Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

by Rem Koolhaas

  The final remedy is to perform cosmetic surgery on the older part of the twin, so that the Waldorf reaches the same height as the Astoria. But each proposal is an additional argument for the hotel’s death warrant.

  LIBERATION

  The real problem of the Waldorf-Astoria is that it is not a Skyscraper. The more the hotel’s success enhances the value of the block, the more urgent it becomes to realize a definitive structure that is at once: a new incarnation of the idea of the Waldorf as defined by William Waldorf Astor—a colossal “house” with the preserved atmosphere of a private mansion—and a Skyscraper that reaps the financial harvest allowed by the Zoning Law.

  In drawings, the block is now contested by two equally phantasmagorical occupants: the first, the final Skyscraper that strives, almost beyond the control of man, toward the full exploitation of the 1916 model; and the second, the re-reincarnation of the Waldorf idea.

  The first image is drawn as culmination of a sequence of occupancies—from virgin nature to Thompson’s farm, to the Astor Mansions, to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, to finally, the Empire State. It suggests that the model for Manhattan’s urbanism is now a form of architectural cannibalism: by swallowing its predecessors, the final building accumulates all the strengths and spirits of the previous occupants of the site and, in its own way, preserves their memory.

  The second drawing suggests that the spirit of the Waldorf will, once more, survive physical destruction to reappear triumphantly on another location in the Grid.

  The Empire State Building is the last manifestation of Manhattanism as pure and thoughtless process, the climax of the subconscious Manhattan. The Waldorf is the first full realization of the conscious Manhattan. In any other culture the demolition of the old Waldorf would have been a philistine act of destruction, but in the ideology of Manhattanism it constitutes a double liberation: while the site is freed to meet its evolutionary destiny, the idea of the Waldorf is released to be redesigned as the example of an explicit Culture of Congestion.

  “AND NOW—the EMPIRE STATE, an office building, taking its logical position on this site”; final Skyscraper rendered as summation of all previous occupancies of the block (advertisement).

  PROGRAM

  The Empire State Building is to be “a skyscraper surpassing in height anything ever constructed by man; surpassing in its simple beauty any Skyscraper ever designed, meeting in the interior arrangements the most exacting requirements of the most critical tenant….”32

  The program, as described by William F. Lamb, its architect, is so rudimentary as to become epigrammatic. "[It] was short enough—a fixed budget, no space more than 28 feet from window to corridor, as many stories and as much space as possible, an exterior of limestone, and completion by May 1931, which meant a year and six months from the beginning of sketches….

  “The logic of the plan is very simple. A certain amount of space in the center, arranged as compactly as possible, contains the vertical circulation, toilets, shafts and corridors. Surrounding this is a perimeter of office space 28 feet deep. The sizes of the floors diminish as the elevators decrease in number. In essence there is a pyramid of non-rentable space surrounded by a pyramid of rentable space.”33

  TRUCK

  While the Empire State is being planned, the European avant-garde is experimenting with automatic writing, a surrender to the process of writing unhindered by the author’s critical apparatus.

  The Empire State Building is a form of automatic architecture, a sensuous surrender by its collective makers—from the accountant to the plumber—to the process of building.

  The Empire State is a building with no other program than to make a financial abstraction concrete—that is, to exist. All the episodes of its construction are governed by the unquestionable laws of automatism. After the sale of the block there is a dreamlike ceremony of desecration, a performance for Truck and Hotel. “Promptly following the first announcement a motor-truck [was it driverless?] drove through the wide door which had received presidents and princes, rulers of states and uncrowned kings and queens of society. The truck, like a roaring invader, thrust its great bulk into the lobby, where surely such an invader had never been seen before. It churned across the floor, then turned and roared down‘ Peacock Alley,' down that proud corridor lined with gold mirrors and velvet draperies.

  “The end of the Waldorf had come.”34

  SAW

  On October 1, 1929, demolition is formally begun. A second “act” is performed, this one for two gentlemen and a saw. With crowbars they dislodge the topmost stone of the cornice.

  The destruction of the Waldorf is planned as part of the construction. Fragments that are useful remain, such as the elevator cores that :now reach into the as yet immaterial floors of the Empire State: “We salvaged four passenger elevators from the old building and installed them in temporary positions in the new framework.”35

  Those parts that do not serve any purpose are carted off in trucks and loaded on barges. Five miles beyond Sandy Hook, the Waldorf is dumped in the sea.

  The dream’s outrageousness activates dormant nightmares: might the building’s heaviness make it disappear through the earth? No—“Empire State is not a new load placed on bedrock. Instead, the inert load of earth and stones put there by Nature has been dug away and a useful load in the form of a building has been placed there by man.”

  “Messrs. Raskob and Smith begin to demolish the Waldorf….”

  “As if by magic, their supplies appeared at their elbows….”

  “A dream well-planned…”

  DREAMPLANNING

  According to the logic of automatism, workers on the site are described as passive, almost ornamental presences.

