural container that fixes it to a site degenerates sooner or later into a battery of outdated technical and atmospheric apparatus that prevents the hasty surrender to change that is the tradition’s raison d’être.
After barely 20 years of confident existence the twin hotel is abruptly diagnosed—by a consensus of commercial intuition and public opinion—. as “old,” unfit to accommodate true modernity.
In 1924 Boldt and his partner, Lucius Boomer, propose gradually to “reconstruct the Waldorf-Astoria and make it vastly more modern.” Over the Astor Court—a crevice that separates the hotel from the other occupants of the block—their architects design “a vaulted roof of glass and steel…creating one of the most magnificent arcades in all New York.”31 The Ballroom is enlarged to twice its original size.