by Rem Koolhaas
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
REPRESENTATIVE
Manhattanism is the urbanistic doctrine that suspends irreconcilable differences between mutually exclusive positions; to establish its theorems in the reality of the Grid, it needs a human representative. Only he could conceive of the two positions quoted above at the same time without unbearable strains developing in his psyche.
This representative is Raymond Hood.1
Hood is born in 1881 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, son of an affluent Baptist family; his father is a box manufacturer. Hood attends Brown University, then MIT School of Architecture. He works in Boston architectural offices but wants to go to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; in 1904 he is turned down for lack of drawing ability.
In 1905 he is accepted. Before leaving for Paris, he warns his colleagues in the office that one day he will be “the greatest architect in New York.” Hood is small; his hair grows straight up from his scalp at a remarkable 90-degree angle. The French call him “le petit Raymond.”
As a Baptist, he refuses at first to enter Notre Dame; friends convince him to drink his first wine, then to enter the cathedral.
In 1911 his final project at the École is for a city hall in Pawtucket. It is his first Skyscraper: a fat Tower, inadequately anchored to the ground by a timid socle.
He travels in Europe—the Grand Tour—then returns to New York. Paris represents “years to think,” he writes; “in New York one falls too easily in the habit of working without thinking on account of the amount of work that there is to do.”2
Manhattan: no time for consciousness.
Hood opens his office in a brownstone at 7 West 42nd Street. In vain he listens for “footsteps on the staircase.”
He papers his office in gold, but the money runs out and it remains half-gilded.
A client asks Hood to redecorate her bathroom. She expects the Prince of Wales; a large crack in the wall might upset him. Hood advises her to hang a painting over the crack.
There are odd jobs: Hood supervises “the removal of 8 bodies from one family vault to another.”
He is restless in the absence of work; he “marks up many a tablecloth with his soft pencil” with architect friends Ely Jacques Kahn (the Squibb Building) and Ralph Walker (One Wall Street).
He marries his secretary.
His nervous system gets intertwined with that of the Metropolis.
Raymond Hood.
GLOBE 1
In the Concourse of Grand Central Station he meets his friend John Mead Howells, one of ten American architects invited to enter the Chicago Tribune Competition; the first prize is to be $50,000. Howells, too busy to accept, offers Hood the chance to enter for him.
On December 23, 1922, their entry, no. 69, a Gothic Skyscraper, wins first prize. Mrs. Hood drives around town in a taxi to show all creditors the check.
Hood is 41.
He refers to the moon as “his”3 and designs a house in the form of the globe.
His involvement with the Skyscraper deepens.
He buys Le Corbusier’s first book, Towards a New Architecture; the next ones he only borrows.
THEORY
He has a discreet, private theory about the Skyscraper but knows that, in Manhattan, it would be unwise to admit it.
In his vision the future Manhattan is a City of Towers, 4 subtly modified version of what already exists; instead of the ruthless extrusion of arbitrary individual plots, larger sites within a block will be assembled in new building operations. The space around the Towers within the blocks will be left unbuilt, so that each Tower can regain its integrity and a measure of isolation. Such pure skyscrapers can insinuate themselves strictly within the framework of the Grid and gradually take over the city without major disruptions. Hood’s City of Towers will be a forest of freestanding, competing needles made accessible by the regular paths of the Grid: a practical Luna Park.
Raymond Hood, “A City of Towers,” first published in 1927; diagram of suggested transformations presented as “Proposals for the Solution of New York’s Problem of Overcrowding?' Against the 1916 Zoning Law, which can never control the ultimate bulk of Manhattan’s buildings, only their shape—and is therefore incapable of defining the upward limit of Manhattan’s density—Hood wanted to “establish a constant ratio between the Volume of Building and the street area…. For each foot of street frontage a definitive volume is allowed by law. A property owner can [only] exceed this volume allowance provided he sets back,” so that “each building as it imposes additional load on street traffic provides the additional street area to carry it….” In this way, Hood enlisted the natural greed of the developer—who invariably wanted to build the largest possible volume, which, under the terms of Hood’s proposal, would coincide with the highest possible tower on the smallest possible site—in the service of an aesthetic vision: a city of sheer, freestanding needles. But that vision was never revealed; officially the proposal would only solve “the problems of light, air and traffic….”