  “It was, as Shreve the architect said, like an assembly line placing the same materials in the same relationship over and over….

  “So perfect was the planning, so exact the fulfillment of schedule that workmen scarcely had to reach out for what they next required. As if by magic, their supplies appeared at their elbows….”

  Since the base of Empire State occupies the entire site, all new supplies vanish inside the building, which now seems to generate itself, feeding on the never-ending stream of materials that arrive with split-second regularity.

  At one point the “velocity” of this automatic architecture reaches 14 1/2 stories in ten days.

  The cladding joins the frame: “On each floor, as the steel frame climbed higher, a miniature railroad was built, with switches and cars, to carry supplies. A perfect timetable was published each morning. At every minute of the day the builders knew what was going up on each of the elevators, to which height it would rise and which gang of workers would use it. On each floor, the operators of every one of the small trains of cars knew what was coming up and where it would be needed.

  “Down below, in the streets, the drivers of the motor trucks worked on similar schedules. They knew, each hour of every day, whether they were to bring steel beams or bricks, window frames or blocks of stone, to Empire State. The moment of departure from a strange place, the length of time allowed for moving through traffic and the precise moment of arrival were calculated, scheduled and fulfilled with absolute precision. Trucks did not wait, derricks and elevators did not swing idle, men did not wait.

  “With perfect teamwork, Empire State was built.”

  Pure product of process, Empire State can have no content. The building is sheer envelope.

  “The skin is all or almost all Empire State will gleam in all its pristine beauty, for our children’s children to wonder at This appearance comes from the use of chrome-nickel steel, a new alloy that never tarnishes, never grows dull.

  “The disfiguring shadows which so often come from deeply recessed windows, to mar the simple beauty of line, in Empire State are avoided by setting the windows, in thin metal frames, flush with the outer wall. T
hus, not even shadows are allowed to break the upward sweep of the tower….” After the building is finished, all participants wake up and look at the structure, which, inexplicably, does not go away.

  “Empire State seemed almost to float, like an enchanted fairy tower, over New York. An edifice so lofty, so serene, so marvelously simple, so luminously beautiful, had never before been imagined. One could look back on a dream well-planned.”36

  But exactly its character of dream, of automatic architecture, prevents it from being also an example of the conquest of the Automonument by higher forms of culture.

  It was and is, literally, thoughtless.

  Its ground floor is all elevator; there is no place left between the shafts for metaphor.

  The upper floors too are strictly business, for 80,000 people. Maybe a businessman finds himself puzzled by its grandiosity; secretaries gaze at vistas never before seen by man.

  Rendezvous with destiny: the airship meets its metropolitan lighthouse.

  AIRSHIP

  Only at the top is there symbolism. “At the eighty-sixth floor level is the observation tower, a sixteen story extension shaped like an inverted test-tube, buttressed by great flanking corner piers… ”37

  It is also an airship mooring mast and thus resolves Manhattan’s paradoxical status as a city of landlocked lighthouses.

  Only an airship could select its favorite harbor among all Manhattan’s needles and actually dock to make the metaphorical literal once more.

  Empire State Building, details of airship mooring mast.

  DISPLACEMENT

  Meanwhile, during its short period of displacement, the concept of the Waldorf continues to exist in the form of rights to its name, owned by Lucius Boomer, its last manager. It is left to him to reformulate the tradition of the last word, to plan and design the Waldorf’s reappearance as the first Skyscraper fully conquered by social activity.

  For over a century, Manhattan’s lifestyle avant-garde has wandered from type to type in search of ideal accommodation. “In the beginning, private and detached houses were the only available residences for well-to-do New Yorkers. Then came the famous Brownstones, which were sometimes ‘two-family’ affairs; then the day of the flats arrived. Flats went up in the social scale and became ‘apartments’ Next, because of their economic advantages, real or fancied, cooperative apartments had their day of favor. There then followed the vogue for Duplex apartments, with large rooms for entertaining purposes and many facilities of living that had previously been unknown….”38

  The stages of this quest correspond to ever greater accumulations of individual units that, however combined, do not surrender their independence.

  But as the Culture of Congestion reaches its zenith in the early thirties, a final homecoming is imminent.

  The model of the hotel undergoes a conceptual overhaul and is invested with a new experimental ambition that creates Manhattan’s definitive unit of habitation, the Residential Hotel—place where the inhabitant is his own houseguest, instrument that liberates its occupants for total involvement in the rituals of metropolitan life.

  By the early thirties, what used to be everyday life has reached a unique level of refinement, complexity and theatricality. Its unfolding requires elaborate mechanical and decorative support systems that are uneconomical in the sense that peak use of decor, space, personnel, gadgetry and artifacts is only sporadic, while their idle presence is detrimental to the optimum experience of privacy.

