Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

by Rem Koolhaas

  Similar transplants—they cause a busy transatlantic traffic of dismantled mantelpieces—are inserted in the towers, where “floors alternate in modified French and English styles of decoration, while some of the terraced suites have been decorated and furnished in contemporary style….”44

  TENTACLES

  Its nonexistent site forces the Waldorf’s designer to rethink a number of hotel-planning conventions.

  Since the railroad is unwilling to give up parts of its tracks, the hotel is without a basement, the traditional location for services such as kitchens and laundry. These facilities are therefore atomized and scattered throughout the structure in optimal locations for serving the farthest reaches of the building.

  Instead of a kitchen, the Waldorf has a system of kitchens. The main station is located on the second floor; “from there octopus-like tentacles in the form of service pantries were extended in all directions providing contact with all the Rooms and innumerable private dining rooms on the 3rd and 4th floors.” On the 19th floor, in the residential part, is a Home Kitchen where all the cooking is done by women. “Suppose that you want a dinner in your own language? Instead of the exotic masterpiece of a French chef, you may pine for your country ham and eggs, or Vermont cakes and maple syrup…. It was for that reason that I put a home kitchen in the Waldorf. There are times that we all long for everyday food, so for instance if you wake up feeling hungry for chicken dumplings, or cherry pie, you simply call the American kitchen….”45

  The concept of Room Service is also elevated. For the benefit of those guests who choose to remain in the tower rather than descend to the living floors, it is transformed into a transcendental service that offers each visitor a choice between remaining a provincial or becoming a cosmopolite without ever leaving his room.

  All these services are orchestrated and coordinated by means of the telephone, which becomes an extension of the architecture. “The volume of telephone calls and special services rendered by telephone to the Waldorf’s guests requires equipment that is extensive enough to serve a city with a population of more than 50,000….”46

  Through all these revolutionary arrangements and the facilities that “fake care of elaborate private or public functions—balls, banquets, expositions, concerts, theatrical performances—all of them in self-contained spaces that include halls, theater, restaurants, cloakrooms, dance floors, etc.,” the Waldorf-Astoria becomes “the social and civic center which it is today….”47

  Manhattan’s first Skyscraper House.

  Axonometric section through new Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

  MOVIE

  In the thirties—when the second Waldorf is being built—the “Hotel” becomes Hollywood’s favorite subject.

  In a sense, it relieves the scriptwriter of the obligation of inventing a plot. A Hotel is a plot—a cybernetic universe with its own laws generating random but fortuitous collisions between human beings who would never have met elsewhere. It offers a fertile cross section through the population, a richly textured interface between social castes, a field for the comedy of clashing manners and a neutral background of routine operations to give every incident dramatic relief.

  With the Waldorf, the Hotel itself becomes such a movie, featuring the guests as stars and the personnel as a discreet coat-tailed chorus of extras.

  By taking a room in the hotel, a guest buys his way into an ever-expanding script, acquiring the right to use all the decors and to exploit the prefabricated opportunities to interact with all the other “stars.”

  The movie begins at the revolving door—symbol of the unlimited surprises of coincidence; then subplots are instigated in the darker recesses of the lower floors, to be consummated—via an elevator episode—in the upper regions of the building. Only the territory of the block frames all stories and lends them coherence.

  EPIC

  Together, the cast performs an abstract epic entitled Opportunity, Emancipation, Acceleration.

  One (sociological) subplot describes a careerist’s shortcut to the top through a stay in the Hotel. “I would invest my savings in living at the Waldorf and doing my utmost to rub shoulders with the financial and business great…. This was the best investment I have ever made in my life,” confides Forbes, the future tycoon.”48

  In another part of the intrigue women guests are freed to pursue careers by the Hotel’s takeover of all the annoyances and responsibilities of housekeeping, which leads to an accelerated liberation that baffles the males, suddenly surrounded by “hyper-emancipated creatures.”

  “The bluer their eyes, the more they know about Einstein’s theory and you can depend upon a clinging vine to give you the real lowdown on the diesel engine….”49

  In a more romantic story, the boy next door becomes the man on the floor above, his tap dancing an indispensable medium of Skyscraper communication—a Morse code of the heart performed by the feet.

  COW

  Until 1800 real cows grazed on the site of the first Waldorf.

  A hundred years later, the pressure of popular demand invests the concept of the cow with a technical dimension, producing the Inexhaustible Cow on Coney Island: stiff and lifeless, but effective in its production of an endless flow of milk.

  Thirty-five years later still, the Waldorf witnesses the final (re)appearance of the concept Cow, in one of the Hotel’s most ambitious subplots. Gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell—a self-described “hotel pilgrim”—has lived in the Waldorf Towers since their opening. To cultivate her connections, she organizes a yearly party somewhere in the building. Because she likes to test the management, the theme of each of these events is chosen to be as incompatible as possible with the existing interiors. In fact, “the vain, mad endeavor to break down Captain Silly” (who is in charge of the Waldorf’s Banquet Department) becomes, after a while, “the only reason for the continuing and ever-growing extravagance of my costume balls….”