GOLD
Soon after building the Chicago Tribune Tower, Hood is asked to do his first Skyscraper in New York, the American Radiator Building, on a lot facing Bryant Park.
In the standard “solution”—the direct multiplication of the site as often as the zoning envelope permits—the west face of such a Tower would have a blind wall, so that a similar structure could be built directly against it. By shrinking the area of the Tower, Hood is able to perforate the west facade with windows, and so designs the first example of his City of Towers. The operation makes pragmatic and financial sense; the quality of the office space increases, therefore the rents, and so on.
But the exterior of the Tower presents different—i.e., artistic—issues to the architect. He has always been irritated by the boring window openings in the facades of Towers, a potential tedium that increases in direct proportion to their height—acres of meaningless black rectangles that threaten to reduce their soaring quality.
Hood decides to build the building in black brick, so that the holes—embarrassing reminder of the other reality inside—can be absorbed within the stem and thus become unnoticeable.
The top of the black building is gilded. Hood’s down-to-earth alibi for the top briskly severs all connections between gold and any possible associations with Ecstasy. “The incorporation of publicity or advertising features in a building is frequently an item for consideration. It stimulates public interest and admiration, is accepted as a genuine contribution to architecture, enhances the value of the property and is profitable to the owner in the same manner as other forms of legitimate advertising.”5
“A City of Towers…Operation at the end of a block…”
“A City of Towers…Three operations have completed one block …”
Manhattan halfway to becoming a City of Towers: model combining various end-, mid- and complete-block operations; gradual metamorphosis without major disruption or conceptual reorganization.
Study model of the theoretical zoning envelope on the Daily News site, 1929. “It is a shape that the law puts in the architect’s hands. He can add nothing to it; but he can vary it in detail as he wishes. (Ferriss, Metropolis of Tomorrow; model and photo by Walter Kilham, Jr.)
Daily News Building, second prototype of the City of Towers, halfway modeled from the crude form of the zoning envelope: “clay emerging into practical form …”
Daily News Building, definitive model.
GLOBE 2
In 1928 Colonel Paterson, owner of the Daily News, comes to Hood. He wants to build printing works on 42nd Street combined, with a negligible amount of office space for his editors.
Hood calculates that a Skyscraper would ultimately be cheaper. He designs the second fragment of his City of Towers (unbeknownst to his client) by “proving” that through yielding a thin midblock stri
p this Tower too can have windows in, a wall that would otherwise be blind, transforming cheap loft space into expensive office accommodation.
Inside he goes even further: builder so far only of Towers, he consummates here his overwhelming love for the sphere. He designs “a circular space, 150 feet in circumference—to be enclosed by a wall of black glass which rises, unbroken by any windows, to a black glass ceiling; in the center of a brass-inlaid floor, a cup-shaped well from which light the sole illumination of the room—is to stream.
“Bathed in this light. a ten-foot terrestrial globe is to revolve—its even revolutions reflected darkly in the night-like ceiling above”: with understandable pleasure Ferriss describes the Daily News lobby in his Metropolis of Tomorrow.6
The lobby is, after all, a three-dimensional realization of that murky Ferrissian void—the pitch-black womb of Manhattanism, cosmos of charcoal smudges—which has given birth already to the Skyscraper and now, finally, to a Globe.
“Why is so bizarre a design included in so utilitarian a building?"