  In addition, this infrastructure is perpetually threatened with obsolescence by the pressure of fashion—of change as index of Progress—which results inevitably in a growing aversion to make household investments. The Residential Hotel transcends this dilemma by separating the private and public functions of the individual household and then bringing each to its own logical conclusion in a different part of the Mega-House.

  In such a hotel, “patrons, whether permanent or transient, could avail themselves not only of the usual living facilities in an ultramodern hotel but, in addition, of services that might readily enable them to expand and supplement their own living quarters, and so arrange for the occasional entertainment of their friends on an elaborate scale….”39

  COMMUNE

  Such a unit of habitation is in effect a commune.

  Its inhabitants pool their investments to finance a collective infrastructure for the “method of modern living.”

  Only as a commune can they afford the machinery to sustain the expensive and strenuous tradition of the last word.

  By the same logic the hotel also becomes the shared headquarters of clubs and organizations that do not have their own accommodations. Freed from overhead, they can reconstitute themselves at regular intervals with maximum splendor at minimal cost.

  With the development of the Residential Hotel, the metaphor implied by the 1916 Zoning Law finally coincides with the interior program: the Skyscraper as single unit of the Mega-Village. The phantom envelope of 1916 can become a single metropolitan household.

  PROBLEM

  “A problem of planning indeed was the new Waldorf-Astoria, combining…a transient hotel, an apartment house, a great ballroom and entertainment layout, a garage for private railroad cars (off the New York Central tracks), various exhibition rooms and everything one can think of, the whole thing mounting to forty stories….

  The architects’ job was to plan the greatest hotel of all time, a structure designed to take care of dozens of functions at the same moment, leaving any of the house guests who weren’t invited to a certain party quite ignorant of such an affair going on right under their noses….”40

  Its site does not really exist: the entire hotel is built on steel columns wedged between the railroad tracks. It occupies a whole block, 200 by 600 feet, between Park and Lexington avenues and 49th and 50th streets. Its silhouette closely follows the Ferrissian envelope, even if it has two pinnacles instead of one, an echo of its origins in the two Astor Mansions on 34th Street.

  The lowest floors contain three layers of entertainment and public facilities, each the size of the original block, subdivided into circles, ovals, rectangles and squares: Roman baths without water.

  The hotel guests are housed in the four lower flanges, which reach halfway to the top. The permanent residents live in the Waldorf Towers, accessible through a private midblock tunnel.

  New Waldorf-Astoria, plans of typical Waldorf Towers floor, typical hotel sector floor, first floor and ground floor.

  SOLITUDES

  The three lowest floors of the Waldorf form one of the most elaborate manifestations yet of Manhattan’s concept of a modern Venice.

  Even though all their spaces are easily accessible, they are not exactly public; they form a sequence of theatrical “living rooms”—an interior for the Waldorf’s houseguests that admits visitors but excludes the general population. These living rooms constitute one of the bloated private realms that together form Manhattan’s Venetian system of solitudes.

  The first floor, the Piano Nobile level, is a maze of circulation (“for truly, there should be no end to circulation”)41 that leads to the Sert Room—“favorite of New York’s most interesting people…decorated with murals that show episodes of Don Quichotte”—the Norse Grill—“a rustic Scandinavian space with a mural that marks the location of all sports activities in the greater New York area”42—the Empire Room, the Jade Room, the Blue Room and the Rose Room.

  The third floor is a system of interconnecting larger spaces culminating in a colossal ballroom that is also a theater.

  The two are separated by a layer of utilitarian facilities—kitchens, lockers, offices.

  All floors are punctured by 16 passenger elevators, in a configuration that reflects the plan of the towers, and an additional 15 elevators for employees and freight. (One of the cars is large enough—20 by 8 feet—to take -a limousine to th
e center of the ballroom for the yearly automobile exhibit.)

  To complement the cavelike lower floors, other facilities are placed near the extremities of the Mountain, such as the Starlight Roof on the 18th floor, which offers a sudden communication with the elements.

  “The entire ceiling can be rolled back by means of electrical machinery…. A tropical background of decoration, plants, flowers, pink flamingos suggests tropical Florida….”43

  HISTORY

  The Waldorf’s theme of reincarnation is reinforced by the transplantation of Peacock Alley from the old Waldorf and by a nomenclature that repeats the old Waldorf’s famous names, transferring to the new building their accumulated memories and associations. Thus, parts of the new Waldorf are famous before they have even been built.

  Apart from the “historic” names, actual fragments and memorabilia from the old Waldorf, rescued from the demolition on 34th Street, are reassembled in the new Mountain to ensure further atmospheric continuity. More “history” is bought all over the globe by interior decorators who reconstruct their trophies in appropriate locations throughout the new structure: the disintegration of Europe provides ample material for the assembly of Manhattan’s interiors.

  “In the early planning of the Waldorf-Astoria, Basildon Park, England, was about to be dismantled…. Following a visit by Mr. Boomer negotiations were begun, which ended in the purchase of the beautifully painted and decorated salon.” It is reconstituted on the ballroom floor.