  In 1935, when her favorite Starlight Roof is already reserved and only the Jade Room—a somber modern interior that reminds her of the Temple of Karnak near Luxor—is available, Maxwell sees her chance to ask the impossible.

  “‘Captain Willy, in this Jade Ballroom I am going to give a farmyard party, a barn dance.

  “‘I am going to have trees with real apples on them, even if the apples have to be pinned on. I’m going to cover those enormous chandeliers with hayricks. I’m going to have clotheslines stretched across the ceiling on which the family wash will be hung. I’m going to have a beer well. I’m going to have stalls with sheep, real cows, donkeys, geese, chickens and pigs and a hillbilly band….’

  ‘Yes, Miss Maxwell,’ said Captain Willy. ‘Certainly.’

  “To my surprise, I blurted out, ‘Impossible. How are you going to get live animals to the third floor of the Waldorf?’

  “‘We can have felt shoes made for the animals,’ said Captain Willy firmly. A Mephistopheles in coat-tails….”50

  The centerpiece of Maxwell’s party is Molly the Moët Cow, a cow that milks champagne on one side and whiskey and soda on the other.

  Maxwell’s farm completes a cycle: the super-refined infrastructure of the hotel, its architectural ingenuity, all its accumulated technologies together ensure that in Manhattan the last word is the same as the first. But it is only one of many last words.

  A haunted house such as the Waldorf is not simply the end product of a long pedigree, but even more its sum, the simultaneous existence—on a single location, at a single point in time—of all its “lost” stages. It was necessary to destroy those early manifestations in order to preserve them. In Manhattan’s Culture of Congestion, destruction is another word for preservation.

  Definitive Instability: The Downtown Athletic Club

  We in New York celebrate the black mass of Materialism. We are concrete.

  We have a body.

  We have sex.

  We ar
e male to the core.

  We divinize matter, energy, motion, change.

  —Benjamin de Casseres, Mirrors of New York

  APOTHEOSIS

  The Downtown Athletic Club stands on the bank of the Hudson River near Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan. It occupies a lot “varying from 77 feet wide on Washington Street to 78 feet‘ 8 inches wide on West Street with a depth of 179 feet 11/4 inches between streets….”51

  Built in 1931, its 38 stories reach a height of 534 feet. Large abstract patterns of glass and brick make its exterior inscrutable and almost indistinguishable from the conventional Skyscrapers around it.

  This serenity hides the apotheosis of the Skyscraper as instrument of the Culture of Congestion.

  The Club represents the complete conquest—floor by floor—of the Skyscraper by social activity; with the Downtown Athletic Club the American way of life, know-how and initiative definitively overtake the theoretical lifestyle modifications that the various 20th-century European avantgardes have been insistently proposing, without ever managing to impose them.

  In the Downtown Athletic Club the Skyscraper is used as a Constructivist Social Condenser: a machine to generate and intensify desirable forms of human intercourse.

  Downtown Athletic Club, site plan: a small rectangle, repeated 38 times.

  Downtown Athletic Club, 1931 (Starrett & Van Vleck, architect; Duncan Hunter, associate architect). Successful lobotomy made this apotheosis of the Skyscraper as instrument of revolutionary metropolitan culture almost indistinguishable from surrounding Towers.

  Downtown Athletic Club, section.

  TERRITORIES

  In only 22 years the speculations of the 1909 theorem have become reality in the Downtown Athletic Club: it is a series of 38 superimposed platforms that each repeat, more or less, the original area of the site, connected by a battery of 13 elevators that forms the north wall of the structure.

  To the financial jungle of Wall Street, the Club opposes a complementary program of hyper-refined civilization, in which a full spectrum of facilities—all ostensibly connected with athletics—restores the human body.

  The lowest floors are equipped for relatively conventional athletic pursuits: squash and handball courts, poolrooms, etc., all sandwiched between locker rooms. But then ascent through the upper layers of the structure—with its implied approximation of a theoretical “peak” condition—leads through territories never before tread upon by man.

  Emerging from the elevator on the ninth floor, the visitor finds himself in a dark vestibule that leads directly into a locker room that occupies the center of the platform, where there is no daylight. There he undresses, puts on boxing gloves and enters an adjoining space equipped with a multitude of punching bags (occasionally he may even confront a human opponent).

  On the southern side, the same locker room is also serviced by an oyster bar with a view over the Hudson River.

  Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the nth floor—such is the “plot” of the ninth story, or, the 20th century in action.

  Downtown Athletic Club, plan of ninth floor.

  In a further escalation, the tenth floor is devoted to preventive medicine. On one side of a lavish dressing lounge an array of body-manipulation facilities is arranged around a Turkish bath: sections for massage and rubbing, an eight-bed station for artificial sunbathing, a ten-bed resting area. On the south face, six barbers are concerned with the mysteries of masculine beauty and how to bring it out.