Ferriss asks with feigned innocence. It is because Raymond Hood is now the leading agent of the collapse of oppositions that is Manhattan’s true ambition. The lobby is a chapel of Manhattanism. (Hood himself confesses that Napoleon’s Tomb in Les Invalides is the model for the sunken installation.)
Harvey Wiley Corbett, “Proposed Separation of Towers;' 1926. Analogous proposal to Hood’s. As complement to his “Venetian” proposals Corbett projects here a Metropolitan Suburb that corresponds to “the smallest maximum bulk for business buildings” suggested by the Regional Plan models. The random placement of the Towers—which are connected by a frivolous geometry of footpaths through a park enlivened by a multitude of female forms, yet intersected, by the regularity of the Grid—combined with the intimate, suburban scale of the miniature Skyscrapers makes Corbett’s Metropolitan Suburb the most appealing version of the tower-in-the-park formula ever proposed.
ICEBERG
With the McGraw-Hill Skyscraper (1929-31), Hood becomes more openly fanatic as he prepares a final dose of hedonism for his City of Towers. The building accommodates three categories of activity that correspond to the setbacks of its section: printing works in the base, loft spaces for book production in the middle and offices in the slender shaft.
Once, when it suited him, Hood pretended to have no feeling for color: “What color? Let’s see. How many colors are there—red, yellow and blue? Let’s make it red.”7Now he considers yellow, orange, green, gray, red, Chinese red and black with orange trimming for the building.
The tower is to be shaded from a darker tone at the base to a lighter one toward the top, “where it finally blends off into the azure of the sky….” To realize this denial of the tower’s presence, one of Hood’s assistants checks the location of each single tile—its fit within the overall project of “disappearance”—with binoculars from a window opposite the construction site.
The result is stunning: “The exterior of the building is finished entirely in polychrome…. The horizontal spandrel walls are faced with rectangular blocks of blue-green glazed terra-cotta…. The metal-covered vertical piers are painted a dark green-blue, almost black. The metal windows are painted an apple-green color…. A narrow band of vermillion is painted on the face of the top jambs of the windows and across the face of the metal-covered piers. Vermillion is also used on the underside of the horizontal projections on the penthouse and over the front entrance. The golden color of the windowshades effectively complements the cool tone of the building. They have a broad blue-green vertical stripe in the corner tying them into the general color scheme. Their color is an unusually important element in the exterior design.
“The entrance vestibule is finished in sheet steel bands, enameled dark blue and green alternatively, separated by metal tubes finished in silver and gold…. The walls of the main and elevator corridor are finished in sheet steel enameled a green color.“8
The relentlessness of such a color scheme betrays obsession.
Once again Hood has combined two incompatibles in a single whole: its golden shades pulled down to reflect the sun, the McGraw-Hill Building looks like a fire raging inside an iceberg: the fire of Manhattanism inside the iceberg of Modernism.
Raymond Hood, McGraw-Hill Building, 1931.
SCHISM
In the tradition of the dime novel, one day in the mid-twenties a pastor comes to see Hood in his office. He represents a congregation that wants to build the greatest church in the world.
“The congregation was one of businessmen and the site was an extremely valuable one…. Therefore they wished not only to build the greatest church in the world, but to combine it with revenue producing enterprises including a hotel, a YMCA, an apartment house with a swimming pool, and so on. On the street level would be shops, to bring in high rentals, and in the basement, the largest garage in Columbus, Ohio. The garage was very important, because, in giving his congregation a place to park their cars on coming to work weekdays, the pastor would indeed make the church the center of their lives….”
The pastor had first gone to Ralph Adams Cram, a traditional church architect, who rejected him, especially indignant about the suggested garage. “There would be no room for cars because this noble structure would be constructed on tremendous granite piers…that would support [it] through all time as a monument to their faith.”
New York—Hood—is the pastor’s last resort. He cannot go back to the businessmen to tell them that the basement will be completely occupied by piers instead of cars.