  But the southwest corner of the floor is the most explicitly medical: a special facility that can treat five patients at the same time. A doctor here is in charge of the process of “Colonic Irrigation”: the insertion into the human intestines of synthetic bacterial cultures that rejuvenate man by improving his metabolism.

  This final step brings the sequence of mechanical interference with human nature, initiated by such apparently innocent attractions as Coney Island’s Barrels of Love, to a drastic conclusion.

  Downtown Athletic Club. Top: Plan of tenth floor. Bottom: Plan of 17th floor: interior roof garden with metropolitan verandas.

  On the 12th floor a swimming pool occupies the full rectangle; the elevators lead almost directly into the water. At night, the pool is illuminated only by its underwater lighting system, so that the entire slab of water, with its frenetic swimmers, appears to float in space, suspended between the electric scintillation of the Wall Street towers and the stars reflected in the Hudson.

  Of all the floors, the interior golf course—on the seventh—is the most extreme undertaking: the transplantation of an “English” landscape of hills and valleys, a narrow river that curls across the rectangle, green grass, trees, a bridge, all real, but taxidermized in the literal realization of the “meadows aloft” announced by the 1909 theorem.

  Downtown Athletic Club. Top, 12th floor: swimming pool at night. Bottom: seventh floor: interior golf course.

  The interior golf course is at the same time obliteration and preservation: having been extirpated by the Metropolis, nature is now resurrected inside the Skyscraper as merely one of its infinite layers, a technical service that sustains and refreshes the Metropolitanites in their exhausting existence. The Skyscraper has transformed Nature into Super-Nature.

  From the first to the twelfth floors, ascent inside the Downtown Athletic Club has corresponded to increased subtlety and unconventionality of the “programs” offered on each platform. The next five floors are devoted to eating, resting and socializing: they contain dining rooms—with a variety of privacies—kitchens, lounges, even a library. After their stringent workouts on the lower floors, the athletes—puritanical hedonists to a man—are finally in condition to confront the opposite sex—women—on a small rectangular dance floor on the 17th-story roof garden.

  From the 20th to the 35th floors, the Club contains only bedrooms. “The plan is of primary importance, because on the floor are performed all the activities of the human occupants”;52 that is how Raymond Hood—the most theoretical of New York’s architects—has defined Manhattan’s version of functionalism distorted by the demands and opportunities of density and congestion.

  In the Downtown Athletic Club each “plan” is an abstract composition of activities that describes, on each of the synthetic platforms, a different “performance” that is only a fragment of the larger spectacle of the Metropolis.

  In an abstract choreography, the building’s athletes shuttle up and down between its 38 “plots”—in a sequence as random as only an elevator man can make it—each equipped with techno-psychic apparatus for the men’s own redesign.

  Such an architecture is an aleatory form of “planning” life itself: in the fantastic juxtaposition of its activities, each of the Club’s floors is a separate installment of an infinitely unpredictable intrigue that extols the complete surrender to the definitive instability of life in the Metropolis.

  INCUBATOR

  With its first 12 floors accessible only to men, the Downtown Athletic Club appears to be a locker room the size of a Skyscraper, definitive manifestation of those metaphysics—at once spiritual and carnal—that protect the American male against the corrosion of adulthood. But in fact, the Club has reached the point where the notion of a “peak” condition transcends the physical realm to become cerebral.

  It is not a locker room but an incubator for adults, an instrument that permits the members—too impatient to await the outcome of evolution—to reach new strata of maturity by transforming themselves into new beings, this time according to their individual designs.

  Bastions of the antinatural, Skyscrapers such as the Club announce the imminent segregation of mankind into two tribes: one of Metropolitanites—literally self-made—who used the full potential of the apparatus of Modernity to reach unique levels of perfection, the second simply the remainder of the tradition
al human race.

  The only price its locker-room graduates have to pay for their collective narcissism is that of sterility. Their self-induced mutations are not reproducible in future generations.

  The bewitchment of the Metropolis stops at the genes; they remain the final stronghold of Nature.

  When the Club’s management advertises the fact that “with its delightful sea breezes and commanding view, the 20 floors devoted to living quarters for members make the Downtown Club an ideal home for men who are free of family cares and in a position to enjoy the last word in luxurious living,”53 they suggest openly that for the true Metropolitan, bachelorhood is the only desirable status.

  The Downtown Athletic Club is a machine for metropolitan bachelors whose ultimate “peak” condition has lifted them beyond the reach of fertile brides.

  In their frenzied self-regeneration, the men are on a collective “flight upward” from the specter of the Basin Girl.

  A machine for metropolitan bachelors …

  Madelon Vriesendorp, Flagrant délit.

  How Perfect Perfection Can Be: The Creation of Rockefeller Center

  I get so sentimental when I see

  How perfect perfection can be….

  —Fred Astaire in Top Hat

  The Talents of Raymond Hood

  Architecture is the business of manufacturing adequate shelter for human activities.

  My favorite form is the sphere.

  The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.