Hood reassures him. “The trouble with Mr. Cram is that he has no faith in God. I will design a church for you that will be the greatest church in the world. It will include all the hotels, swimming tanks and candy stores you desire. Furthermore, in the basement will be the largest garage in Christendom because I will build your church on toothpicks and have faith enough in God to, believe it will stand up!”9
For the first time Hood works on a multipurpose building. Indifferent to programmatic hierarchy, he simply assigns parts of the Mountain to the necessary functions. With barefaced literalness he projects two floors—the Cathedral and the Parking Garage, separated only by inches of concrete—that realize his boast to the pastor and represent the final implementation of the Great Lobotomy’s indispensable complement: the Vertical Schism, which creates the freedom to stack such disparate activities directly on top of each other without any concern for their symbolic compatibility.
Central Methodist Episcopal Church, first floor plan: Cathedral shares ground floor with, clockwise, candy stores, Sunday school, hotel kitchens and dining rooms.
Raymond Hood, Central Methodist Episcopal Church, Columbus, Ohio, 1927. Vertical Schism at its most blatant: directly below the Cathedral, “the largest garage in Christendom”—actually room for only 2 x 69 cars.
Central Methodist Episcopal Church, general view showing uneasy coexistence of heterogeneous elements collected in Hood’s first multifunctional Skyscraper. The Tower—in spite of its lofty expression—contains strictly secular accommodation: YMCA, pool, apartments, hotel and offices. The church is articulated as a quasi-autonomous volume.
SCHIZOPHRENIA
The church episode is emblematic of Hood’s, and his colleagues’, state of mind in the mid-twenties; they have developed a schizophrenia that allows them simultaneously to derive energy and inspiration from Manhattan as irrational fantasy and to establish its unprecedented theorems in a series of strictly rational steps.
The secret of Hood’s success is a radical command of the language of fantasy-pragmatism that lends Manhattanism’s ambition—the creation of congestion on all possible levels—the appearance of objectivity.
Hood’s rhetoric leaves the most hard-headed businessman—especially him—hopelessly entrapped. He is a captivating architectural Scheherazade, holding the real-estate men i
n thrall with his 1,001 fairy tales of philistinism:
“All this beauty stuff is bunk,”10 or “Consequently, contemporary architecture is disclosed and established as logic… ”11
Or, almost poetic: “The plan is of primary importance, because on the floor are performed all the activities of the human occupants…”12 When Hood concludes his tale with a description of the ideal architect—that theoretical human representative of Manhattanism who alone can exploit the overlap between the businessmen’s fantasies of practicality and the architects’ dreams of a Culture of Congestion—he is merely describing the enviable topography of his own personality:
“The architect of aesthetically acceptable buildings must possess an analytical and logical type of mind; have a knowledge of all the elements of a building and of its purpose and function; possess a lively imagination and a cultivated inherent sense of form, proportion, appropriateness and color; possess a spirit of creation, adventure, independence, determination and bravery, and also, a large measure of humanistic instincts and ordinary common sense.”13
The businessmen have to agree: Manhattanism is the only program where the efficiency intersects with the sublime.
PREMONITION
After the City of Towers and the rediscovery for his profession of the well-integrated schism of the church/garage, Hood undertakes two more theoretical projects.
They share a premonition of a new age contained in the extrapolation of the trends as they are grafted onto a continuing devotion to the existing metaphoric infrastructure, a refusal to consider any part of the magic carpet of the Grid as subject to reconsideration. Hood wants to adapt the new age to the real Manhattan, not the reverse. The “City under a Single Roof”14(1931), the first of these projects, has been founded on the principle that concentration in a metropolitan area…is a desirable condition….” According to the stratagem of self-induced schizophrenia, the scheme is actually presented as the answer to the condition it is determined to exacerbate: The growth of cities is getting beyond control. Skyscrapers create congestion. Subways are built resulting in more skyscrapers and so on in an ascending spiral. Where will it end? Here is, the answer….” Hood knows.